Here’s a question almost nobody asks about a deal: not “who’s involved,” but “who shows up first, who shows up last, and why does it matter?”
Turns out it matters more than almost anything else in your pipeline.
Across nearly a decade of research and more than 10,000 personality profiles, a pattern kept surfacing. It wasn’t random. The same personality types kept showing up at the same points in the buying process, playing the same roles, for the same reasons. Once you see the pattern, you can’t unsee it, and you definitely can’t sell the same way to all three moments in the journey.
The Beginning: Influencers Bring the Idea In
Every deal starts somewhere, and it’s rarely with the person who signs the contract.
It usually starts with an Influencer. They’re the one who found your webinar, forwarded your content to six colleagues, booked the intro call with genuine excitement. They’re driven by recognition and relationships, being the person who discovered something first, who gets to say “you should look at this.”
Here’s the catch: their enthusiasm is real, but their ownership isn’t. Influencers open doors. They don’t push deals through when things get hard. In the research, we call them Teachers – curious, analytical, motivated to bring new ideas into the organization and share what they’ve learned. They’re the reason you got the meeting. They’re rarely the reason you win.
If an Influencer is your only contact three weeks before a decision, you don’t have a deal. You have an introduction.
The Middle: Dominants Take Ownership (and Steadies Quietly Stall Things)
Once an idea clears the door, someone has to carry it. That’s a Dominant.
Dominants are the Go-Getters, results-driven, decisive, motivated by winning and looking good doing it. They ask “what’s the bottom line” and move fast once they’re bought in. In a Life Sciences deal we tracked, an Influencer CEO brought in his CMO, who happened to also be an Influencer, but the deal actually moved because two Dominants on the team, a VP and SVP, saw a personal opportunity to own a new capability in-house. That personal stake is what carried a 15-month sales cycle to close.
But the middle of the journey has a second, quieter character: the Steady. If your primary contact is a Steady, brace yourself. Steadies are relationship-focused, risk-averse, and genuinely helpful – but they will not advocate for you under pressure.
They need to know the group is aligned before they’ll move, and most deals that go quiet in the pipeline have a Steady sitting at the center of them. Push a Steady too hard and you don’t get a yes. You get radio silence, or worse, an email cc’ing someone else who’s “probably better positioned to help.”
The lesson from the middle stage: find your Dominant and give them a personal reason to champion this. Don’t mistake a Steady’s warmth for momentum.
The End: Conscientious Skeptics Show Up Late – and Vet Everything
This is the stage most sales teams never see coming because most of these buyers were never in the CRM to begin with.
Across more than 50 accounts and 27 sales opportunities, 85% of the buyers actively involved in the late stages of a deal – demos, trials, final presentations – weren’t in the selling company’s database. Not in marketing. Not in sales. Nowhere. They show up in predictable waves: five to seven new stakeholders at the demo stage, another three to five at trial setup, and procurement and finance walking in for the first time at the final presentation.
And disproportionately, the people who show up last are Conscientious (aka the Skeptics). Detail-oriented, data-driven, deeply distrustful of hype. They didn’t participate in the early relationship-building because they weren’t there for it. They arrive with fresh eyes and a mandate to find the risk everyone else missed.
We watched this play out in a South Korean pharmaceutical deal. Thirty contacts engaged for nine months – webinars, white papers, events, all the right signals. Then, eight months in, the actual decision-maker entered: a highly skeptical Conscientious Executive Director who had been invisible the entire time, consistent with a hierarchical culture where junior staff do the research and senior leaders make the call.
She started unbundling the deal, questioning complexity, looking for risk. It closed, at half the original value because nobody knew who she was or what she needed until it was too late.
Compare that to the deal where a late-arriving Dominant CEO searched “cash flow” 35 times in two weeks. Because that CEO had been entered into the database, the team caught the signal, rebuilt the final presentation around it, and won a six-figure competitive takeaway against a rival that had beaten them ten times running.
Same late-stage moment. Two completely different outcomes. The only variable was visibility.
Why This Matters More Than Your Funnel Stages
Your CRM tracks funnel stages. It doesn’t track who’s walking through the door at each one. But the personalities do, predictably, whether you’re watching or not:
- Beginning: Influencers bring the idea in. They won’t carry it.
- Middle: Dominants drive it forward if there’s something personal in it for them. Steadies quietly stall it if left unchallenged.
- End: Conscientious Skeptics arrive last, often after the deal feels basically done, and they decide whether it actually closes – and at what value.
The two most important stakeholders in any new-solution deal are the Teacher who brings you in and the Go-Getter who carries you forward. When urgency is high, it shifts: the Go-Getter and the Skeptic become the pair that matters most, because someone still has to vet the thing you’re rushing toward.
Miss any one of these three moments and you’re not losing to a competitor. You’re losing to a person you never saw.
The Hidden Buyer Journey: How Personality, Culture, and Hidden Stakeholders Decide Your Deals is available now on Amazon.
