22 people weigh in on a B2B deal. How many does your company page reach?

Somewhere inside your biggest open deal sits a finance manager you have never met. Next to them are an IT lead running a security review, an operations head who will live with whatever gets bought, and a procurement officer with a spreadsheet. Your sales team probably talks to two or three of them. Your company page speaks in one voice, mostly to the people who already follow it.

In October 2026, LinkedIn's marketing blog repeated a number for that crowd, which marketers call the buying group. In "From Buyer Signals to Pipeline", Vita Molis of LinkedIn wrote that "the average buying group spans 22 stakeholders across three or more departments", citing Forrester's Buyers' Journey Survey (2025). Forrester's own breakdown, published in February 2026, is 13 people inside the buyer's organisation and nine from outside it, with 73% of purchases involving three or more departments. We think most B2B (business-to-business) companies are still trying to reach that whole group with one voice.

A buying group is everyone who has a say in a purchase: the people who sign, whoever will use it day to day, the ones who check it, and anyone who can block it. Forrester finds several of them sit outside the buyer's business.

Size matters because each of them worries about something different. The CFO (chief financial officer) is thinking about payback. Whoever runs IT wants to know what might break. End users mostly want to know if Monday gets harder.

More people can also mean more friction. The same post cites Gartner (2025): "nearly three in four buying groups report unhealthy conflict before reaching a decision".

Brand ambassadors reach the buying group early because each one carries your expertise into a different network, and those networks touch different people on the buyer's side. A brand ambassador is an employee who shares what they know, in their own voice, on their own LinkedIn profile. Doing this at scale, with support, is called employee advocacy.

The same Factors report, "From Benchmarks to Blueprints: The LinkedIn Revenue Engine for B2B", looked at more than 50,000 closed deals at over 100 B2B companies. Deals where six or more contacts were engaged before the deal was created in the CRM saw win rates about 17 percentage points higher than deals where only one contact was engaged. Deals that reached a mix of the buyer's end users, influencers (people who shape the decision without signing off on it) and technical evaluators did better still, by 22 points. It shows a link, not proof of cause.

That study is about LinkedIn marketing in general and does not mention employees. Using your own people to reach more of the buying group is our view at B2B Ambassadors. A company page or a single salesperson is rarely connected to all 22 people, inside and outside the buyer's business. A whole team can be.

The match-ups tend to look like this.

• A solutions engineer on an integration that went wrong, and how they fixed it, is talking to the technical evaluator.
• Your customer success team, on what week six of a rollout really feels like. End users notice.
• When your managing director writes about where your industry is heading, the executive sponsor (the senior person who owns the decision) reads it.

To measure brand ambassadors by pipeline, track the target accounts (the companies you most want to win) that their content reaches, then check whether those accounts become real sales opportunities that move forward and close. Pipeline is the set of live, qualified deals your sales team is working on, with a value attached.

LinkedIn's October post has a section headed "Measure pipeline, not activity". In it, Ney Lins, VP Marketing at Rewind, describes what happens when marketing and sales share the same target: "all of a sudden we are all going after the same number."

Likes and impressions (the number of times a post is shown) tell you a post is landing, but nobody signs a contract because of a like. The better questions look more like these.

• Which target accounts have people engaging with our ambassadors?
• How many people from each account had we reached before the first sales call?
• Did those accounts become opportunities, and did those deals move faster or close more often than the rest?

We haven't found an independent study that ties employee posts to revenue in a clean line, and we'd be wary of anyone who promises one. That's the reason to measure your own pipeline. Our Measurement Framework, on the resources page, is a practical place to start.

If we were across the table from you, we'd suggest one exercise. List everyone involved in your biggest open deal, inside and outside the buyer's business. Tick the ones your people are connected to on LinkedIn, then circle those who have seen anything useful from you lately. The gap between the list and the circles is where brand ambassadors earn their place.