No matter how much sellers might wish that enterprise buying decisions were made by a single individual (and even though there’s only one name on a final contract) that’s simply not how deals are closed. Today’s buying environment is defined by high-stakes, high-budget decisions made by a group of individuals with different priorities, while also considering the needs of specialized influencers.
To sell effectively to buying groups, sales teams need better visibility around MQLs— they need better signals into a buying group so they can evaluate and navigate more effectively. And this discovery process needs to happen early to get to better, more effective meetings that will lead to making a prospect’s shortlist – period.
Strategies like generalized personas or lead-level logic on their own are no longer enough. But it’s not hopeless out there— there are ways I’m seeing sellers win; by tapping into real signals from real people, with intent data, and leaning on support of other teams.
The Buying Group Isn’t a Funnel, It’s a Minefield
We know buying groups include more individuals than ever, meaning sellers need to wrangle more individuals to close just one deal. It’s why teams are shifting away from relying exclusively on individual leads, because a lead only shows one buying signal from one buying team member, which can lead to a lot of false positives— bad MQLs.
On top of that, 77% of B2B buyers say their last purchase was complex or difficult and 78% of buyers engage with vendor content before a project is even underway. So, when sellers can identify key stakeholders and get ahead of internal resistance early on, they have a much better chance of guiding, influencing (and winning) the deal. This is more than understanding which account is spiking. It’s knowing exactly who’s engaging on relevant topics, what function and role they are, and what concerns they are personally signaling through their content consumption behaviors.
Sellers Best Practices
To overcome both hurdles, effective sellers are leveraging intent data to see buying signals from multiple members of a buying committee, and engage more of the buying group, earlier. Here are some best practices I’ve seen lead sellers (both my own and our clients) to success:
- To reduce inefficiency, use intent data to identify the accounts, leads, and active buying groups that matter most, prioritize those and proactively offer support.
- To pre-multi-thread buying teams on behalf of AEs, use intent data to understand the interests and concerns of extended buying team members, engage them and ladder up from there.
- To accelerate opportunities forward, use intent data to identify and engage more buying group members and bring the different buying team players in a meeting conceived to help (more on this below).
For some organizations, a buying group-focused change effort needs to happen first so the integrated teams of Marketing, SDRs and Sales can be assembled and properly chartered.
Better Buying Group Engagement is a Team Sport
Sales teams need help with upfront discovery and multi-threading. Even when armed with better visibility into buying groups, one seller doesn’t have the time to find multiple members of the buying group and personalize engagement for each individual member, all while working toward closing a deal. This is where SDRs and Marketing can step in to help.
The area of collaboration I’ve seen have the most impact focuses on helping Sales to build better meetings with buying groups. To be clear, creating better, more effective meetings that engage more decision-makers does not mean simply creating more meetings. Instead, there should be more people present in each one, representing multiple interests in the potential decision. The best way to accomplish this is to create an operational workflow that maximizes the contributions of the combined team (Sales, SDRs and Marketing).
From the start, Marketing can leverage first, second-party intent data to surface the different members of an extended buying group for SDRs to pre-multi-thread. Then, SDRs can prioritize and engage the buying group members and schedule multi-person, multi-segment meetings. Last, Sales brings the essential players in the buying group together to achieve the consensus necessary to close the deal.
Give Sales the Visibility They Need to Move From Pitch to Close
Ask any seller: The grinding part isn’t closing the deal— it’s the early work of finding the buying group and then working through all their respective issues with them. Sellers need to spend more time selling, so this is a place where marketing and SDR teams can step in to add value by shouldering some of the load.
The organizations I see mastering this approach are capturing more opportunities that would have been otherwise missed and closing more of those deals. Start trying it yourself – I’m betting you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Steve Niemiec is the Chief Revenue Officer at Informa TechTarget, where he drives growth for technology companies from R&D to ROI. A veteran of the B2B tech industry, Steve is known for delivering exceptional revenue results in complex, competitive markets. He’s passionate about optimizing go-to-market performance, empowering diverse teams, and leading change that accelerates growth.
