Data on exec multithreading

Our data demonstrates that win rates went up ~1.5x in mid-market, enterprise, and strategic deals when an executive is directly involved in the sales cycle. That means choosing whether to involve an executive in your 2026 deals will dramatically impact your chances of making President’s Club.

Yet most reps still rely on a single champion to carry the deal internally, only to realize too late that this person had little influence or no ability to sell up to an executive.

Others make the opposite mistake: They run into an 8-person demo buzzsaw in the first meeting and realize they’re handling objections from every function in the company without the support of a deal champion.

So, how do you effectively multithread and build real champions when selling to C-level executives?

To find out, we analyzed more than 1M executive sales cycles in partnership with Gong and Jen Allen-Knuth, who has sold $50M+ in enterprise deals, to uncover what it really takes to build strong relationships with executives.

Here’s what the data revealed:

1. How many stakeholders an executive deal requires
2. When and how you should multithread
3. How to justify a six- to seven-figure purchase

And if you like this, you’ll love the Ultimate Multithreading and Selling to the C-Suite Report that includes more than 20+ insights on how to close bigger deals with executives.

1. How many stakeholders does an executive deal require?

Executives want to hear from their teams that the solution is valuable and worth prioritizing, not from a salesperson. Gone are the days of relying on a single champion to sell your deal for you. A won $50K–$250K deal these days typically involves at least 10 stakeholders.

That’s why multithreading across the organization is critical if you want to close more deals.

Jen believes that while executive deals require many stakeholders, you still need to identify a strong champion early, someone who can help you access those stakeholders and sell internally on your behalf.

The problem is that not all champions are created equal.

Here are 4 actions that Jen takes to find a true champion and some example questions you can ask to test whether you’ve engaged the right person:

1. Map the buying committee (Who is empowered to make the decision):
   1. Who is most likely to be skeptical of prioritizing this business problem? Why?
   2. What else would they prioritize above it? Why?
   3. Who is most likely to be pro-status quo? Why?
2. Anticipate competing priorities (Why the CEO would say no):
   1. We agreed the problem is ACME’s number of onsite troubleshooting visits. Who is likely to have a different opinion of the problem ACME should be solving? Why?
   2. What was the most recent disagreement between this group?
3. Understand resource allocation (Why the CFO would say no):
   1. What other organizational projects/priorities are we competing against for time/attention/budget?
4. Anticipate timeline blockers (Why they might say no today):
   1. (As a follow-up to the above question) Why not hold off for 6 months?
      

2. When and how should you multithread?

Sellers often try to multithread as early as possible, assuming it’s the fastest path to closing. That’s well-intentioned advice, but some sellers include dozens of contacts too early in their sales cycle without having a strong deal champion to support them first.

Gong data indicate that win rates drop by roughly 6% when an evaluation starts with an executive, compared to a 5% increase when executives are involved around the third touchpoint.

Jen focuses on winning over a champion first, then using that context to engage the executive buying group in a broader team meeting.

Once Jen identifies her champion, she does everything she can to make sure they win the group meeting together:

1. Ghostwrite the meeting request‍

Never dump a high-effort next step on your champion’s plate. Instead, write the meeting request for them. Here’s an example:

As we consider [PROBLEM], I’ve asked [Your Name] at [Company] to spend 30 mins with our team.

I met with [Your Name] this week to provide context on our plans for [OBJECTIVE], as well as the roadblocks we’ve encountered.

They had some unique perspective on [PROBLEM], based on [X and Y].

Any concerns with spending 30 mins on this together?

[Champion Name]

2. Focus the first big team meeting on problem agreement instead of a demo

People need to agree on the problem before they agree on the solution, so kick off the meeting by resharing the problem statement to align on the objective, the core challenges, and the cost of the current approach.

For example, you could share a problem statement with a CRO that sounds like the following:

ACME is being asked by the board to double its revenue while increasing profitability, which means the only way to hit that goal is by increasing profitability per rep. What makes that challenging is XYZ.

3. Actively seek out disagreement about the root cause of the problem

A solution often gets cut at the finish line when the buying group disagrees on either the problem to solve (it’s not worth investing in a solution) or the root cause (this isn’t the right solution to the problem).

Invite disagreement by asking who sees the problem differently, which lowers defenses and surfaces real issues before they stall the decision when you’re not in the room.

Continuing the example above, that might sound like:

Who has a different opinion on the way we’ve outlined the problem here? What is missing from this POV?

3. How do you justify a six- to seven-figure purchase?

Our data show that deal value massively increases with the number of stakeholders involved. That’s because every function that experiences the problem adds to the cost of inaction for the company as a whole.

Your discovery call is like the initial stab at the cost of inaction. You can point to some quantifiable metric with a single champion or function, and the big team meeting allows you to quantify the cost of inaction for every function.

As you wrap the meeting, the next step is often co-authoring a business case with your champion to assess the cost of inaction for the entire group using the following 6 steps. We’ve also provided an example to illustrate step:

1. Determine who is most likely to have this problem. City government teams that have multiple office locations, 20K+ employees, and a small IT team. Does this account meet that description?
2. Determine how most prospects solve the problem today. Send IT team on location when wifi goes down to figure out the problem, because the goal is to resolve problem for our internal customers — and get good CSAT scores.
3. Establish the negative consequence that happens because of the status quo. On average, there are X number of downtime events every month. IT techs spend X hours driving to the office, identifying the problem, and resolving it. Often, the internal client has to wait, or the problem was something that could’ve been easily resolved without IT onsite.
4. Determine how often that problem happens due to status quo. How many incident logs occurred last month that required an IT technician onsite? Let’s size that.
5. Identify a benchmark or alternative way to solve the problem. It looks like there is a budget deficit of $X for city of X. With reducing budgets, many other city government officials are looking for ways to increase productivity of their IT teams, without increasing headcount. City of Philly is using AI to predict wifi downtime and remotely resolving it before the downtime event happens. This reduced their onsite visits by X% and achieved an X% reduction of downtime events.
6. Get your prospect to give an honest perspective on how much of the gap we could close: “What if we could knock off X% or $Y off of that?”

This allows you to avoid an unrealistic ROI claim. Instead, size the cost of inaction and have your prospect engage in an honest assessment of how effectively your solution would address the root cause.

The verdict

To win a deal upwards of seven figures, you have to get to power and quantify the problem for them. But you also need a dedicated champion to guide you through the process. If you multithread effectively, you’ll close bigger deals at higher win rates.