The committee is larger than you think
Forrester’s 2026 research puts the average B2B buying committee at 22 people. Most agency engagements get evaluated by a tighter subset — usually three to six actively engaged humans — but the committee is still the unit. Marketing operations is screening. The CRO is reading the case studies. Finance is calculating what budget category this lands in. Someone is doing the AI-assisted research and pasting summaries back into the channel.
This matters because the site has to read as competent to all of them, not just the operator who first clicked.
What each role wants to see
The operator (your first reader). They want to know if you understand their problem. Hero copy. Service pages. The way you describe the cadence. They’re skimming. They’re tired. They’ve been promised “full-stack growth” by 40 agencies this month.
The lieutenant (the operator’s closest report). They’re reading deeper. Case studies. The team page. They’re trying to surface a deal-breaker before their boss commits the calendar slot.
Finance. They’re hunting for the price. If the site won’t tell them, they want a budget selector that maps cleanly to a procurement tier. They’re building a comparison sheet with three agencies on it.
Procurement / legal. They want to know if you’re a real entity. Schema markup. Privacy page. A registered business. They’ll Google your company name and read the first two pages of results before letting the call get on the calendar.
The AI assistant. 45 percent of buyers now use AI to research vendors (Gartner 2025). That assistant is reading your structured data, your case studies, your service descriptions. Write the site so an AI summarizing it back into a buyer’s channel produces a fair representation of what you do.
What the site has to carry, regardless of who reads it
- A named position. Not “full-service.” A specific point of view that gives the reader a hook to remember you by.
- Named clients. Anonymized case studies are a leak signal. Real names with real outcomes is the strongest single trust signal you have.
- A real team. Founders with faces, names, roles. No generic “our team” mosaics.
- An operating cadence. What it’s actually like to work with you, Monday through Friday. The committee is buying months of meetings, not a deliverable.
- A single primary CTA. Multi-CTA hero costs you 8 percent conversion (Digital Applied 2026, 2,000-page study). One primary action per page. Two at most.
What kills the committee
- Multi-step contact forms with eight fields and no budget selector. Finance bounces.
- Hero copy that uses the word “solutions” more than once.
- Stock photography. Costs you 11 percent conversion (same study).
- “We work with leading brands” followed by no names.
- A “case study” that’s really just a logo and a vague paragraph.
The honest move
Build the site for the operator first. Make sure it doesn’t fail the other four. The combination is what gets the discovery call on the calendar.