Your CRM tells you who you've spoken to. It was never built to tell you who you should have been speaking to.

Every sales leader has lost a deal that looked straightforward right up until it fell apart at the final stage, when someone nobody on the account team had ever spoken to raised an objection the champion couldn't answer. Nobody had briefed that person, because nobody knew they were part of the decision.

The Hidden Veto sets out the five ways these stakeholders typically show up in an enterprise deal, from the advisor brought in late by a champion who's run out of authority to the procurement lead who only surfaces once the contract lands on their desk. Knowing the pattern is what lets a team go looking for them instead of finding out who they were after the deal's already gone quiet.

That matters because the typical enterprise purchase now runs through a committee of 13 internal stakeholders and nine external participants (Forrester), and research from LinkedIn B2B Institute and Bain found unknown stakeholders vetoed roughly half the vendors on enterprise shortlists in 2024. Most of them never take a meeting, so there's nothing in the CRM to show they exist until they've already said no.

Download it, then check your live deals for the stakeholders you haven't identified yet.