The Hidden Politics: Consultants and Intermediaries

In larger deals the room is not what you see. There is always a third party — sometimes in the room, more often outside it — rearranging the decision.

Whoever does not know who that is, or how they are measured, sells to one audience while the decision is made in another.

The number that says this is now the norm

The 2026 ERP Report from Panorama Consulting Group, built on 170 responses collected between January 2025 and January 2026, found third-party involvement rose in business process management from 40.4% to 50.0%, and in organizational change management from 38.4% to 46.8%.

In other words: in roughly half of deals there is a party who neither buys nor sells, and whose opinion carries.

Add to it what Gartner found in The B2B Buying Journey: the enterprise buying group spans five to sixteen people across four functions. The consultant is not an addition to that count — he is often the voice that unifies it, and we saw in the decision map what participant count does to purchase likelihood.

Three types, each handled differently

1. The professional consultant

Paid a fee for his time, measured by the success of the selection, and his reputation is the most valuable thing he owns.

This is the best thing that can happen to you. He understands the terminology, asks the right questions, shortens the cycle, and later protects your project from the customer’s own bad decisions.

Deal with him in full technical detail, and do not pitch him. He detects exaggeration in seconds, and honesty with him buys a recommendation that works on other files for years. And when you tell him we don’t do that — as in the demo station — you gain more than you lose.

2. The commissioned intermediary

Paid by the winning vendor, so the buyer does not necessarily know how he is compensated.

He is not necessarily a bad actor — many intermediaries deliver real value in access and in time saved. But his incentive is tied to the close rather than to the outcome, and that difference shows up in month six.

The only rule that protects you is transparency. A commission relationship the customer knows about is legitimate. One he discovers mid-project burns both parties — as noted in the channels station.

3. The chartered accountant or tax adviser

More valuable than the other two, and the least used.

He sees the company from inside, and he sees the event months before you do — the struggling close, the due-diligence preparation, the e-invoicing obligation nobody has noticed yet. And his view carries more weight with the owner than any presentation, because he is not selling anything.

Nothing is built with him on commission. It is built by being the reference he calls when he is asked — which takes years, and gives years.

When the third party writes the RFP

This is where the deal is decided before it starts.

The signal that reveals everything: a requirement only one product satisfies — a specific pricing method, or a commercial term proprietary to one vendor. The walking-away station covered this: whoever arrives after the RFP is written is competing on someone else’s ground.

You then have three options, and no fourth:

1. Withdraw without embarrassment, leaving the door ajar.
2. Answer what concerns you and state explicitly what you do not meet — which creates credibility that works in the next tender.
3. Request a requirements-clarification meeting — the only attempt available at changing the ground. If the request is refused, the refusal has answered you.

And the worst option is the fourth, which many choose: claiming to meet the requirement, winning, then discovering the gap after signature. At that point you have not won a project — you have won a dispute.

How to read who benefits

Before any presentation, ask yourself about every person on the route: what does he gain if this goes ahead? And what does he lose?

• The finance director may gain a number he trusts, and may lose his control over adjusting the numbers.
• The IT manager may gain a platform, and may lose his position — the subject of the previous station.
• The consultant may gain a project to oversee, and may lose his reputation if the choice goes badly.
• And the owner may gain visibility, and may lose — for the first time — the ability to state a number the system does not agree with.

That last one is the most common silent cause of stalled deals in the market I work in, and it appears in no report, and it is an experience-based judgement that I declare as such: a working system means transparency, and transparency is not equally wanted by everybody.

The story: the consultant who looked like an enemy

The story is composited from real events, and every identifying detail has been changed.

A family group brought in a consulting firm to run the selection. The consultant was difficult in every sense: precise technical questions, no tolerance for general answers, and documentation requests no customer had ever made of me.

Everyone on my team saw him as an obstacle. I assumed he had a preferred vendor.

In one meeting he asked me about a complex costing scenario, and I said the sentence I had been dreading:

“The system doesn’t do that out of the box. It needs customisation, and I’ll give you the cost and the duration in writing.”

He put down his pen, looked at me and said:

“You’re the first of four to say no. The rest all said yes.”

He was not an obstacle. He was looking for a vendor who would not lie to him — because a lie that passes today shows up in a project he is answerable for.

We won. And that was not the last file that came from him.

The lesson: the professional consultant is neither a competitor nor a gatekeeper. He is the only person in the room capable of telling a vendor who knows from a vendor who talks — and that is in your favour, if you are the first kind.

Checklist before you move on

• For every live deal: do you know whether there is a third party, and how they are paid?
• Is any commission relationship of yours known to the customer?
• In the last RFP: was there a requirement specific to one product? What did you do?
• Can you write, for every person on the route, what they gain and what they lose?
• How many chartered accountants or tax advisers are in your network? When did you last speak to one?

Next station

One station remains, the one that makes everything above accumulate rather than repeat: the long game.