Thinking like a C-suite strategist: The impact of salesperson executive officer mentality on B2B buying team complexity and salesperson performance

Business-to-business (B2B) purchasing decisions are increasingly marked by larger, more diverse buying teams with multiple functions and C-suite involvement whose competing priorities complicate the sales process and negatively impact win rates. In an exploratory qualitative study with 26 B2B buyers and sellers (Study 1), I identify buying team complexity as a central barrier to success and uncover a novel salesperson characteristic, Executive Officer Mentality (EOM), that helps sales professionals effectively navigate their customers’ complex purchasing journeys. EOM reflects the extent to which salespeople adopt the perspective of their customers’ most senior executive team, focusing on long-term strategic outcomes, aligning solutions to C-suite-level objectives, and tailoring value propositions to the language and priorities of senior stakeholders. In a scale development study (Study 2), I develop and validate a new six-item measure of EOM, confirming its reliability and construct validity. Finally, in a field study investigating 1,632 sales opportunities nested within 59 sales professionals (Study 3), results confirm that greater buying team complexity significantly hinders win rates, but salespeople who exhibit higher EOM mitigate this negative effect and substantially improve their likelihood of winning. Collectively, these findings introduce EOM as a critical salesperson capability for addressing the growing complexity of B2B sales. By thinking like a “C-suite strategist,” salespeople can more successfully align a diverse and growing number of stakeholders and improve sales performance in complex buying environments.