Forrester Counts 13 People in the Buying Group. Your Sequence Has One.
TL;DR. Forrester found the typical B2B buying decision now includes 13 internal stakeholders and nine external influencers. Most outbound writes to one person in that buying group. Single-threaded outreach bets the whole account on one inbox and one person's week. Write to the people who feel the problem, own the budget and will run the thing, give each one their own reason, and never send the same email twice inside one company. Colleagues compare notes.
The number
Forrester's State of Business Buying 2026 put it plainly: "The typical buying decision now includes 13 internal stakeholders and nine external influencers" (Forrester, January 2026).
Thirteen people inside the company. Nine more outside it: consultants, peers, analysts, the friend at another company who already bought something similar.
Now look at a typical outbound list. One contact per account. Maybe two if someone was feeling ambitious. The whole account rides on whether that one person reads the email on the right day.
Why one contact per account is a coin flip
Say you write to the VP of Sales at a 400-person software company. She might be exactly the right person. She might also be in the middle of board prep. She might be two weeks from leaving. She might like her current vendor just fine, while her RevOps lead is quietly losing three days a month to the exact problem you solve.
You don't know which. With one contact, you never find out. Silence from one person isn't a "no" from the account. It's a "not her, not this week."
There's a second problem. Buyers often start the conversation themselves. 6sense found buyers initiated 79% of engagements with sellers in 2025 (6sense, November 2025).
The person who eventually reaches out to you may never have been on your list. They heard your name from a colleague. If only one colleague ever heard from you, that's a thin chance.
Who in the buying group to write to
You don't need all 13 of Forrester's stakeholders. You need the few who decide whether this becomes a project. Start with three roles:
- The person who feels the problem. They live with it every day. They'll reply first if you describe it accurately.
- The person who owns the budget. They care about the outcome and the risk, not the workflow.
- The person who will run it. After the contract is signed, this is who has to make it work. They care about what changes in their week.
Sometimes there's a fourth: the person who can block it. Security, legal, IT, procurement. You usually don't open with them, but you should know who they are before the deal does.
Picking these people is research, not a job-title filter. Titles vary wildly between companies. The person who feels the problem might be a "Senior Manager, Revenue Systems" at one company and a "Director of Sales Operations" at the next. (How we research prospects.)
A different reason for each person
This is where most multi-threading goes wrong.
The same email sent to five people at one company isn't multi-threading. It's a mail merge with extra steps.
And colleagues compare notes. Somebody forwards it. Somebody posts it in Slack with "did you get this too?" Now you're not a vendor with a point of view. You're a campaign.
Write each person their own reason, from the same research:
- To the person who feels the problem: the daily cost, described specifically enough that they recognize it.
- To the budget owner: what the problem costs the business, and what fixing it would change.
- To the person who'll run it: what their week looks like after, and what it doesn't add to their plate.
Same company. Same facts underneath. Different question for each person. The outreach we write follows a simple rule here: colleagues at one organization never get the same trigger, the same proof or the same question.
That's only possible if the research is real. If all you know about an account is its industry and headcount, every email to it will sound the same. (Why real personalization is different from mail merge.)
Stagger the group, don't blast it
Five emails landing in five inboxes at one company on the same Tuesday morning looks exactly like what it is.
Stagger it. Start with the person closest to the problem. Give it a few days. Bring in the next person with their own reason. Keep LinkedIn and email working together rather than firing at once.
And when anyone replies, stop and rethink the rest. A reply from the person who feels the problem changes what the budget owner should hear, and when. A "talk to my colleague" is a gift; follow it.
The nine outside the company
Forrester's number has a second half that most outbound ignores: nine external influencers. Consultants, analysts, peers at other companies, the former colleague who already bought something similar.
You can't email most of them, and you shouldn't try. But you can shape what they find and what they forward.
Be easy to describe. When a champion explains you to a peer, they'll repeat the clearest sentence you gave them. Give them one.
Give the champion something to forward. A short, specific note about the problem and why it matters at their company travels further than a deck. If your email is good enough to forward, it reaches people you never wrote to.
Be findable when the outsider looks. An outside advisor asked "have you heard of these people?" will search, and increasingly will ask an AI tool. What they find should match what your emails say.
Why this used to be impossible
Multi-threading isn't a new idea. Every sales leader has told a team to "get more people in the account." It rarely happened at scale, for one reason: research time.
Writing one good email to one person at an account takes real research. Writing three good emails to three people, each with their own reason, takes three times as much, and the reasons have to stay consistent with each other. With a human doing the research, that only made sense for a short list of top accounts.
That's the constraint that changed. AI can research every person at an account, find what each one is likely to care about, and keep the reasons from overlapping, across the whole target list instead of a handful of top-tier accounts. We wrote about what that does to account-based programs in The ABM Research Constraint Just Died.
What single-threaded metrics hide
If you measure outbound per contact, multi-threading looks inefficient. Say you send four emails to four people at one company and get one reply. That looks worse than sending one email to one person at four companies.
It isn't, if the one reply came from the right person at the right account.
Measure by account:
- Did anyone at the account engage?
- Did the account move: a meeting, a referral, an inbound visit, a demo request three weeks later?
- Which role replied, and to which reason?
Relevance is still the whole game. Gartner found 73% of B2B buyers actively avoid suppliers who send irrelevant outreach (Gartner, June 2025). Writing to more people only helps if each email is relevant to the person reading it. Five irrelevant emails to one account is five chances to get avoided.
The bottom line
Buying is a group decision. Outbound that writes to one person is betting on luck. Score the account, find the people who decide, give each one their own reason, and measure whether the account moved, not whether one inbox answered.
If you run account-based programs and want this done across your whole target list, not just Tier 1, see how we approach ABM research.
Frequently asked questions
How many people are in a B2B buying group?
Forrester's State of Business Buying 2026 found the typical buying decision includes 13 internal stakeholders and nine external influencers (Forrester, January 2026).
What is multi-threading in outbound?
Writing to several people at the same account, so the account doesn't depend on one person's inbox. It works when each person gets their own reason to reply, and backfires when they all get the same email.
How many contacts per account should we write to?
Enough to cover the person who feels the problem, the person who owns the budget and the person who will run it. Three good contacts with three different reasons beat ten contacts with one template.
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