The short version.
A business purchase is decided by a group. How large that group is depends on who you ask: the published figures run from three or four people to thirteen or more. The figures count different things.
A seller does not need the exact number. A seller needs to know who uses the product, who carries it inside the company, who pays, and who can stop it. This guide gives a way to write that down, and shows what our own software finds when it tries.
Our own maps have limits. Three in four roles are the software's reading of a job title and public text. A mapped group is what public sources show, which is less than the real group.
What the research says.
The sizes disagree because the surveys asked different people about different purchases.
| Source | What it counted | Size |
|---|---|---|
| G2, 2025[1] | Software purchases, 1,169 buyers. A vendor survey. | Groups of three or four are becoming more common, groups of five to eight less. |
| Gartner, 2022[2] | Enterprise buying groups. | Five to eleven people, from five business functions on average. |
| Harvard Business Review, 2017[3] | Purchases of B2B solutions. | 6.8 people on average, up from 5.4 two years earlier. |
| Gartner, 2025[6] | 632 buyers. | Five to sixteen people, across as many as four functions. |
| Forrester, 2024[4] | More than 16,000 business buyers worldwide. | Thirteen people inside the company on average. |
| Forrester, 2026[5] | The typical buying decision. The press release we read gives no sample size. | Thirteen people inside the company, and nine outside it. |
Forrester counts everyone involved in the decision. G2 asks about software, where one department often buys for itself. None of these is the size of the group in your next account.
The idea of fixed roles is older. Webster and Wind described the group that buys in 1972, and Johnston and Bonoma studied purchases in 31 firms in 1981.[7][8] We have read only the bibliographic records of both papers. The five roles usually credited to Webster and Wind (user, influencer, buyer, decider, gatekeeper) are known to us from later descriptions, so we give them with that reservation.
The person who moves the group is not always the user. The authors of The Challenger Customer studied 700 people on the buying side and call the ones who can build agreement mobilisers. The firm behind the book reports that sellers who target mobilisers are “31% more likely to be high performers”.[9] A mobiliser can sit anywhere in the company.
Finance and procurement are in the decision more often than a seller who talks only to users will see. Forrester reports that procurement takes part as a decision-maker in 53% of purchases.[5] G2, a vendor, asked who makes the final decision on software: a finance lead in 20% of cases, the user who championed the product in 9%, procurement in 4%.[1] Taking part in a decision and making the final call are different things, which is why 53% and 4% can both be true.
How to map a group in practice.
SYNC sorts the people in an account into seven roles. The roles describe a person's part in this one purchase, so the same person can have a different role for a different product.
- 01Economic buyer. Holds the budget and can agree to the spending.
- 02Champion. Gains enough from the purchase to argue for it inside the company.
- 03User. Would work with the product day to day.
- 04Influencer. Shapes the decision without holding the budget.
- 05Blocker. Can stop the purchase: legal, security, procurement, or the owner of the tool that would be replaced.
- 06Indifferent. Senior enough to be in the room, but the purchase touches neither their budget nor their work.
- 07Unknown. The evidence does not say.
The order follows from the roles. In a contact plan, users hear first and buyers last. Blockers are never written to. Take a hotel like the one in our case study. The operations manager is the user and is written to first. The head chef is the champion and comes next. The general manager is the economic buyer and comes last. Procurement is the blocker and is never contacted. This example is an illustration. The roles at the client are withheld.
To do this by hand, list the people you can find, write one role next to each name, and write down whether the source said so or you guessed. Keep the guesses marked as guesses.
What our own mapping looks like.
We counted every person in every dossier on the platform. Champions are the largest role and blockers the smallest of the named ones.
The middle dossier holds three people. Of the 1,303 dossiers, 10 hold nobody, 274 hold one person, 448 hold two or three, 224 hold four to six, 217 hold seven to twelve, and 130 hold thirteen or more. That is smaller than any group in the table above, because we only see people who appear in public sources, and the software stops at a maximum per account.
Most roles are inferred. The software marked 5,483 of the 7,415 roles (74%) as its own reading and 1,863 (25%) as stated by the source. Even “stated” is weaker than it sounds: it means the source stated the person's function, not their part in a purchase.
| Role | Stated by the source | Inferred by the software |
|---|---|---|
| Champion | 1,209 | 1,686 |
| User | 0 | 1,559 |
| Economic buyer | 425 | 998 |
| Indifferent | 0 | 1,093 |
| Influencer | 228 | 5 |
| Blocker | 1 | 142 |
No user is ever stated, and 142 of the 143 blockers are inferred. The roles that decide the order of writing are the ones we are least sure of.
Our “reachable” mark does not yet tell people apart. Of the 7,034 people it was assessed for, 7,017 are marked reachable. The mark records that a way to contact the person is on file. It says nothing about whether the person can be reached.
What speaks against this.
The strongest objection is to writing each person their own angle. Gartner surveyed 632 buyers in 2024 and found that content tailored to the individual had a “59% negative impact on buying group consensus”.[6] In the words of Delainey Kirkwood of Gartner, “content with individual-level relevance can lead to confirmation bias.”
The same survey found that content relevant to the whole group raised agreement by 20%. What we take from this: the reason for writing stays the same for everyone in the account, and only the angle changes per person. We have not measured whether that is enough to avoid the effect Gartner describes.
Groups may also be getting smaller. G2 finds groups of three or four growing for software, and a department lead making the final decision most often, in 24% of cases.[1] Where that holds, a seven-role map is more than the purchase needs.
Our example never writes to procurement. Forrester's finding that procurement takes part as a decision-maker in 53% of purchases speaks against treating it as a blocker by default.[5]
Our own figures describe five workspaces on one platform. The roles are the software's reading and nobody has checked them against the real groups. They say nothing about how large buying groups are.
We counted every person attached to a dossier, with the role the software gave them, whether that role was marked as stated or inferred, and the reachable mark. The count covers 7,415 people in 1,303 dossiers across five workspaces. Nothing was left out; dossiers with nobody in them count as size zero.
The 1,303 dossiers cover 972 companies, so a figure per dossier is not a figure per company. When a dossier is rebuilt its people are replaced, so this is the state on one day. The count of 7,346 people with a named role is our own subtraction: 7,415 less the 69 marked unknown. The outside figures are quoted from the sources listed below. Two papers were available to us as bibliographic records only and are marked so.
- [1]G2 (2025). Buyer Behavior Report 2025.vendor researchread in the original; 1,169 software buyers, April 2025
- [2]Gartner. B2B Buying Report (2022 buyer survey).read in the original
- [3]Toman, N., Adamson, B. & Gomez, C. (2017). The New Sales Imperative. Harvard Business Review, March–April 2017.read in the original
- [4]Forrester. The State of Business Buying, 2024.read in the original
- [5]Forrester. The State of Business Buying, 2026 (press release).read in the original
- [6]Gartner (7 May 2025). Gartner Sales Survey Finds 74% of B2B Buyer Teams Demonstrate 'Unhealthy Conflict' During The Decision Process. Press release.read in the originalread as a verbatim copy; 632 buyers, August to September 2024
- [7]Webster, F. E. & Wind, Y. (1972). A General Model for Understanding Organizational Buying Behavior. Journal of Marketing 36(2), 12–19. doi:10.1177/002224297203600204abstract onlythe five roles are known to us from secondary descriptions only
- [8]Johnston, W. J. & Bonoma, T. V. (1981). The Buying Center: Structure and Interaction Patterns. Journal of Marketing 45(3), 143–156. doi:10.1177/002224298104500312abstract only
- [9]Adamson, B., Dixon, M., Spenner, P. & Toman, N. (2015). The Challenger Customer. Portfolio/Penguin.read in the originala page of the firm behind the book, not the book itself
- [10]iSyncSO. The people and roles in every dossier on the platform, counted on 29 September 2026.our own measurement