Get one unit to sign something real before the committee meets. If the group still will not move together, sign the ready unit's part as its own contract and let the rest follow.
The committee will not agree, and every meeting ends with "let's wait until everyone is aligned".
Stop asking everyone to move at once. Get one unit, one sponsor, to sign something real first: a paid pilot, a purchase order for one team, a signed scope. Then take the deal to the group with that commitment already behind it. If the rest still will not move together, write the ready unit's part as its own contract, sign it now, and let the other units sign later, one at a time, as each reaches its own yes.
The idea comes from startup fundraising, where founders stopped trying to get every investor to sign on the same day and started banking each commitment as it came. Carrying it into a stalled enterprise deal is the library's own step; no sales source puts it that way. You can tell the committee that a unit has committed without saying which, as a charity experiment did, but drop the anonymity if it costs you credibility in the room.
Paul Graham's rules for the first commitment, from How to Raise Money, 2013. The biggest factor in most investors' opinion of you is the opinion of other investors, and getting the first substantial offer can be half the total difficulty of fundraising. Estimate not just whether an investor will say yes but whether they would be the first to say yes, because one who only invests once others have is worthless at the start. Treat every investor as a no until they make a definite offer with no conditions, and bank each commitment at once, because it is not a deal until the money is in. On disclosure he goes the other way from the anonymous version: he tells founders to mention the smaller investments to the investors they talk to next.
Why waiting for everyone deadlocks. In High Resolution Fundraising, 2010, Graham says the question founders hear most is who else is investing, and that a fixed round stalls because the investors wait for each other, like sprint cyclists riding slowly at the start so they can follow whoever breaks first. Geoff Ralston's Y Combinator guide gives the fix: once an investor says yes, get the signature and the money immediately, and each close after the first gets faster and easier.
The anonymous first commitment, word for word. In Steffen Huck and Imran Rasul's opera experiment, the letter read: "A generous donor who prefers not to be named has already been enlisted." It then gave the amount, 60,000 euros, and said this was not enough to fund the project, which was why the writer hoped the reader would support it too. The donor and the gift were real.
The nearest thing in selling. Vendor advice on land and expand, for example Dock's, tells sellers to open with one pain point, one team or one use case and grow the account afterwards. That is a choice made before the deal starts, not a move on a contract that has already stalled, and Dock sells the software these deals are run in.
Nobody has measured the move. No study compares deals where one unit signed before the group met, or where a contract was split so a ready unit could sign, with deals held together until everyone agreed.
Bigger groups decide less often. CEB's 2015 press release for The Challenger Customer reported an average of 5.4 people in a B2B purchase decision, and that the likelihood of a purchase drops to 30% when more than five are involved. Challenger, which sells the training built on the research, restated it in 2024 as 31% of buying groups of six or more expecting to buy within six months, against 60% of groups of three or four. Neither gives a sample, and big purchases attract big groups, so this does not show that shrinking the group changes the answer.
One vendor finding points the other way. The same CEB release reports that bringing the stakeholders together to learn before they buy raised their willingness to pay a premium by nearly 70%. That argues for getting the group in a room, and it comes from the company selling the answer.
A lead gift nearly doubled the average donation. The Bavarian State Opera mailed 25,000 attendees, and Huck and Rasul analysed 14,000 of them randomly given four versions of the letter. With no lead gift, the average donation was 74.3 euros. With the anonymous lead gift announced, it was 132 euros. Adding a 50% match on top pushed it back down to 101 euros. Dean Karlan and John List's mailing to 50,000 past donors found that a matching offer raised giving, and that bigger match ratios added nothing over one to one.
A first commitment causes more commitments. Arnout van de Rijt and colleagues gave money at random to 100 of 200 new, unfunded Kickstarter projects. Of the funded ones, 70% went on to get money from others, against 39% of the rest. The same pattern held in three other live systems they tested.
Groups grown from a committed core coordinate better. Roberto Weber's experiment in the American Economic Review in 2006 had people pick a number from one to seven, all paid on the group's lowest pick. Every twelve-person group formed at full size sank to one. Groups that started as a coordinated pair and added one person at a time held at seven all the way to twelve in three of nine sessions, but only when newcomers could see what the group had done before; without that, every one collapsed.
The one test of the same choice favoured holding out. Douglas Cumming, Gaël Leboeuf and Armin Schwienbacher compared 22,850 crowdfunding campaigns that kept whatever arrived with campaigns that kept nothing unless the full goal was met. The all-or-nothing campaigns hit their goal twice as often, 34% against 17%. Founders chose their own model, so part of that is who chose it.
Opera donors and Kickstarter backers decide alone and cannot ask who the anonymous donor was, while a buying committee works together, shares a budget and can ask which unit signed and on what terms. The coordination result comes from a laboratory game, and the one measured comparison of taking what arrives against requiring the whole, in crowdfunding, favoured the whole.
Get something signed by one unit before the group convenes, and if the group still will not move together, sign the ready unit's part as its own contract and let the rest follow. Make sure the later units can see what the first one did, because that is what made the growing groups hold. Outside selling the evidence that a first commitment pulls the next is strong; inside a deal nobody has measured it.