Buying Groups Evolve. So Should Your Marketing

As data and marketing technology becomes more sophisticated and readily available, more marketers are creating buying group strategies—marketing plans that consider the role and relationships of different stakeholders.

Consider the role of someone on marketing, finance, technology or procurement—they each have a different set of criteria and influence each other’s opinions in different ways. They need different, but related, marketing material.

According to Forrester, a typical buying group contains 13 people and 89 percent of B2B purchase decisions require two or more groups. The bigger and more complex the product—such as enterprise software—the bigger and more complex the buying group.

For marketers interested in creating a buying group strategy, a key factor is actually identifying the members of the buying group. This may sound simple, but there are complexities that marketers need to account for. Buying group strategies only work as well as the data behind them

The Churn of Changing Roles

The art and science of marketing to buying groups starts with the ability to stay up to date with accurate data. Across our data, we see consistent and meaningful contact and role changes occurring within months, not quarters or years, in active segments. On average the data degrades 2 to 5 percent per month. It doesn’t fail all at once, but erodes in layers with role relevance and buying group alignment deteriorating long before emails stop working, making continuous validation and refreshing essential.

The more strategic or tech-driven the role the faster it can change. Below are the three functions where we see the highest volatility:

Marketing. Positions such as demand gen, growth, life cycle, marketing ops, RevOps. Here we see rapid team reorgs and title inflation, along with high attrition in growth-stage companies and constant tooling and strategy shifts within businesses.

Sales and revenue. Roles positions such as SDR, BDR, growth, account executive, sales ops. Given that these roles are performance-based, there is a higher turnover rate and churn at the rep level, which can lead to territory and coverage changes.

Technology and engineering. Example positions: software engineers, DevOps, cloud architects, security. Within these roles there exists intense talent competition and frequent job switching for compensation

Tactics for Managing Buying Group Change

It’s essential to have access to recent and frequently updated data to stay current with buying groups. Marketers can evaluate changes across key datapoints to determine if a stakeholder is no longer a relevant part of a buying group.

The elements that change fastest, in order are role relevance, title accuracy, buying group fit, email deliverability, employment status.

Data stability also varies a lot by industry, geography, and even company maturity. Key Industries like Technology, Marketing & Advertising services, Ecommerce and Digital Retail see frequent job changes, title churn, and org restructuring. While regulated industries like Government, Public Sector and Utilities and Energy represent more stable industries with longer tenure, more rigid role definitions, slower role evolution and stable org structures.

There are also differences globally driven by labor mobility, employment laws, title standardization and professional social network penetration. For example, within the US, UK and Australia there is a highly mobile workforce and frequent company switching occurring, as compared to some areas in APAC like Japan where there is a long tenure culture and more rigid hierarchies.

The Agile Buying Group Approach

It’s clear that buying groups are not static, and marketers need a flexible and agile marketing strategy to keep up with the many changes that happen within a buying group over time.

The good news is that the state of B2B data and marketing technology make it possible for marketers to create an agile buying group strategy. It’s possible to monitor changes to stakeholder status over time and maintain an updated picture of buying groups. Prioritizing updated insights will make outreach that much more effective, ensuring that the right people are getting the right messages.

Lea Kimball is senior vice president, data solutions, at Anteriad, where she has spent more than two decades shaping the company's B2B data strategy and multichannel core data assets. She was instrumental in building Anteriad's flagship proprietary data product, and owning end-to-end data acquisition, platform integrations, data hygiene, and team leadership. Her work has contributed to Anteriad's recognition by Forrester and Neutronian as a premier data provider. She holds a B.S. in communication arts from St. John's University.