Four in ten people in buying groups say literally nothing on a sales call — zero words. That figure comes from Gong Labs' analysis of more than 120 million sales calls, and it reframes a metric most revenue teams still get wrong: multi-threading is not about how many contacts you log, but how many of them speak.

What does buyer silence look like at scale?

The share of silent buyers climbs as the room fills up. One-third of sales calls with multiple buyers feature a silent participant. In rooms of 4–6 people, that number jumps to 38%.

The crowded demo that sellers read as strong interest may be four extra attendees using the call as cover to check Slack.

Do more contacts actually improve win rates?

No — but more voices do. Gong's data shows win rates increase by 30% when four or more people speak up in a deal, compared with deals where only one person ever talks, regardless of how many contacts are logged in the CRM.

That finding directly challenges the standard multi-threading playbook, which treats coverage as a numbers game. A deal with six contacts and one active voice is functionally a single-threaded deal, the researchers argue — it just looks better in your pipeline report.

The practical adjustment for forecast calls: stop counting contacts and start counting voices. Ask how many people on the deal have actually said something, not just shown up.

Does seniority predict who stays quiet?

Mostly. Individual contributors have the highest silence ratio at 15%; VPs have the lowest at 5%. But the C-suite breaks the pattern: executives have the second-highest silence ratio, at 11% — nearly as quiet as ICs and far quieter than the VPs below them.

Gong ties this to a principle Jeff Bezos has described for running meetings: the most senior person should talk last, so their opinion doesn't steer or silence everyone else. Executives may already follow that rule instinctively.

The takeaway for sellers in late-stage calls: don't read C-suite silence as disengagement. It may signal deliberate restraint. Give that person a direct, specific question before the call ends — silence from the most senior attendee is the easiest signal to misread.

Does silence mean the same thing in every market?

No, and the spread is wide. Japan has the highest silence ratio of any country measured, at 16.5%. Northwestern European and Nordic countries sit at just 6.5–8%, consistent with flatter, more vocally egalitarian business cultures.

Gong illustrates the point with Phil Knight's account in Shoe Dog of pitching Japanese executives at Onitsuka for distribution rights to what became Nike. After his pitch, nobody spoke and the executives left the room; Knight assumed he had lost. Minutes later they returned and gave him exactly what he asked for. The silence reflected nemawashi — informal consensus-building that happens before anyone speaks in the room.

For international deals, that means one silence benchmark cannot apply globally. Quiet on a Tokyo-based buying committee call and quiet on a Stockholm-based call are not the same signal: one may mean consensus is forming behind the scenes, the other that you have lost the room.

How should teams change their deal reviews?

The real test of whether a deal is multi-threaded is not the number of names on the account but how many have spoken. A dominant champion on a crowded call can feel like broad buy-in while boxing the seller into a single point of view and leaving the rest of the buying committee unheard.

Gong's guidance: treat every attendee as worth knowing — who they are, what they care about, why they carved out time to be there. Silent buyers aren't necessarily out of the deal. But sellers won't know which ones are engaged until they start listening for who is actually talking. Expect deal inspection practices to shift toward voice counts as conversation intelligence data like this reaches more forecast reviews.