Credit union deal stuck at the champion? Plan the seats with her

Reach the CEO and CFO through your champion

Plan each introduction with your champion: who on your side meets whom on hers, what for and by when. Silence from above her for 5 months means nobody up there has a reason to answer yet. More emails won’t give them one. A meeting that saves them work will.

Start with a direct conversation. Tell her the pilot has done its job and that you want to help her take it to a decision. Then ask 4 questions:

• Who signs a contract of this size, and does it go to the board or a board committee?
• Whose budget would pay for it next year?
• Who can stop it: IT, vendor management or compliance?
• Which date matters to the credit union: a member launch, a loss target or a board meeting?

Then give her something worth taking upstairs. For the CFO, offer a 30-minute review of what the pilot proved in the CFO’s terms: cost, losses avoided, staff hours and the budget line it needs. For the CEO, offer a one-page note from your CEO to theirs, sent through her. It should say what the pilot showed and what scaling it would ask of the credit union.

Match seats on your side too. In Gong Labs’ analysis of 10,332 deals, win rates doubled when 1 more colleague from the selling side joined.^↗ Seller-side executives were the least-used of those colleagues and went with the highest win rates.^↗ A note from your CEO to theirs, with your champion copied, reads as a peer note. The same note from your rep, sent without her, reads as going around her.

The whole plan fits on a single page. This is the version we would agree with a champion at a credit union:

Credit unions decide in committee, on a fixed calendar

A credit union decides on a technology contract as a group, on dates you can find out early. In our research on banking vendors, the seats that can stop a deal are the CEO, the CFO, the CIO and vendor management. For multi-year or critical contracts, the volunteer board often joins them. A VP of Digital can champion the deal but holds none of those vetoes. For fraud and AML tools, the BSA/AML officer or the head of fraud usually owns the purchase, with the CEO, CFO or COO as sponsor. Our banking industry pages map each panel seat by seat.

The calendar then sets 2 dates. First, the fiscal year of every federal credit union ends on 31 December, so next year’s budget has to be settled before January.^↗ A pilot without a line in that budget starts the year competing with work that has one.

Second, the board. Since July 2026, a well-rated federal credit union’s board may meet as few as 6 times a year, with at least 1 meeting a quarter. Until then, every federal credit union board had to meet at least once a month.^↗ If the contract needs the board, its next meeting is the earliest realistic signature date. State-chartered credit unions follow their state’s rules, so ask your champion for both dates.

A deal with fewer than 3 engaged seats is single-threaded

A credit union deal is single-threaded when fewer than 3 of the seats that matter have engaged with you in the last 30 days.^↗ Engaged means a two-way exchange: a reply, a call or a meeting. Panel Check, our GTM audit, counts engaged contacts on each open deal above a minimum size and reports the share of deals with 3 or more.^↗ For a deal plan we count seats rather than people, because 3 people from IT are still 1 seat.

The bar matters because thinly threaded deals stall. At Palo Alto Networks, opportunities with several people attached were 8× more likely to advance in the pipeline than single-contact ones, Forrester reports.^↗

Other datasets point the same way. In Gong’s analysis of 1.8M deals closed in 2024, multi-threading lifted win rates by 130% on average in deals over $50k.^↗ In Ebsta and Pavilion’s benchmark of 655,000 opportunities, win rates were 55% higher when decision makers were actively involved in the first 2 stages.^↗

That gives a second test. If the budget owner isn’t engaged by the end of the second stage, before any pilot starts, we treat the deal as stalled, whatever the pilot shows.

Example: take a $2bn credit union where the VP of Digital is your champion. The deal needs 6 seats: hers, the CEO, the CFO, the CIO, vendor management and the board. Only she has replied in the last 30 days, so 1 of 6 seats is engaged. Counted this way, the stall shows after the first 30 days of silence. A stuck pilot becomes a number on the deal: engaged seats, and days since each one last replied. Our post on how big a buying group to map goes beyond these 6 seats.

A 7-month pilot needs an owner and an exit date

To turn a ‘successful’ 7-month fraud AI pilot into a signed contract, give it the 3 things it lacks: production data, a named owner and exit criteria. Without them it stays an open-ended evaluation, and those often end in no decision. In a study of more than 2.5M recorded sales conversations, 40–60% of deals were lost to customers who said they intended to buy but failed to act.^↗ We read a pilot that keeps being extended as that pattern, seen from inside the deal.

Reset the pilot as a deal stage with your champion, in 5 steps:

Production data is the step that brings the other seats in. It means member data reaches you, so IT, security and vendor management have to agree before the test starts. The BSA/AML officer will want to see how the model explains each alert. Each review puts a seat that can stop the deal in front of you, with your champion in the room.

If nobody will own it, end it. Call the pilot complete and write the results up for your champion, so the credit stays with her. Then take the deal out of your forecast until an owner appears. A forecast full of single-threaded pilots is part of why a healthy pipeline still misses.

A stalled credit union deal is usually a single-threaded deal

We think most credit union deals that stall after a good pilot have only ever engaged 1 seat. An enthusiastic VP shows that someone wants the product, and a pilot that works shows that it does its job. Neither shows that anyone who owns the budget, the risk or the contract has decided to buy. So we wouldn’t count either as a qualified opportunity.

Our reasons are practical. Reps default to the contact they’re comfortable with, so a second thread rarely starts on its own. Your champion has her own job and little standing to pull a CFO into a vendor’s pilot. Waiting for her to do it leaves the deal to chance. That is why we think multi-threading has to be designed in with the champion: which seat talks to whom, and by when. The budget owner, or one of their direct reports, should be engaged before the pilot runs another month.

We’d add 2 limits. More threads alone don’t sign a contract: a deal with every seat engaged still stalls if the credit union has no reason to change. And not every seat needs equal attention. The seats that own the budget or can stop the deal come first. Counting them on every deal shows the stall before the silence does.