Only 10% of Sales Managers Trust Their Reps to Identify Decision-Makers
When Akoonu surveyed 50 B2B sales managers, the results confirmed what most RevOps leaders already suspect: reps are flying blind on the deals they’re supposed to close. The numbers were stark. Only 30% of managers believed their average rep understood the individual roles within a buying committee. Just 10% were confident reps could identify decision-makers at target accounts. And only 12% believed reps could accurately assess where a buyer stood in the purchasing journey.
These are not edge-case metrics. Knowing who decides, who influences, and where they are in the process is the baseline of deal execution. When reps lack that visibility, every forecast built on their input inherits the same blind spots.
The pipeline intelligence gap
The survey framed this as a “buyer insight” problem, and it is. But in practice, it manifests as a pipeline intelligence gap. Reps don’t just lack knowledge about buyers in the abstract. They lack structured visibility into the deals sitting in their pipeline right now.
Consider what the data points actually mean:
- 70% of reps don’t fully understand the buying committee on their active deals. That means close dates and forecast categories are being set without knowing who needs to sign off.
- 90% of reps can’t reliably identify the decision-maker. Deals are advancing through stages without confirmed economic buyers.
- 88% of reps can’t accurately gauge where the buyer is in their journey. Stage assignments are based on seller activity, not buyer readiness.
When pipeline reviews happen against this backdrop, the conversation is necessarily shallow. Managers ask “where does this deal stand?” and reps answer based on the last email they sent, not the last signal the buying committee gave.
Why spreadsheets don’t fix this
The instinct is to ask for better data entry. Add a “decision-maker confirmed” field. Require a buying committee mapping exercise. Put a validation rule on the close date.
These approaches treat the symptom. The underlying problem is that reps lack a structured way to see their pipeline holistically — to visualize which deals have complete stakeholder maps, which are stalled, and which are progressing based on real buyer engagement rather than calendar defaults.
A spreadsheet or list view shows you rows of deals. It doesn’t show you the shape of the problem. It doesn’t make the gaps visible.
What the survey got right about marketing
One finding stood out: 52% of managers believed marketing was targeting the right audience, and 56% thought marketing content was effectively influencing buyers. Marketing scored meaningfully higher than sales on buyer understanding.
The reason is structural, not about talent. Marketing teams invest in persona research, journey mapping, and engagement tracking. They build systems to understand buyers at scale. Sales teams, by contrast, are expected to develop that understanding deal by deal, from memory, with no standardized framework.
The fix isn’t to make reps think more like marketers. It’s to give them pipeline tools that surface the same kind of structured intelligence — stakeholder visibility, deal progression signals, engagement context — inside their existing workflow.
From insight gap to pipeline visibility
The survey data points to a clear set of requirements. Reps need to see:
- Who is in the deal — not just the primary contact, but the full buying committee, with roles identified
- Where the deal actually stands — based on buyer actions and stage-appropriate criteria, not just seller optimism
- What’s missing — gaps in stakeholder coverage, stalled progression, and deals that lack the signals to justify their forecast category
These are exactly the problems that Pipeline Reviews and Deal Reviews are designed to solve. Pipeline Reviews gives managers and reps a visual, interactive view of every deal by close date, amount, and stage — making it immediately obvious which deals are real and which are assumptions. Deal Reviews structures the conversation around what’s actually happening in each deal: who’s engaged, what’s changed, and what needs to happen next.
The survey confirmed the problem nearly a decade ago. The pipeline intelligence tools to solve it exist today.
See how Akoonu surfaces deal stakeholders, pipeline gaps, and forecast risks inside Salesforce. Explore Pipeline Reviews, Deal Reviews, or schedule a demo.
