The Committee Cycle
Six to eight people on every deal. Three deals in the pipeline. One bad quarter from collapse.
How an enterprise learning platform doubled sales by getting the whole buying group educated before the RFP was written.
An enterprise learning platform. Sells into higher education and into large corporate learning teams the size of Walmart. Either way, the buying committee is the same shape. A senior sponsor. A CIO. Two or three department heads. A procurement officer. Sometimes a faculty or compliance rep. Six to eight people, different priorities, different timelines, all locked to either an academic calendar or a corporate fiscal cycle.
Most vendors sell to the person who signs. The deal lives or dies on the five people who don't.
Referrals had carried the business for years. A happy buyer would mention them at a conference. The colleague would bring them into a conversation. Deals would close slowly, when someone else took the time to make the introduction.
The founder ran the math one Sunday night. Three deals in the pipeline. All from referrals. All gated by budget cycles outside the firm's control. One stall in committee review and the quarter was gone.
That isn't a pipeline. That's a prayer.
The opportunity we saw
The firm wasn't selling to one person. They were selling to six to eight people who barely talked to each other. Every committee member had a different concern and a different favorite channel. Nobody was educating any of them before the formal evaluation started.
A real fix needed to put different material in front of different roles over the months they spent forming an opinion. Before the RFP, not after.
What we built
- 01
A cornerstone monthly webinar on a real problem buyers were trying to solve.
Student retention analytics. Cross-departmental data integration. Compliance reporting that ten different stakeholders trust. Not a product demo dressed up as education.
- 02
A multiplication system that turned each webinar into more than twenty assets.
Short videos for the CIOs. Frameworks for the compliance officers. Cost models for procurement. LinkedIn threads from the founder. Email sequences for the target account list. Different roles encountering the same material in the form that fit their role.
- 03
A social presence in higher-ed and corporate-learning communities.
Where deans, CIOs, and learning leaders already talked. The founder commented, contributed, didn't sell.
- 04
Paid amplification by named company and named role.
LinkedIn thought leader ads targeting the chair of academic affairs at specific universities, not industry-keyword guessing.
- 05
Role-mapped email nurture for each committee role.
CIO got the integration follow-up. Procurement got the cost model. Compliance got the framework. Same account, different conversations.
- 06
A signal layer that flagged when two or more committee members at the same institution engaged with the firm's work.
That account got an outreach before the RFP existed.
The results
- 01
Sales doubled over two years.
- 02
Pipeline performance up 72%.
Fewer deals stalled in committee review, because the committee was already educated.
- 03
The partnership ran more than four years and counting.
Most agencies measure tenure in months. The system we built keeps adapting to a buying environment that won't stop changing.
- 04
By the time an RFP showed up, the firm was already inside how the institution defined the problem.
The fix is rarely a new tactic. The fix is a system.
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