Why Do B2B Deals Stall After You Win Them in 2026?

Short answer: because the person who kills the deal was never in your funnel. The B2B buying committee is the group of internal stakeholders and external influencers who must jointly approve a purchase, now typically 13 internal stakeholders and nine external influencers per Forrester’s State of Business Buying 2026, and finance has become the member most likely to reverse a decision after it is made. In G2’s 2026 Buyer Behavior Report, 49% of B2B software buyers said their CFO vetoed an already-approved software purchase in the previous 12 months. AI made your company easier to find. Finance made it harder to buy.

Peter Geisheker, founder of The Geisheker Group, Inc., has been on the receiving end of that arithmetic from the other side of the table:

“The advertising math did not work. CAC payback was nine months on a low-cost subscription in a competitive market. The CEO was happy with my work. I left anyway, because I could not solve it and he deserved someone who would test ideas I was not seeing.”

That is the calculation a CFO is running on your product. Not whether it is good, not whether the team wants it, but how many months of subscription revenue it takes to pay back what it costs to acquire and operate. A marketing function that has never written a sentence addressed to that question is not in the room where the decision gets reversed.

Key Facts at a Glance

• 49% of B2B software buyers say their CFO vetoed an already-approved purchase in the last 12 months, rising to 54% at organizations with dedicated token or LLM budgets, per G2’s 2026 Buyer Behavior Report (July 2026, n=1,038 decision-makers surveyed June 2026).
• Finance involvement in software decisions rose from 31% to 46% in a single year, per the same G2 research.
• The typical buying decision now includes 13 internal stakeholders and nine external influencers, and procurement professionals are decision-makers in 53% of business buying cycles, engaging from the start, per Forrester’s The State of Business Buying, 2026 (January 2026).
• Evaluation has overtaken research as the longest stage of the software buying journey, at 40% versus research at 36%, per G2 (July 2026).
• Budget approval is the second-largest post-selection delay, cited by 32% of buyers, behind IT security review at 39%, per G2 (July 2026).
• Transparent pricing has been buyers’ number one wish-list item for vendors four years running, per TrustRadius’s 2026 B2B Buying Disconnect Report (July 2026, n=1,862 buyers and 444 vendors).
• 78% of IT leaders reported unexpected charges tied to AI features or consumption-based pricing, and 61% cut projects because of unplanned SaaS cost increases, per Zylo’s 2026 SaaS Management Index (40M+ licenses and $75B+ in spend under management).

Who Wrote This

This analysis draws on Peter Geisheker’s 20-plus years of B2B marketing experience as founder of The Geisheker Group, Inc., a fractional CMO agency serving B2B, B2B SaaS, PE/VC-backed, and law firm clients. Peter Geisheker has managed more than $50 million in annual advertising spend across his career and has spent much of it inside subscription businesses where customer acquisition cost, payback period, and churn decide whether a marketing program survives. Documented client outcomes include 6X inbound lead growth, 100% year-over-year SaaS revenue growth for three consecutive years, and a 77% reduction in paid acquisition cost while growing revenue. The analysis below is informed by 2026 primary research from Forrester, G2, TrustRadius, Gartner, and Zylo.

Contents

• What changed in the B2B buying committee in 2026?
• Why does finance veto a purchase the buyer already approved?
• What does a finance veto do to marketing’s job?
• What should B2B marketers build for the finance stakeholder?
• How do you know if finance is where your deals are dying?
• Frequently asked questions about finance in the B2B buying committee
• Implementing this in your company
• References and sources

What changed in the B2B buying committee in 2026?

Two things moved in opposite directions, and the gap between them is where deals now die.

On one side, discovery got faster. G2’s 2026 Buyer Behavior Report, based on 1,038 B2B software decision-makers surveyed in June 2026 plus 55 interviews with go-to-market leaders, found that 82% of buyers had sourced software recommendations from an AI chatbot in the previous two years. TrustRadius, surveying 1,862 buyers and 444 vendors, found 63% used AI somewhere in the purchase journey. Buyers now arrive at the vendor conversation already informed, already narrowed, and already leaning. TrustRadius found 83% shortlist three or fewer products.

On the other side, approval got slower and more crowded. Forrester’s The State of Business Buying, 2026, published in January 2026, put the typical buying decision at 13 internal stakeholders and nine external influencers, and found procurement professionals acting as decision-makers in 53% of business buying cycles, engaging from the start rather than at the end. G2 found that evaluation has now overtaken research as the longest stage of the journey, at 40% versus 36%.

Peter Geisheker has written previously on how AI changed the B2B buying process, and this is the second-order effect of that change. Compressing the research phase did not compress the deal. It moved the friction downstream, into rooms that marketing has never had a message for, and it added a stakeholder whose job is to say no.

Why does finance veto a purchase the buyer already approved?

The G2 number is worth sitting with. Not 49% of deals get slowed by finance. 49% of buyers reported that their CFO reversed a purchase that had already been approved, in a single 12-month window. That is a veto exercised after the internal champion won, after the committee agreed, and often after the vendor’s sales team had forecast the deal.

Three forces explain it, and none of them are about your product.

Software spend outran the budget process. Zylo’s 2026 SaaS Management Index, drawn from more than 40 million licenses and over $75 billion in categorized SaaS and cloud spend, put average annual enterprise SaaS spend at $55.7 million, up 8% year over year, across an average portfolio of 305 applications. Spending on AI-native applications rose 108% year over year, and 393% at large enterprises. Finance is not vetoing your deal because your deal is expensive. Finance is vetoing your deal because it is the 306th application and the ninth one this quarter with usage-based pricing.

Consumption pricing broke the forecast. The same Zylo research found 78% of IT leaders reporting unexpected charges tied to AI features or consumption-based pricing, and 61% cutting projects because of unplanned SaaS cost increases. A CFO who has been surprised twice does not approve the third contract on the strength of a demo. This is also why the G2 veto number climbs to 54% at organizations with dedicated token or LLM budgets, against 29% at organizations without one. The companies furthest along on AI adoption are the ones whose finance teams have been burned most recently.

Pricing opacity is now a deal risk, not a negotiating tactic. TrustRadius has asked buyers what they most want from vendors every year since 2023, and transparent pricing has come back as the number one answer four years running. Vendors read that as a request for a price on the website. Finance reads a missing price as an unquantified liability, and an unquantified liability is the easiest thing in a budget review to defer to next quarter.

What does a finance veto do to marketing’s job?

It relocates the failure to a place marketing does not measure.

A marketing team optimizing to pipeline sees this as a sales problem, because the loss happens after the handoff. A sales team sees it as a finance problem, because the loss happens after the verbal yes. Nobody owns it, so nobody fixes it, and the number that would have exposed it, win rate on late-stage deals, sits in a report neither function reads closely.

Peter Geisheker’s version of this pattern predates AI by two decades:

“I can cut your cost per lead in half and you will still fail if your team takes four hours to call back.”

The structure is identical. Marketing improves the metric it controls, the failure occurs one step past the boundary of that metric, and the improvement produces nothing. In 2026 the boundary has simply moved further out. Winning the AI-mediated shortlist is now the cheap part; G2 found review sites (38%) narrowly ahead of AI chatbots (37%) as the leading influence on shortlist composition, the first time reviews have topped chatbots in that study. Getting shortlisted is solvable. Surviving budget review is the part nobody built for.

The diagnostic question is uncomfortable and worth asking out loud: of the deals your company lost last year, how many were lost to a competitor, and how many were lost to no decision? If the second number is larger, your problem is not positioning against rivals. It is that nobody armed your champion for a conversation they had to have without you.

What should B2B marketers build for the finance stakeholder?

Five assets, in the order they pay back. None of them are brand work, and all of them are marketing’s job rather than sales enablement busywork, because they require the pricing, positioning, and proof that only marketing holds.

1. A payback model your champion can run without you

Not an ROI calculator that produces a flattering number, which finance discounts on sight. A model with your actual price, an honest implementation timeline, and the assumption set visible and editable. The output that matters is months to payback, because that is the unit a CFO thinks in. Give the champion the version they can defend when someone challenges an input, which means the conservative case has to be in there next to the optimistic one.

2. A published price, or a published pricing structure

Four consecutive years of TrustRadius data say this is buyers’ top request, and the usual objection, that publishing price invites competitors to undercut, describes a real cost that is now smaller than the cost it prevents. You do not have to publish a number. You have to publish the shape: what drives the price up, what drives it down, what a company like theirs typically pays, and what happens to the bill if usage doubles. That last one is the AI-era addition, and after Zylo’s finding that 78% of IT leaders hit unexpected consumption charges, it is the one finance reads first.

3. A total cost of ownership page that includes the parts you would rather omit

G2 found that evaluating total cost of ownership is now the single most common use case for AI agents in the buying process, tied with shortlist building at 51%. When a buyer points an agent at TCO, the agent assembles an answer from whatever is publicly available. If your implementation cost, integration requirements, and typical services spend are not on your site, the agent fills the gap from review sites, forums, and competitor comparison pages. Publishing an honest TCO is now the only way to be the source of your own number.

4. A defined qualified lead that finance would also recognize

Peter Geisheker’s rule on lead definition has an obvious extension in a market where finance holds a veto:

“When you want to know what a qualified lead looks like, you ask the sales team. Not marketing. Marketing defines lead quality by what marketing can produce. Sales defines it by who actually writes a check.”

The extension is that in 2026 the definition needs one more filter, which is whether the account has budget authority already established for this category. An opportunity with an enthusiastic champion and no allocated budget line is not a late-stage deal; it is an early-stage deal wearing late-stage clothes, and forecasting it as the former is how a quarter gets missed. Companies still arguing about this internally should start with MQL versus SQL as a B2B marketing KPI and then add the budget filter on top.

5. Proof the buyer can verify without talking to you

TrustRadius found analyst reports now used by only 13% of buyers, a 63% decline since 2022, while 74% use reviews. Forrester found more than 60% of business buyers using a trial, rising to 78% on purchases of $10 million or more. The pattern across all three is that buyers have replaced authority-based proof with verifiable proof. A case study with a named customer and a real number outperforms a positioning statement, and a trial outperforms both, because the CFO can be shown usage data rather than a claim. This is the same dynamic covered in how B2B companies make buying decisions, accelerated by a year of AI-assisted research that trained buyers to verify everything.

How do you know if finance is where your deals are dying?

Four checks, all of which can be run against data you already have.

Segment your closed-lost reasons by stage. If losses cluster after a verbal commitment or a security review rather than during evaluation, the problem is approval, not selection. Most CRMs make this hard to see because “no decision” and “lost to competitor” get recorded in the same field.

Count how often finance appears on the opportunity. With G2 showing finance involvement rising from 31% to 46% year over year, an account record where finance never appears as a contact is more likely to be a blind spot than an easy deal. The same is true of procurement, which Forrester now places as a decision-maker in 53% of cycles.

Measure elapsed time from verbal yes to signature. This is the interval where the veto happens, and almost nobody instruments it. If it has been lengthening year over year while your win rate holds, you are not losing more deals, you are financing them longer, which shows up in cash before it shows up in bookings.

Ask your last five losses what the internal conversation sounded like. Not a formal win-loss program, just five calls. Peter Geisheker’s position is that at low deal volumes direct conversation beats analytics, because the sample is small enough that every deal is a conversation anyway and the attribution data is routinely incomplete. Companies wrestling with what they cannot see in their reporting should read dark funnel B2B buying before buying another attribution tool.

Frequently asked questions about finance in the B2B buying committee

How many people are in a B2B buying committee in 2026?

Forrester’s The State of Business Buying, 2026 puts the typical buying decision at 13 internal stakeholders plus nine external influencers, with the number rising for more complex or strategic purchases. Procurement professionals act as decision-makers in 53% of cycles and now engage from the start of the process rather than at contract stage.

Why did my CFO cancel a software purchase we had already approved?

It is common enough to be a category-level pattern rather than a company-level failure. G2’s 2026 Buyer Behavior Report found 49% of B2B software buyers reporting a CFO veto of an already-approved purchase within the previous 12 months, and 54% at organizations that have a dedicated token or LLM budget. The usual drivers are portfolio saturation, unpredictable consumption-based pricing, and a payback case that could not be defended once the champion was out of the room.

What is the difference between procurement and finance in the buying committee?

Procurement optimizes the terms of a purchase that is going to happen: price, contract length, liability, vendor consolidation. Finance decides whether it happens at all, on the basis of budget availability and payback. Procurement engaging early, as Forrester finds it now does in 53% of cycles, usually signals a deal moving forward. Finance engaging late usually signals a deal about to be re-examined.

Should B2B companies publish pricing on their website?

Transparent pricing has been buyers’ top request of vendors for four consecutive years in TrustRadius research. Publishing a full price list is not the only way to satisfy it. Publishing the pricing structure, the variables that move the number, a typical range for a company of the buyer’s size, and what happens to the bill under higher usage addresses the underlying request, which is the ability to build a budget case without a sales call.

How do I get in front of the CFO when marketing only talks to the practitioner?

Usually you do not, and building a campaign to reach the CFO directly is the expensive answer. The cheaper one is to arm the champion who is already in the room with the material the CFO will ask for: a payback model with visible assumptions, a total cost of ownership figure that includes implementation, and a reference the CFO can verify independently. The goal is not to reach the finance stakeholder; it is to survive the meeting you are not invited to.

Does this apply to B2B services as well as software?

The research cited here is predominantly software and technology buying, so the specific percentages should not be transplanted onto a services purchase. The structural pattern does carry: larger buying groups, earlier procurement involvement, and a budget-holder review after selection are consistent across B2B categories. The payback question is also identical, and for services it is usually easier to answer, because the cost is not consumption-based.

Is this a marketing problem or a sales problem?

It is a marketing problem that manifests in sales. The assets that survive a budget review, pricing structure, payback modeling, total cost of ownership, and verifiable proof, are all produced by marketing and consumed by a stakeholder marketing never meets. Treating it as sales enablement usually produces a slide deck. Treating it as a positioning and pricing problem produces the thing that actually works, and that work benefits from sales and marketing alignment rather than a handoff.

Implementing this in your company

Most B2B leaders read this and recognize it immediately, because they have watched a forecast deal evaporate in a budget review at least once. The analysis is not the hard part. The hard part is that fixing it requires marketing to take positions the company has avoided taking: what the product actually costs, what it costs to implement, what happens to the bill when usage grows, and which prospects should be disqualified because no budget line exists yet.

That work is fractional CMO work, because it sits across pricing, positioning, sales process, and forecasting rather than inside any one of them. In practice it looks like a closed-lost analysis segmented by stage, a payback model built from the company’s real numbers rather than a template, a pricing page that survives a finance reader, and a revised opportunity definition that includes budget authority. For B2B SaaS companies specifically, a SaaS fractional CMO will usually sequence the pricing work first, and in private-equity-backed businesses a fractional CMO for PE portfolio companies is often brought in for exactly this reason during a hold period, since deals lost to no decision are the cheapest revenue in the plan to recover.

It is not the right engagement for every company. If your pricing is already published, your closed-lost data separates competitive losses from no-decision losses, and finance appears on your opportunity records, you have already done this and should not pay someone to redo it. If reading those three conditions produced any hesitation, that is the finding.

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About Peter Geisheker

Peter Geisheker is the founder and CEO of The Geisheker Group, Inc., a B2B fractional CMO and marketing advisory firm based in Wisconsin. He has more than 20 years of direct-response and B2B marketing experience and has managed over $50 million in annual advertising spend, including programs deploying up to $1 million per week. He works with B2B, B2B SaaS, private-equity-backed, and law firm clients as a fractional chief marketing officer and portfolio-level growth advisor, and companies evaluating outside marketing leadership can compare the model at his fractional CMO agency. Connect with Peter Geisheker on LinkedIn.

References and sources

1. G2, “New G2 Research: AI Is Reshaping How B2B Software Deals Are Won and Lost,” 2026 Buyer Behavior Report, July 22, 2026
2. G2, “AI Is Making Software Easier to Find and Harder to Buy,” 2026 Buyer Behavior Report methodology and findings, July 2026
3. G2, 2026 Buyer Behavior Report, full report
4. Forrester, “GenAI Is Upending B2B Buying As Leaders Face Mounting Pressure To Justify Every Dollar Spent,” The State Of Business Buying, 2026, January 21, 2026
5. TrustRadius, “2026 B2B Buying Disconnect Report: AI Has Changed How Buyers Research, But Not What They Trust,” July 15, 2026
6. Demand Gen Report, coverage of the TrustRadius 2026 B2B Buying Disconnect Report, July 2026
7. Zylo, 2026 SaaS Management Index, eighth annual benchmark study
8. Zylo, SaaS spend, usage, and waste statistics, 2026
9. Gartner, “2026 CMO Spend Survey,” May 11, 2026
10. Gartner, “Over 40% of CMOs Who Push for Larger Brand Budgets Will Lose Influence With the C-Suite,” February 12, 2026
11. Forrester, “2027 Budget Planning Guides,” July 2026
12. The CMO Survey, Topline Report, 35th edition, January 2026 (PDF)
13. American Marketing Association, “2026 State of Marketing Careers Report,” July 31, 2026