Multi-thread, because a single champion is a single point of failure
The deal feels great. Your champion loves you, replies fast, says all the right things. Then they go quiet, and you find out they changed roles, lost the internal argument, or never had the authority they implied. A deal that lives or dies on one relationship is the most fragile thing in your pipeline, and single-threading is why so many "sure things" close lost.
Modern B2B purchases are made by groups, not heroes. Gartner's research puts the typical buying group at six to ten stakeholders, each arriving with their own independently gathered information, and a meaningful share of those teams disagree internally before they ever agree on you. Even a modest deal usually has an economic buyer who controls the budget, an end user who feels the pain daily, and a blocker, often in finance, security, or legal, who can kill it without ever taking your call. If you only know one of these people, you are flying blind on the others, and they are the ones who decide quietly in a room you are not in.
The numbers on this are stark enough to change how you run every deal. Multi-threaded opportunities consistently win at well above the rate of single-threaded ones, with Aviso's analysis putting the lift around 42 percent and other vendor studies showing single-threaded deals closing at roughly half the rate. The mechanism is obvious once you see it: more relationships means more ways the deal survives a departure, a veto, or a reorganisation. Multi-threading means deliberately earning a relationship with more than one person in the account before you need to. You ask your champion who else cares about this outcome and who else has to bless the spend, then you get introduced, on the strength of the value you have already shown, not as a power play that undermines them. Done well it makes your champion look good, because they are building the coalition that gets the deal done.
The tell that you are single-threaded is that you cannot name the economic buyer and the likely blocker for a deal you call "strong". If you cannot, the deal is weaker than your gut says. Make mapping the buying group a standard part of qualification, not a scramble in the final week, and you convert a category of deals that used to evaporate without warning. The cleanest way to make threading visible to everyone, including the buyer, is a shared mutual action plan.