Ask the buying group who decides if they have not agreed by a date, and get a name. Borrowed from how fast executive teams decide; never measured in selling.
Five people liked the demo. Three weeks later they still have not agreed, and nobody can tell you who would break the tie.
Ask the group what happens if they have not agreed by a given date, and ask for a name. You want one thing: the person who ends a disagreement the group cannot end itself. Ask early, while the answer can still be checked against what that person actually does.
The rule comes from research on how executive teams make fast decisions, where it is called consensus with qualification. The team tries for agreement, and if it does not come, a named senior person decides with everyone's input on the table.
The rule as its authors published it for managers. Kathleen Eisenhardt, Jean Kahwajy and L.J. Bourgeois set out six tactics of high-performing management teams in Harvard Business Review in 1997. One is that when the team cannot reach consensus, the most relevant senior manager decides, guided by the others' input. In their example, at a firm they call Premier Technologies, managers could not agree how to answer a competitor's launch, and the chief executive and his marketing vice president made the call. The chief executive's summary: "The function heads do the talking; I pull the trigger."
No seller publishes the question. The nearest sales versions ask who has authority and what the steps are, not what happens when the group deadlocks. MEDDICC's page on the decision process defines it as the steps the buyer will follow to decide, usually in two parts, technical validation and business approval. MEDDICC's definition of the economic buyer is the person with overall authority in the buying decision. 30MPC's newsletter on multithreading builds from the champion across to department leads and uses their agreement to reach power. None of them asks who decides if the group has not agreed.
Nobody has tested it. No study compares deals where the seller got a named tie-breaker with deals where nobody asked.
What has been measured is the problem. CEB announced in 2015, in the release for The Challenger Customer, an average of 5.4 people in a B2B purchase decision, and said the chance of any purchase drops to 30% once more than five people are involved. CEB sold the research and the book. In a survey of 632 B2B buyers run in August and September 2024, Gartner found that 74% of buying teams showed what it calls unhealthy conflict, and put buying groups at five to 16 people from up to four functions.
The nearest measured finding points the wrong way. Gartner counts being overruled by a decision maker outside the group as one of the three kinds of unhealthy conflict, and found that groups which reached consensus were 2.5 times more likely to report a high-quality deal. Gartner sells advice to the sales leaders it surveys. A tie-breaker inside the buying group is not the same as an outsider overruling it, but it is the closest thing anyone has measured, and it links an imposed decision to the deals buyers rate worst.
The study behind the rule is eight case studies. Eisenhardt's 1989 paper in the Academy of Management Journal followed eight microcomputer firms. Its abstract reports that fast decision makers used more information, not less, weighed more alternatives, not fewer, and took advice in two tiers, and that fast decisions made this way led to better performance. It builds propositions from eight cases, with no comparison group and no experiment.
An independent reading states the rule plainly. Samuel Tarigan's 2012 paper in Jurnal Telematika credits consensus with qualification to the 1989 study: the top team first tries to agree, and where it cannot, the chief executive or the relevant vice president is trusted to decide. Tarigan's own survey of 156 senior managers in Indonesian technology firms tested a different question.
The rule was observed in eight American computer firms deciding their own strategy in the late 1980s. A supplier asking a customer's committee to name a tie-breaker is a different act by different people. And a group that names someone who cannot actually overrule it has given you a name and nothing else.
Ask who decides if the group has not agreed by the date, and ask early enough to check the answer against what that person does. The rule is documented in eight firms and has never been measured in selling. What has been measured is that buying groups this size struggle to agree at all, which is a reason to ask, not a reason to expect the answer to hold.