In May 2025, Gartner published a stat that most CROs read once and then quietly forgot: 74% of B2B buyer teams demonstrate "unhealthy conflict" during the decision process (Gartner, https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-05-07-gartner-sales-survey-finds-74-percent-of-b2b-buyer-teams-demonstrate-unhealthy-conflict-during-the-decision-process).
The stat that follows it is the one that should have made every sales leader stop what they were doing: buying groups that reach consensus close 2.5× more high-quality deals.
Read those together. Three out of four of the buying groups your team is actively working right now are stuck in internal conflict. And the ones that get unstuck close two and a half times more revenue than the ones that don't.
We spend a lot of time in this industry talking about how to win against competitors. Gartner just told us that the harder game is happening inside the buyer's org, and most sellers don't even know it's happening. This piece is the diagnostic — seven signs your deal is stuck in unhealthy conflict, why it happens, and what to do before the deal folds into no-decision.
What Gartner means by "unhealthy conflict"
Gartner draws a line between two kinds of disagreement inside a buying group.
Healthy conflict is task-focused. Stakeholders argue about the substance — which integration matters more, what the security review needs, whether cloud or on-prem. These arguments are useful. They tighten requirements. They surface risk. Buying groups that manage healthy conflict well end up more aligned, not less.
Unhealthy conflict is personal, political, or values-based. It's stakeholders disagreeing about who gets to decide, whose priorities matter, or what the group's underlying goals should be. When stakeholders in a buying group fundamentally disagree on what they're trying to do — or worse, on who's allowed to say — they stop making progress. The deal doesn't die dramatically. It just… stops.
Gartner's survey found that most B2B buying groups are stuck in the second kind. Three out of four. That is a staggering hidden tax on B2B pipeline.
Why unhealthy conflict is up so sharply
Three structural shifts explain the number.
First, buying groups got bigger. A modern complex B2B purchase involves 6-10 stakeholders across four functions (Gartner, https://www.gartner.com/en/sales/insights/b2b-buying-journey). More stakeholders means more possible disagreements, and each stakeholder brings 4-5 pieces of independently gathered information into the discussion, most of which nobody has vetted.
Second, buyers spend most of the journey without a seller present. Buyers spend 17% of purchase time with any supplier and about 5% per vendor in competitive evaluations. The rest is happening behind a closed door. Whatever conflict is brewing brews without seller visibility.
Third, AI-generated content has flooded the buyer's field of view. Sixty-nine percent of B2B buyers now turn to sales reps to validate AI-generated insights (Gartner, https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-05-20-gartner-survey-finds-sixty-nine-percent-of-b-two-b-buyers-turn-to-sales-reps-to-validate-ai-generated-insights). Meaning: when stakeholders bring conflicting AI-synthesized findings into a buying group meeting, someone has to decide whose synthesis is trustworthy. That's not a task-conflict question. That's an authority-conflict question. And authority conflicts are exactly the kind Gartner labels "unhealthy."
The 7 signs your deal is stuck in unhealthy conflict
Below is the diagnostic I run on every deal I coach my team through. If a deal has three or more of these signals, it's likely stuck in unhealthy conflict — and no product demo is going to unstick it.
1. The champion stops answering "who else needs to be in the room?"
Healthy champions bring you into new relationships. They introduce you to peers, procurement, security. Unhealthy conflict shows up as a champion who suddenly stops adding people. When you ask "who else should we brief?" the answer becomes vague, or worse, silent. That's not stalling. That's the champion signaling they don't have the internal capital to pull anyone else in.
2. The buying-group meeting keeps being "rescheduled"
Two consecutive reschedules of a full-buying-group meeting is a diagnostic signal. It rarely means people are busy. It usually means the group can't agree on what the meeting is for. Someone in the group is refusing to show up until a prior disagreement is resolved, and nobody wants to name it.
3. Requirements keep getting rewritten late
If the buying group is 8 weeks into evaluation and the requirements document is on its fifth version, that's not diligence. It's disagreement. A stakeholder is repeatedly injecting new criteria to move the goalposts. Sometimes because their priorities weren't heard early enough. Sometimes because they don't want the deal to close and this is a legitimate stall tactic.
4. Procurement joins the deal earlier than it should
Procurement showing up in month two of a six-month sales cycle isn't good news. It usually means an internal stakeholder pulled procurement in as a lever — either to slow the deal down or to force a competitor to be evaluated. If procurement joins before a preferred vendor has been selected, you're inside a political conflict, not a pricing conversation.
5. The exec sponsor keeps "delegating" back down
Watch what happens when the executive sponsor of a deal is asked for a decision. In a healthy buying group, the exec makes it or defers to a designated decision-maker. In an unhealthy one, the exec keeps pushing it back down — "let's have finance look at that again," "let's have security run through it one more time." Delegation loops are how buying groups avoid conflict they can't resolve.
6. Two departments are running parallel evaluations
If sales finds out that marketing is also evaluating a similar solution, or that a different business unit is looking at competitors, the buying group is fragmented. This isn't procurement being thorough. It's an active political conflict where multiple internal factions are trying to own the decision. Deals in this state have very low close probability unless a senior exec forces alignment.
7. The champion asks you for "internal ammunition"
This is the one every seller thinks is good news. A champion asks for a one-pager, a security answer, a TCO model — "I need this to convince internal skeptics." Sometimes that's real. But when the same champion keeps asking for more and more "ammunition" without ever converting it into internal progress, the ammunition is being absorbed by an internal fight they're losing. You're the arms dealer, not the winner.
What CROs get wrong when they see unhealthy conflict
Most sales leaders' instinct is to lean harder — more meetings, more content, more product proof. That instinct is wrong. Unhealthy conflict doesn't get resolved by more seller-produced content. It gets resolved by three things Gartner's research consistently points at.
Trusted external voices. Peers from lookalike companies who have already been through the same internal fight and can tell your champion, credibly, how they got past it. Ninety-five percent of your target buyers likely know one of your customer champions from a prior role, from school, or from an industry community. Activating that is the fastest way to defuse authority conflicts inside the buying group.
Executive air cover. Not a demo call. A 20-minute exec-to-exec conversation where your CRO helps the buying-group exec sponsor articulate the case to their own skeptics. This is one of the highest-ROI activities in enterprise sales and one of the most consistently underused.
Buyer enablement. Templates, calculators, comparison frameworks that give the champion tools to run internal alignment sessions. This is the "buyer enablement" work Gartner has been publishing on since 2018 — and it's specifically effective inside unhealthy-conflict deals because it takes the conflict out of the champion's head and into a shared artifact everyone can debate against.
For more on how to structure exec air cover, see our writeup on multithreading enterprise deals.
The 2.5× consensus gap
Buying groups that reach consensus close 2.5× more high-quality deals (Gartner). That's the math every CRO should have taped to the wall.
If your average deal size is $100K and your team is working 100 open opportunities, and 74% are stuck in unhealthy conflict, the differential between "these deals close" and "these deals go to no-decision" is enormous. Even if you can move a quarter of the stuck deals from unhealthy to consensus, you're picking up 25% additional revenue on the same pipeline coverage.
That is the highest-ROI motion available to a CRO right now. It's not lead volume. It's not conversion rate optimization. It's helping buying groups escape the internal conflict Gartner just quantified.
How this changes what "sales effectiveness" means in 2026
For a decade, the sales-effectiveness conversation has been about seller skill — pitch quality, discovery frameworks, negotiation tactics. Gartner's 74% stat suggests the highest-leverage skill in 2026 is different: helping buying groups navigate internal conflict.
That's a coaching topic. It's also a workflow topic. Sellers need visibility into which relationships they have inside the buying group, which stakeholders are aligned vs. opposed, and which trusted external voices can be brought in when internal conflict is blocking progress.
That kind of workflow doesn't exist inside a CRM. It has to be layered on top. Boomerang's customers use the relationship graph to see which stakeholders in the buying group are connected to which champions, which partners, and which executives — and then activate the right intro at the right moment to defuse the conflict. Armis credits the workflow with 26,000 warm-intro paths and 10× ROI on booked revenue in year one. Narvar built $800K in pipeline within three months of deploying the same motion.
If you're a CRO and 74% of your deals are stuck in unhealthy conflict, you're not going to fix it by pushing your team harder. You're going to fix it by giving them a way to route the right external voice into the right internal conversation, on time.
Frequently asked questions
What does Gartner mean by "unhealthy conflict" in a B2B buying group? Unhealthy conflict, per Gartner's May 2025 survey, is disagreement inside a buying group that becomes personal, political, or values-based rather than task-focused. It blocks consensus and drives no-decision outcomes. Gartner found 74% of B2B buyer teams demonstrate this pattern.
How much revenue does unhealthy conflict cost B2B sellers? Gartner found that buying groups that reach consensus close 2.5× more high-quality deals than those that don't. If 74% of your pipeline is affected by unhealthy conflict, the revenue swing from moving even a subset into consensus is one of the largest available levers in enterprise sales.
How can a seller tell if a deal is stuck in unhealthy conflict? Seven diagnostic signals: the champion stops adding people, buying-group meetings keep being rescheduled, requirements keep getting rewritten late, procurement joins early, the exec sponsor keeps delegating decisions, two departments are running parallel evaluations, and the champion keeps asking for internal ammunition without visible progress.
What can sellers do about unhealthy conflict? Three interventions: bring in trusted external peer voices, arrange executive-to-executive air cover, and provide buyer enablement artifacts (templates, calculators, comparison frameworks) that let the champion run internal alignment sessions. More seller-produced content usually makes it worse.
Why has unhealthy conflict increased so much in recent years? Three structural shifts. Buying groups got bigger (6-10 stakeholders across four functions). Buyers spend most of the purchase journey without seller visibility. And AI-generated content has flooded the buying group with conflicting synthesized findings, forcing authority conflicts about whose synthesis to trust.
Is unhealthy conflict the same as "no-decision"? No, but they're linked. Unhealthy conflict is the mechanism. No-decision is the outcome. The 74% of buying groups Gartner identified are in the mechanism; a large share of them will end up in no-decision unless the conflict gets resolved.
