A deal can have agreement from everyone the seller has spoken to and still stall. The Consensus Risk framework looks at which functions haven't had their say.
How the Consensus Risk framework shows where agreement breaks in a live deal
The business case has been through three rounds and the sponsor has signed it off. The demo went well enough that the operations lead asked for a second one with her own team. Then procurement sends over a supplier onboarding form asking for things nobody mentioned in four months of conversations, and the security questionnaire that went across in week six still hasn't come back.
Nothing about the deal has changed in the CRM. It's sitting at the same stage with the same close date, and the champion still says it's a priority for this year. Ask anyone on the deal team and they'd say the buying group had agreed, which is a fair reading of the people they've been dealing with. The functions that sign off on the purchase have mostly not been part of those conversations.
Forrester (2024) found that 86% of B2B purchases stall at some point in the buying process, and Basis Global (2026) puts the share of late-stage losses that come down to something other than price at 58%. Deals like the one above account for a fair amount of that, where the group wanted to buy but some of the functions inside it were never asked whether they could accept it.
Each function agrees separately
A typical enterprise purchase now involves 13 internal stakeholders and nine external participants (Forrester, 2025). Sales teams tend to talk about that group reaching consensus as if it happens once, for everyone at the same time. What we see more often is each function coming to its own view, at the point in the process where it's asked for one.
Operations is usually the first to be convinced, because the problem you're solving is theirs. Finance comes to it later with the payback, weighing it against everything else competing for the same budget. Security and legal tend to arrive with the questionnaire and the contract, looking at data, audit and liability in ways the commercial conversation rarely gets into, and procurement is often last, checking the deal against a supplier policy that was in place long before your opportunity.
Winning over operations does very little for the others. A champion there can be completely convinced and still have no real say in how the CISO's team scores a questionnaire, so the enthusiasm on a deal can be genuine and still tell you fairly little about whether it will sign.
Where Consensus Risk sits
We use Consensus Risk to describe the chance that agreement inside the buying group breaks before signature. The framework looks at each function on its own, what it needs to be satisfied of before it will say yes and when in the deal it actually gets to say it.
The timing is where most of the risk turns out to be. Finance, security, legal and procurement usually get their turn late, after the commercial conversation already feels settled, and until they've had it they haven't agreed to anything, whatever the rest of the deal looks like.
There are usually signs beforehand. A request to rebuild the business case on different assumptions is a common one, and so is a security review that reopens questions the technical evaluation was meant to have closed. Legal redlines on clauses nobody discussed, or a procurement requirement that pushes the timeline back, tend to come a little later. Any of them can be resolved, though each one means a function has started working through its own concerns.
What it changes in a pipeline review
In most pipeline reviews the question of whether the buying group is on board gets answered by the champion. Reading Consensus Risk means going through the functions one at a time and checking whether each has had its say yet, and whether anyone on the deal team knows the people who will be giving it.
On a live deal that can be as simple as listing the functions down the side of a page and marking which have agreed. The ones left unmarked are usually where the forecast is most exposed, and they're easy to overlook because nothing has gone wrong with them yet.
In the deal at the start of this piece, the onboarding form was the first sign of trouble anyone noticed. Security and procurement hadn't been part of the agreement at any stage, so what the deal team actually had was operations on board and finance most of the way there, which looked like consensus from where they were sitting.
This framework builds on The Hidden Veto, our paper on the stakeholders who shape a decision without ever meeting the deal team.
