Minoa Research · 2026

The Audience of One

The State of B2B Buying Behavior 2026

Enterprise purchases are decided by groups — but almost everything sellers produce is built for individuals. New data on the cheapest correction available to any sales team.

7 pages · 5 findings · n = 818 closed deals

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01 · The Setup

Twenty-two people are reading over your champion's shoulder.

The decision unit in a typical enterprise purchase is 13 internal stakeholders and 9 external participants — and the seller usually knows two of them.

74%

of buying teams show unhealthy conflict during the decision — conflicting objectives, open disagreement, or being overruled from outside the room.

Forrester, State of Business Buying 2026 · ~18,000 buyers — Gartner, May 2025 · n=632

02 · The Tension

Personalization is making it worse.

The profession's biggest investment of the past decade — content tailored to individual stakeholders — actively fractures the group whose agreement decides whether anything gets bought.

Gartner, May 2025 · n=632 B2B buyers

03 · The Turn

One more reader is worth 10–15 points of win rate.

What travels between people is a shared set of numbers. When a second person on the buyer's side opens the business case, win rate jumps — and the effect holds when matched by contract value, company size, and total reading time.

Minoa Research, July 2026 · n=818 closed B2B deals

04 · The Price

Deals aren't lost to competitors. They're lost to nobody.

61%

of lost deals are lost to indecision

14%

are lost to a competitor

Ebsta × Pavilion · 4.2m opportunities across 530 companies

Indecision is what happens when twenty-two people can't assemble a shared reason to spend money. Yet the instrument that produces one is almost never built: under 1% of deals carry a business case — while roughly half of closed deals above $100k do. Matched by deal size, the deals with a case win.

Minoa Research, July 2026 · n≈1,000,000 deals

05 · The Feasibility

Co-created beats broadcast.

The bottleneck that kept business cases rare has broken. The work moved from a handful of specialists to the reps themselves — and output doubled without anyone working harder.

⅓ → 60%

rep share of business-case builders, in 18 months

2×

total output — with the median builder's workload flat

51%

of buyers expect misleading information from generative AI — co-created, traceable numbers win trust

Minoa Research, July 2026 — Gartner, May 2026 · n=645

06 · The Landing

You cannot personalize your way to consensus. The cheapest correction is a business case more than one person has read.

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