Your champion loves the demo, the business case is built and the deal is in your commit. Then she goes on leave, her budget moves to another project or her replies stop, and a deal that rested on one inbox stalls with it.

You ran the discovery, the demo and the business case, and one contact was all that stood between that work and a signature. Five questions, asked in the first two meetings, get you the second and third person before that can happen.

How do you multithread a deal without going around your champion?

Ask your champion questions that help her sell the deal inside her company, so naming the next person is her idea.Each of the five questions below asks about the work, the money or the sign-off, and each one turns up a second or third buyer contact without asking her to hand you over.

“Who else will have to live with this once it goes in?” It asks about the work, so she can name the people it touches without feeling she is handing you over.
“When this lands on your CFO’s desk, what will they ask that we haven’t answered yet?” It offers to help her win the internal sell, and it tells you what the person with the budget cares about.
“Who signed off the last time your team bought something this size?” It maps the real approval path from a purchase she has already been through.
“Would it help if I walked them through the numbers with you, so you’re not carrying it alone?” It turns a name into a meeting, with her in the room as the host.
“If you were out for two weeks, who would keep this moving?” It finds your second champion while the first one is still there to introduce you.

Ask question 3 in the first meeting and question 4 in the second. Ebsta’s 2025 benchmarks found that when decision makers join in the first two stages of a deal, win rates rise 50% to 55% (a relative figure, from Ebsta’s data alone).

Why do multithreaded deals win more often?

A deal with one contact rests on one person’s calendar, budget and job.Gong Labs studied 1.8 million new-business deals closed in 2024 and found won deals had twice the buyer contacts of lost ones, and on deals over $50K, multithreading lifted win rates by 130% on average, a relative figure.

The same Ebsta data puts the typical new-business deal at 8 stakeholders (one dataset). Most of them will never sit in your demo, so the questions above are how you reach the people who will judge it anyway.

Each name these questions turn up comes with its own reason: the CFO who wants payback inside a year, the operations lead worried about the switchover. The questions pay off when you still have each person’s words in front of you as you write the proposal, dozens of calls later.

Not sure how your deals stack up? See how you compare on the three numbers in the report, in 90 seconds.