Quick Takeaways
- Buying Group Marketing targets the collective decision-makers within accounts rather than individual leads or entire organisations
- The average B2B purchase now involves 6-13 stakeholders, making traditional MQL-focused approaches increasingly ineffective
- Marketing Qualified Buying Groups (MQBGs) provide better purchase readiness signals than individual leads or account-level scoring
- BGM delivers 15-30% higher conversion rates compared to traditional lead-based marketing strategies
- Successful implementation requires alignment between sales and marketing around opportunity-centric workflows
- Engaging just three buying group members can boost conversion rates by over 50%
- BGM represents the natural evolution of Account-Based Marketing, adding precision to account-level strategies
Introduction
The B2B landscape has fundamentally changed. If you're still celebrating individual Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) as your primary success metric, you're fighting yesterday's battle with outdated weapons. Today's enterprise purchases involve an average of 6 to 13 decision-makers—and in complex deals, that number climbs even higher. Each stakeholder brings unique priorities, concerns, and decision criteria to the table.
Buying Group Marketing represents a paradigm shift in how marketers approach B2B sales. Instead of targeting isolated contacts or broadcasting to entire accounts, this approach focuses on identifying and engaging the specific group of individuals who collectively make purchasing decisions. It's the "just right" solution in the Goldilocks dilemma: leads are too narrow, accounts are too broad, but buying groups hit the sweet spot.
This comprehensive guide will walk you through everything you need to know about Buying Group Marketing—from understanding the core concepts to implementing winning strategies that drive measurable revenue growth. Whether you're a seasoned ABM practitioner or new to targeted B2B marketing, you'll discover actionable insights to transform your go-to-market approach.
What Is Buying Group Marketing?
Defining the Buying Group
A buying group (also called a buying committee or decision-making unit) is the collection of individuals within an organisation who collectively evaluate, influence, and approve a B2B purchase decision. Unlike consumer purchases where one person typically makes the call, enterprise software, services, and solutions require consensus across multiple stakeholders.
According to Forrester research, the average B2B purchase now involves 13 stakeholders, whilst Gartner reports that typical buying groups for complex purchases include 6 to 10 decision-makers. Nearly 89% of buying decisions cross multiple departments. Each member brings their own perspective based on their department, role, and responsibilities.
The Core Principles of Buying Group Marketing
Buying Group Marketing focuses on finding, engaging, and influencing these collective decision-makers inside target accounts. It's built on three fundamental principles:
Strategy: Understanding the business needs of each buying group member and creating a holistic marketing approach that addresses their collective journey.
Execution: Delivering personalised experiences to each stakeholder based on their role, priorities, and stage in the buying process.
Measurement: Tracking completeness and engagement across the entire buying group rather than individual lead scores or account-level metrics.
The approach recognises that a Chief Financial Officer cares about ROI and cost, whilst a Chief Information Officer focuses on integration and security. Practitioners want usability, and influencers seek market credibility. Traditional lead-based marketing treats these individuals as isolated contacts. Buying Group Marketing sees them as a connected team whose combined engagement determines deal success.
Why Traditional Marketing Models Are Failing
The Lead-Based Marketing Trap
For decades, the Marketing Qualified Lead reigned as the North Star of B2B marketing. Someone downloads a whitepaper? They're an MQL. Marketing hands them to sales, sales makes the call, and everyone moves on to the next lead.
This model creates three critical problems:
The Context Gap: When three people from the same company download your content but your system treats them as three separate leads, you miss the bigger picture. You don't realise the company is in deep research mode.
The Handoff Problem: Marketing celebrates lead volume whilst sales complains about quality. The disconnect stems from individual leads not representing true purchase readiness.
The Conversion Crisis: Opportunities with only one contact convert at dramatically lower rates. You need engagement across the buying committee to move deals forward.
Why Account-Based Marketing Isn't Enough
Account-Based Marketing improved on lead-centric approaches by focusing on high-value accounts. However, ABM has its own limitations:
Accounts Are Too Broad: A FTSE 100 company might have multiple buying committees interested in different solutions. Treating the entire account as a monolith misses these distinct opportunities.
Resource Constraints: Traditional ABM requires significant resources to execute properly, often at the expense of continued lead funnel support.
Incomplete Visibility: Account-level engagement doesn't tell you which specific buying group is forming or how close they are to making a decision.
Research shows that whilst ABM helps you reach the right company, the account itself is not your buyer. There are multiple buying groups within each account, each representing different potential opportunities.
The Buying Group Marketing Advantage
Superior Conversion Metrics
Organisations implementing Buying Group Marketing strategies report significant performance improvements:
- 15-30% increase in conversion rates compared to traditional lead-based approaches
- 23% increase in click-through rates on targeted content
- 40% boost in buying group engagement across campaigns
- Over 50% higher conversion rates when engaging just three buying group members
- 800% increase in opportunity progression to forecast in documented case studies
Better Sales and Marketing Alignment
The opportunity-centric focus of BGM naturally aligns sales and marketing teams. Instead of arguing about lead quality, both teams focus on the same objective: identifying, completing, and advancing buying groups through the pipeline.
Marketing creates programmes to attract and engage absent buying group members, then supplies these to sales automatically or on-demand. This partnership helps complete buying groups and accelerate deals.
More Accurate Purchase Signals
Marketing Qualified Buying Groups (MQBGs) provide clearer indicators of purchase readiness than individual leads or account scores. An MQBG tells you that the right combination of roles—decision-maker, influencer, technical evaluator, budget approver—has shown coordinated interest in a specific solution.
Unlike MQLs or MQAs, MQBGs track:
- Completeness scores: Whether all key roles are accounted for
- Engagement scores: The level and quality of activity across individuals
- Solution alignment: Which specific product or service the group is evaluating
This gives you a more actionable, accurate view of true purchase intent.
Understanding Buying Group Roles and Personas
The Eight Key Buying Group Personas
Successful Buying Group Marketing requires understanding the distinct roles within the committee:
1. The Initiator: The first person to identify a problem or discover your solution. They start the conversation but may lack final authority. Engage them with industry reports, data sheets, and case studies that validate their insight.
2. The Champion: Your internal advocate who believes in your solution and sells it in internal meetings. Make their job easier by providing pitch decks, ROI calculators, and testimonials they can share.
3. The Decision Maker: The executive or budget holder with final approval authority. They need strategic clarity and financial justification showing how your solution creates value, reduces risk, or improves efficiency.
4. The Technical Evaluator: The person who assesses whether your solution meets technical requirements. Provide detailed documentation, integration guides, and proof of technical capabilities.
5. The Financial Controller: Usually from finance or procurement, they scrutinise costs and contract terms. Address their concerns with transparent pricing, clear ROI models, and flexible payment options.
6. The End User: The people who will actually use your solution daily. They care about usability, training, and support. Demonstrate ease of use and comprehensive enablement resources.
7. The Influencer: Someone whose opinion carries weight even without formal authority. Engage them with thought leadership, peer validation, and industry recognition.
8. The Blocker: Stakeholders who may oppose the purchase due to competing priorities or past experiences. Understand their concerns and address them directly with evidence and risk mitigation strategies.
Mapping Roles to Your ICP
Job titles vary across companies, but the roles people play in buying decisions remain remarkably consistent. Instead of focusing solely on titles, develop role-based templates that define the personas you expect to find in each buying group.
This allows you to map account members to roles and automatically match them with appropriate content. A decision-maker receives ROI-focused case studies, whilst an influencer gets thought leadership articles and practitioners receive hands-on guides.
How Buying Group Marketing Differs from ABM
The Core Distinction
Account-Based Marketing focuses on engaging multiple contacts at high-value accounts. It's about reaching the right company.
Buying Group Marketing focuses on engaging the specific personas tied to an opportunity within that account. It's about reaching the right people making a specific decision.
Think of it this way: A security software vendor might run one ABM play across a major UK bank as an account. But within that bank, there could be three distinct buying groups—one evaluating network security, another looking at endpoint protection, and a third considering cloud security solutions. Each group has different members, priorities, and decision-making dynamics.
When to Use Each Approach
ABM is ideal when:
- You're entering new accounts and need broad awareness
- You want to build long-term relationships with strategic accounts
- You're establishing your brand presence with target organisations
Buying Group Marketing is ideal when:
- You have active opportunities with identifiable stakeholders
- You need to accelerate specific deals through the pipeline
- You want to measure engagement at the opportunity level
- You're ready to personalise messaging by role and buying stage
The most effective B2B organisations don't choose between these approaches—they run both concurrently. ABM builds account awareness and opens doors. BGM accelerates specific opportunities and closes deals.
Implementing Your Buying Group Marketing Strategy
Step 1: Identify Target Accounts and Opportunities
Start by defining your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and identifying target accounts that match this profile. Within each account, look for specific selling opportunities—different buying groups interested in different solutions.
Use firmographic data, intent signals, and first-party engagement data to prioritise accounts showing purchase intent.
Step 2: Discover Buying Group Members
Once you've identified an opportunity, uncover the buying group members through:
- Form submissions from the same organisation for the same solution
- Website behaviour patterns showing multiple stakeholders researching similar topics
- Intent data from third-party sources indicating coordinated research
- Sales intelligence from your SDR and AE teams about known stakeholders
- LinkedIn insights revealing organisational structure and key decision-makers
Look for triggering events like company expansions, leadership changes, or regulatory shifts that indicate active buying groups.
Step 3: Map Roles and Personas
Assign each identified stakeholder to their role in the buying group. Build role templates that define:
- Their primary concerns and success metrics
- Their biggest fears or objections
- The content types that resonate with them
- Their preferred channels and engagement patterns
- Their stage in the buying journey
This mapping enables personalised engagement strategies for each member.
Step 4: Create Role-Based Content Journeys
Develop content strategies that serve the specific needs of each persona:
For Decision Makers: Executive summaries, ROI calculators, strategic whitepapers, board-ready presentations
For Technical Evaluators: Technical documentation, integration guides, architecture diagrams, sandbox access
For Financial Controllers: Pricing transparency, total cost of ownership analysis, contract flexibility options
For End Users: Product demos, training resources, user community access, implementation timelines
For Champions: Internal pitch templates, comparison matrices, customer testimonials, analyst reports
Step 5: Orchestrate Multi-Channel Engagement
Engage buying group members across multiple touchpoints:
- Personalised advertising using platforms that enable contact-level targeting
- Email nurture sequences tailored to role and buying stage
- Direct sales outreach coordinated with marketing activities
- Content experiences like webinars, workshops, and executive briefings
- Social selling through LinkedIn and industry communities
The key is consistency and coordination across all channels, ensuring each stakeholder receives relevant messages.
Step 6: Measure Buying Group Completeness and Engagement
Track two critical metrics:
Completeness Score: Are all essential roles represented in your engagement? A buying group missing the financial controller or technical evaluator faces higher risk of stalling.
Engagement Score: How actively are buying group members interacting with your content and sales team? Higher collective engagement indicates stronger purchase intent.
Combined, these scores help determine when a buying group is sales-ready.
Step 7: Enable Sales with Buying Group Insights
Provide your sales team with:
- Real-time visibility into buying group composition and engagement
- Alerts when key stakeholders show high intent signals
- Content recommendations for specific personas and situations
- Buying group health scores indicating deal progression likelihood
- Absent member identification showing gaps that need filling
This transforms sales from guessing about who's involved to knowing exactly which stakeholders to engage and how.
Technology and Tools for Buying Group Marketing
Essential Platform Capabilities
Successful Buying Group Marketing requires technology that supports:
Unified Account Profiles: Integration of firmographic, behavioural, and engagement data at the account and contact level
Role-Based Segmentation: Ability to categorise contacts by their role in buying decisions, not just job title
Multi-Touch Attribution: Tracking engagement across multiple stakeholders and channels
Journey Orchestration: Automated content delivery based on role, stage, and behaviour
CRM Integration: Seamless flow of data between marketing platforms and Salesforce, HubSpot, or other CRMs
AI-Driven Insights: Predictive analytics that identify buying groups forming and suggest next actions
Leading Solutions
Platforms designed specifically for Buying Group Marketing include:
- Adobe Journey Optimiser B2B Edition: Built on Adobe Experience Platform with AI-driven buying group orchestration
- 6sense: Revenue AI platform with account identification and buying group engagement
- Demandbase: ABM platform with buying group identification and engagement tracking
- LeanData: Revenue orchestration focused on routing and matching buying group members
- Influ2: Person-based advertising for contact-level targeting within accounts
Making It Work with Your Current Stack
You don't necessarily need to replace your entire martech stack. Start by:
- Auditing your CRM data structure to ensure you can track opportunities with multiple contacts
- Configuring lead-to-account matching so multiple enquiries from the same organisation are connected
- Creating buying group fields in your CRM to track roles, completeness, and engagement
- Adjusting reporting to measure at the opportunity level, not just lead level
- Training your teams on the new opportunity-centric workflows
Overcoming Common Challenges
Data Silos and Integration Issues
Challenge: Marketing automation, CRM, and sales intelligence tools don't share data effectively.
Solution: Implement a unified data platform or customer data platform (CDP) that aggregates information from all sources. Establish clear data governance and ensure regular synchronisation.
Sales and Marketing Misalignment
Challenge: Marketing generates buying group insights, but sales lacks visibility or doesn't know how to use them.
Solution: Create shared definitions of buying group stages, establish joint success metrics, and build regular review cadences. Ensure sales has easy access to buying group composition and engagement data.
Incomplete Buying Groups
Challenge: You've identified some buying group members but don't have complete coverage of all roles.
Solution: Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator, predictive analytics, and intent data to identify missing stakeholders. Create targeted campaigns to attract absent members. Work with your champion to introduce additional contacts.
Maintaining Personalisation at Scale
Challenge: Creating truly personalised experiences for every role in every buying group becomes resource-intensive.
Solution: Build role-based content frameworks and templates that can be customised efficiently. Use dynamic content and automation to deliver the right message to the right person without manual effort for each interaction.
Long Sales Cycles
Challenge: Even with buying group engagement, complex B2B deals take months to close.
Solution: Focus on accelerating consensus amongst buying group members. Create content that helps them align internally. Use multi-threading to build relationships with multiple stakeholders simultaneously.
Best Practices for Buying Group Marketing Success
1. Start with Your Best Opportunities
Don't try to implement buying group strategies across your entire pipeline at once. Begin with your most promising opportunities where you already have some stakeholder engagement. Learn from these initial implementations before scaling.
2. Build Cross-Functional Teams
Successful buying group programmes require collaboration between marketing, sales, sales development, and customer success. Establish a core team with representatives from each function.
3. Focus on Consensus Building
Your goal isn't just to convince individual stakeholders—it's to help the group reach consensus. Create content that addresses common concerns across roles and helps stakeholders align on the value of your solution.
4. Use Multi-Threading in Sales Outreach
Don't rely on a single champion. Have your executives talk to their executives, your technical team engage their technical evaluators, and your customer success team connect with end users. This parallel engagement accelerates trust-building.
5. Measure What Matters
Track buying group completeness, engagement depth, and velocity through stages. Don't get distracted by vanity metrics. Focus on indicators that predict closed-won revenue.
6. Iterate and Optimise
Treat your buying group programme as a continuous improvement process. Analyse which content resonates with different roles, which engagement patterns predict success, and which buying groups convert fastest. Use these insights to refine your approach.
7. Celebrate Early Wins
Document and share success stories when buying group strategies accelerate deals or improve conversion rates. This builds organisational buy-in and justifies continued investment.
The Future of Buying Group Marketing
AI and Predictive Analytics
Artificial intelligence is transforming buying group identification and engagement. AI-powered platforms can:
- Predict which accounts are forming buying groups based on behavioural signals
- Recommend the next best action for engaging specific personas
- Generate personalised content variations at scale
- Identify patterns in winning buying group compositions
By 2027, over 40% of B2B companies are expected to use AI-driven insights to shape buying group strategies.
Dynamic Buying Group Models
Traditional static buyer personas are giving way to dynamic role-based models that adapt based on real-time behaviour. Instead of assuming all CFOs care about the same things, systems will recognise individual priorities and adjust messaging accordingly.
Community and Peer Influence
Forrester predicts that by 2028, over 50% of B2B purchase decisions will be significantly shaped by community influences. Buying Group Marketing will increasingly incorporate peer validation, user communities, and social proof into engagement strategies.
Integrated Account Experiences
The future isn't choosing between ABM and buying groups—it's seamlessly integrating both. Organisations will run account-level brand awareness campaigns whilst simultaneously executing personalised buying group journeys, all coordinated through unified platforms.
Real-World Success Stories
Palo Alto Networks: 800% Increase in Opportunity Progression
Palo Alto Networks implemented a buying group motion using intelligent routing and engagement scoring. Instead of routing every inbound lead to a general queue, they identified buying group members and engaged them based on their role and opportunity.
The results: win rates doubled during the pilot phase. Upon full scaling, they saw an 800% increase in opportunity progression to forecast, plus significant improvements in business development representative conversions and average deal sizes. Applied to previous year results, this would have generated an estimated 13% revenue increase.
European SaaS Provider: 111% Increase in Enterprise Deals Won
A European B2B SaaS company used buying group strategies to create highly personalised video content addressing specific pain points for each stakeholder role. The campaign resulted in:
- 23% increase in banner click-through rates
- 40% boost in buying group engagement
- 67% audience conversion rate
- 111% increase from baseline in enterprise deals won
UK Technology Company: 30% Higher Conversion Rates
A leading UK technology company restructured its marketing from lead-based to buying group-centric. By identifying all stakeholders in target opportunities and delivering role-specific content, they achieved:
- 30% higher conversion rates on buying group-engaged opportunities
- 25% reduction in marketing costs through better targeting
- 4-month reduction in average sales cycle length
Conclusion
The B2B buying landscape has fundamentally evolved, and marketing strategies must evolve with it. Individual leads no longer represent true purchase intent. Entire accounts are too broad to target effectively. Buying Group Marketing provides the precision needed to identify, engage, and influence the specific stakeholders who collectively make purchasing decisions.
The evidence is clear: organisations implementing buying group strategies see dramatic improvements in conversion rates, sales efficiency, and revenue growth. Companies like Palo Alto Networks and countless others have proven that focusing on buying groups accelerates deals and improves win rates.
The shift from MQL-centric or account-based approaches to buying group strategies requires changes in technology, processes, and culture. But the investment pays dividends through better sales and marketing alignment, more accurate purchase signals, and ultimately, faster revenue growth.
Your next step: Start by identifying your most promising active opportunities. Map the buying group members you already know. Identify gaps in your coverage. Begin delivering role-specific content to complete the group and deepen engagement. You don't need to transform your entire operation overnight—but you do need to start.
The future of B2B marketing is here. The question isn't whether to adopt Buying Group Marketing—it's how quickly you can implement it to gain competitive advantage.
