Most sales teams chase titles. The deals that close traverse the network behind the titles. Here's how to map the real path to power on a B2B deal, and how to actually walk it.
By Boomerang · Updated May 2026 · 14 min read
If you're reading a piece on path to power in 2026, you've probably been taught the MEDDPICC version: identify the economic buyer, find a champion, develop both, neutralize blockers. The framework is fine. The way most teams operationalize it is not.
The problem isn't the framework. It's that the inputs to it — who has power, who has influence, who can carry your message — are still derived from the org chart. And the org chart is a lagging, often misleading indicator of how a real decision actually gets made inside a B2B company.
This piece argues for a different primary input. Map the relationship graph first, then layer the org chart on top. The pages on this topic that MEDDICC, Altify, and the rest of the relationship-mapping category cover well are the static parts: definitions, frameworks, role lists. We're going to cover the part they don't — how to actually traverse the graph from where you are to where the power sits.
The org chart tells you formal reporting structure. It does not tell you:
Every one of these is a "path to power" variable. None of them are visible in the org chart. All of them are visible in the relationship graph — the dataset that tells you who has worked with whom, who reports to whom, who used to report to whom, who's introducing whom, and who's been talking on Slack at 11pm about your vendor evaluation.
VP of Engineering reports to CTO. Director of Platform reports to VP of Eng. Three managers report to Director. That's your "buying committee."
CTO and VP-Platform-from-the-old-company are best friends. The official VP of Engineering is being replaced in Q3. The Director of Platform is the actual decision-maker right now.
The relationship graph reorders who matters. The deals that win in 2026 are the deals that pick up that reordering early.
Every B2B deal has four roles that map to "power" in some form. MEDDPICC names them; we're going to redefine the identification method for each, because the title-based version is wrong about 40% of the time in deals over $100k.
| Role | What you've been taught | What the relationship graph reveals |
|---|---|---|
| Economic buyer | "The person who owns the budget." Look for VP/SVP/CXO title in the cost-center matching your category. | The person whose calendar the finance team blocks for "vendor approvals." Often one level higher or lower than the title implies. Visible in who they meet with weekly. |
| Decision maker | "The person driving the buy decision." Usually a VP or director below the EB. | The person whose Slack mentions cluster around your category for the last 30 days. Whoever's been adding stakeholders to the eval thread is the operational DM. |
| Technical buyer | "The architect / IT leader who has to sign off." Often a director-of-engineering or principal-engineer type. | The IC whose name shows up on the last three vendor evaluations of this type. The official architect approves; this person actually scopes. |
| Champion | "Someone who wants you to win and will sell internally on your behalf." | Someone who already has internal credibility with the EB (visible in meeting frequency, project history) AND has a personal incentive aligned with your outcome (visible in their role, tenure, and current bets). |
Notice what the right column has in common. None of it comes from the org chart. All of it comes from relational data — meeting patterns, message clusters, project histories, tenure overlap, mutual connections. This is the data that's available in 2026 and wasn't available five years ago. Teams that act on it get to power faster than teams who don't.
Every other page on this topic answers the question "who is the EB?" Almost none answer the question "how do I get to them?"
That's the actual problem. Knowing the EB's name without a path to them is the same as not knowing. Cold-emailing them is, in 2026, statistically indistinguishable from doing nothing — reply rates below 1%, calendar-block-and-ignore the default response.
The traversal problem is the relationship-graph problem. The question is: between your company and the EB at the target account, what is the shortest warm path?
The candidate paths are, in rough order of strength:
The work of mapping the relationship graph is identifying which of paths 1-5 exists for each EB you care about, scoring them by strength, and starting with the warmest one. The work of operationalizing the graph is doing this at the pace of a sales cycle — within hours, not within a quarterly campaign.
The standard multi-threading advice — "get four contacts at the account, span three levels" — is a title-coverage strategy. It optimizes for breadth of formal authority. That's not what makes a thread hold.
What makes a thread hold is internal relational density. A VP who reports to the EB but rarely meets with them is a weak thread; the EB will discount their input. A peer who eats lunch with the EB twice a week is a strong thread; the EB will absorb their opinion almost without realizing it.
The reframe: for each role you want to cover, pick the person whose internal connection to the EB is strongest. Title is secondary. A senior IC with a personal relationship to the CFO is a better thread than a director with no personal relationship to the CFO.
You're looking at four signals:
Most of this data is available via legitimate sources — LinkedIn, Apollo, CRM activity, Calendar APIs, prospecting tools. Stitching it into a usable internal-density score is what relationship-intelligence platforms do, including our category.
Two events reshape the path to power in real time, and most teams don't catch them in time:
This happens in roughly 1 in 4 enterprise deals over a 12-month sales cycle. When it happens, two things shift simultaneously. First, the path inside the deal collapses — your champion is gone, the new person doesn't know you, the EB has a new direct report whose opinion they'll weight. Second, a new path opens — your departed champion is now at a new company, and is, by definition, a champion you can re-activate at a new account.
Teams that detect job changes within 48 hours and re-activate the alumni path beat teams that catch up at quarterly review by an average of two months of cycle time. Job-change tracking isn't a nice-to-have in 2026; it's the difference between losing the deal you had and winning the one you didn't know existed.
When the CFO turns over, every deal in procurement at that company resets. The new CFO has their own vendor relationships, their own preferences, their own first 90 days. Your existing champion's credibility is now uncertain. The relationship graph reorders overnight.
Teams that catch this within a week have time to re-map. Teams that catch this at next quarter's pipeline review have already lost the deal.
Every other page on this topic answers the question "who is the EB?" Almost none answer the question "how do I get to them?"
That's the actual problem. Knowing the EB's name without a path to them is the same as not knowing. Cold-emailing them is, in 2026, statistically indistinguishable from doing nothing — reply rates below 1%, calendar-block-and-ignore the default response.
The traversal problem is the relationship-graph problem. The question is: between your company and the EB at the target account, what is the shortest warm path?
The candidate paths are, in rough order of strength:
The work of mapping the relationship graph is identifying which of paths 1-5 exists for each EB you care about, scoring them by strength, and starting with the warmest one. The work of operationalizing the graph is doing this at the pace of a sales cycle — within hours, not within a quarterly campaign.
The standard multi-threading advice — "get four contacts at the account, span three levels" — is a title-coverage strategy. It optimizes for breadth of formal authority. That's not what makes a thread hold.
What makes a thread hold is internal relational density. A VP who reports to the EB but rarely meets with them is a weak thread; the EB will discount their input. A peer who eats lunch with the EB twice a week is a strong thread; the EB will absorb their opinion almost without realizing it.
The reframe: for each role you want to cover, pick the person whose internal connection to the EB is strongest. Title is secondary. A senior IC with a personal relationship to the CFO is a better thread than a director with no personal relationship to the CFO.
You're looking at four signals:
Most of this data is available via legitimate sources — LinkedIn, Apollo, CRM activity, Calendar APIs, prospecting tools. Stitching it into a usable internal-density score is what relationship-intelligence platforms do, including our category.
Two events reshape the path to power in real time, and most teams don't catch them in time:
This happens in roughly 1 in 4 enterprise deals over a 12-month sales cycle. When it happens, two things shift simultaneously. First, the path inside the deal collapses — your champion is gone, the new person doesn't know you, the EB has a new direct report whose opinion they'll weight. Second, a new path opens — your departed champion is now at a new company, and is, by definition, a champion you can re-activate at a new account.
Teams that detect job changes within 48 hours and re-activate the alumni path beat teams that catch up at quarterly review by an average of two months of cycle time. Job-change tracking isn't a nice-to-have in 2026; it's the difference between losing the deal you had and winning the one you didn't know existed.
When the CFO turns over, every deal in procurement at that company resets. The new CFO has their own vendor relationships, their own preferences, their own first 90 days. Your existing champion's credibility is now uncertain. The relationship graph reorders overnight.
Teams that catch this within a week have time to re-map. Teams that catch this at next quarter's pipeline review have already lost the deal.
Boomerang is the operational layer for relationship-led sales. Specifically, on the path-to-power problem, we do four things:
We're not the only option. Relationship-intelligence platforms exist; data layers exist; AI sales copilots exist. Where we differ is operational orchestration — turning the mapped relationship graph into actual booked meetings, at the speed and volume a sales team needs. The mapping is table stakes; the activation is the wedge. We've written about how this differs from champion-tracking tools and what each category actually owns.
Map every warm path to power across your network in 15 minutes. No CRM cleanup required.
Book a 15-min walkthroughIf you're starting from scratch and don't want to evaluate tools yet, this is the minimum viable sequence:
Run this once. Then run it on the next opportunity. Then the one after. Within ten deals you'll have a working internal map and a real path to power for each one. After that, the question becomes how to scale it — which is where tooling actually earns its keep.
For the full warm-intro operating system, read our piece on warm-intro strategy. For the champion side of the equation specifically, see our breakdown of champion-tracking tools and where each one fits.
The path to power is the sequence of people and relationships you have to traverse to reach the person who can actually approve a deal. It's a MEDDPICC concept, but in practice it isn't a vertical line on an org chart — it's a route through a network of relationships, advocates, and gatekeepers. The path is rarely the shortest line between you and the buyer; it's the warmest one.
The economic buyer controls the budget and can approve the spend. The decision maker drives the decision and is often the person the deal is being sold to operationally — frequently a VP or director below the EB. In smaller deals these are the same person. In enterprise deals they're almost always different people, and missing the EB is the most common reason late-stage deals stall in procurement or get pushed to next quarter.
Map four power roles per deal: decision maker, economic buyer, technical buyer, and champion. Then, for each role, capture two things — title (formal authority) and internal relationship strength (informal influence). Most teams stop at titles. The ones who close enterprise deals also score who actually talks to whom inside the account. The internal relationship graph determines which thread will hold and which will collapse under pushback.
Most reps multi-thread by title — they add a VP, a director, and a manager and call it covered. That misses the point. The threads that hold are the ones built on internal relationships that already exist. A director who reports to the EB but rarely meets with them is a weak thread; a peer who eats lunch with the EB is a strong one. Multi-thread by relationship strength, not by title.
When a champion or buyer changes jobs, they bring a new path to power with them — into their new company's account. A former customer who becomes a VP at a prospect is, by definition, a champion with internal access on day one. Job-change tracking turns alumni into the warmest possible path to power at accounts you couldn't otherwise reach.
Relationship-based selling is a sales motion that treats the relationship graph — who knows whom, who trusts whom — as the primary asset, and treats titles, intent data, and demographics as secondary. In practice it means starting every deal by asking "who in our company already has a path to this account?" before asking "who at this account should I email?" It's the inverse of cold outbound.
