Buying Group Marketing: Why Most B2B Campaigns Target the Wrong Person

Buying group marketing is a B2B go-to-market approach that shifts targeting from individual leads to the full group of people involved in a purchase decision. Instead of optimising for a single contact, it maps and engages every stakeholder who influences whether a deal gets done, from the economic buyer to the end user to the person who can quietly kill a proposal in a committee meeting.

Most B2B marketing is built around lead generation. Someone fills in a form, gets a score, and moves through a pipeline. The problem is that in most meaningful B2B purchases, no single person decides anything. The contact you captured may not be the person who controls the budget, the one who defines the requirements, or the one whose objection will eventually derail the deal.

Why Lead-Centric B2B Marketing Keeps Failing

I spent years running performance marketing programmes that were, by every internal metric, working. Cost per lead was down. Volume was up. The sales team had a full pipeline. And yet, quarter after quarter, conversion from pipeline to closed revenue was disappointing. Nobody could explain it cleanly. The leads were real. The interest was genuine. So what was going wrong?

The answer, which took longer to surface than it should have, was that we were reaching the wrong people. Or more precisely, we were reaching one person in a group of five or six, declaring success, and handing a single contact to a sales team who then had to do all the stakeholder mapping themselves, from scratch, under commercial pressure.

The lead-centric model was designed for a simpler world. It works reasonably well for transactional purchases, where one person decides and buys. It breaks down badly for complex B2B sales, where the average buying group involves multiple people across different functions, each with different priorities, different objections, and different definitions of what a successful outcome looks like.

If you are thinking about this in the context of broader go-to-market strategy, the Go-To-Market & Growth Strategy hub covers the structural decisions that sit upstream of channel and campaign choices.

What a Buying Group Actually Looks Like

The composition of a buying group varies by deal size, category, and organisation. But there are recurring roles that appear across most complex B2B purchases.

The economic buyer controls the budget and in the end approves the spend. They are often the most senior person involved but frequently the least engaged in early-stage research. They show up late, ask the sharpest questions, and can veto a decision that everyone else has already agreed to.

The technical evaluator assesses whether the product or service actually does what it claims. In software, this is often an IT lead or architect. In professional services, it might be an operations director or a category specialist. They are typically deep in the detail and highly sceptical of marketing language.

The user champion is the person who will live with the decision day to day. They care less about commercial terms and more about whether the thing works in practice. They are often the easiest to engage early and the most likely to advocate internally if you have genuinely solved their problem.

The gatekeeper or influencer sits between the vendor and the decision-makers. In larger organisations, this might be a procurement lead, an EA, or a department head who controls access. They are rarely the buyer, but they can slow or stop a process without much effort.

The blocker is the role that marketing almost never plans for. This is the person who has a reason, professional or political, to prefer the status quo or a competing solution. They may not be visible in early discovery, but they will surface when the deal gets serious.

How Buying Group Marketing Changes Campaign Design

Once you accept that a purchase decision involves multiple people, the implications for campaign design are significant. You are no longer optimising for a single persona. You are building a programme that needs to reach, inform, and influence a group, often simultaneously, often without those people coordinating with each other.

The first change is in targeting. Account-based marketing has been the dominant framework for this kind of work, and it remains a useful structure. But ABM as commonly practised still tends to focus on the account as the unit of measurement, with individual contacts as secondary. Buying group marketing makes the group itself the unit. You are not asking “have we engaged this account?” but “have we reached each of the roles that matter in this account’s purchase process?”

The second change is in content. Most B2B content is written for one audience, usually the person most likely to fill in a form, which tends to mean a mid-level practitioner with research responsibility. That person matters, but they are not the only person who needs to be convinced. The economic buyer needs a different conversation. The technical evaluator needs a different level of detail. The user champion needs proof that the product works in conditions similar to theirs.

I have seen this play out clearly in agency pitches. We would spend weeks crafting a proposal for the marketing director who briefed us, only to find that the CFO had a question nobody had anticipated, or that the IT team had a compliance concern that killed the timeline. The brief had come from one person. The decision was being made by a group. Our pitch had addressed one audience.

The third change is in measurement. If your primary success metric is MQL volume, buying group marketing will initially look like it is making your numbers worse. You are now asking whether you have reached enough of the group, not just whether you have captured a lead. That is a harder thing to measure and a harder thing to report on. But it is much more honest about what is actually happening commercially.

The MQL Problem and Why It Persists

The marketing qualified lead has been the dominant currency of B2B marketing for a long time. It is easy to understand, easy to report on, and easy to optimise for. It is also, in many cases, a metric that measures marketing activity rather than commercial progress.

The MQL model assumes that if you capture enough of the right contacts and score them correctly, revenue will follow. That assumption holds reasonably well in lower-value, shorter-cycle sales. It breaks down in enterprise or complex B2B, where the gap between a qualified lead and a closed deal involves months of stakeholder navigation that marketing has little visibility into and even less influence over.

Part of why the MQL persists is that it is convenient for everyone. Marketing gets to show volume. Sales gets a list. Leadership gets a number on a dashboard. Nobody has to confront the harder question of whether the pipeline is actually healthy, or whether it is full of single contacts from accounts where the buying group has never been engaged.

This connects to something I noticed when judging the Effie Awards. The campaigns that struggled to demonstrate effectiveness were often the ones that had optimised relentlessly for an intermediate metric, leads, clicks, engagement, without a clear line back to commercial outcome. The strongest entries could show the full chain, from reach to consideration to revenue, and they had usually built their measurement framework before the campaign, not after.

Vidyard’s analysis of why go-to-market feels harder than it used to touches on this directly. The buying process has become more complex, with more stakeholders involved and longer decision cycles. The response from most marketing teams has been to generate more leads. The more useful response is to engage more of the right people per account.

Building a Buying Group Marketing Programme

The practical starting point is mapping. Before you build any content or configure any targeting, you need to understand who is typically involved in a purchase decision for your category. This is not a desk research exercise. It requires conversations with sales, with customer success, and ideally with customers themselves.

Ask your sales team: who else was in the room when the deal was won? Who almost killed it? Who did you have to convince that you had not expected to? Ask your customers: who else was involved in the decision? What did they need to see? What nearly stopped the purchase from happening?

From those conversations, you can build a realistic buying group model for your category. Not a theoretical one based on analyst frameworks, but one grounded in how your actual customers actually buy.

Once you have the group mapped, the content question becomes much more tractable. You are not trying to create one piece that works for everyone. You are building a set of assets, each designed for a specific role, that collectively address the concerns of the full group. The economic buyer needs a business case. The technical evaluator needs a security review or an integration spec. The user champion needs case studies from organisations similar to theirs. The blocker, if you can identify them, needs their specific objection addressed before it becomes a problem.

On the channel side, buying group marketing tends to work best through a combination of paid media targeting by role and seniority, direct outreach from sales, and content that travels internally within the account. That last one is underrated. When a user champion shares something internally because it answers a question their economic buyer just asked, that is buying group marketing working as intended.

BCG’s work on go-to-market strategy in B2B markets highlights how the complexity of the buying process requires more structured commercial thinking upstream, not just better execution downstream. That framing applies directly here.

Where Sales and Marketing Alignment Actually Matters

Sales and marketing alignment is one of the most discussed and least resolved problems in B2B. Most attempts to fix it focus on process: shared definitions, SLA agreements, regular handoff meetings. Those things help at the margin. But the deeper issue is that sales and marketing are often optimising for different outcomes, and buying group marketing makes that tension visible in a way that lead-centric approaches do not.

When I was running an agency with a significant new business function, the friction between marketing-generated leads and sales-qualified opportunities was a constant source of tension. Marketing would deliver volume. Sales would complain about quality. Marketing would point to the scoring model. Sales would point to the win rate. Both were right, in their own terms, and neither was addressing the real problem, which was that we were treating a group decision as if it were an individual one.

Buying group marketing creates a shared language. Instead of arguing about whether a lead is qualified, sales and marketing can ask together: which roles in this account have we reached? Which ones have engaged with relevant content? Which ones have we not touched yet? That is a more productive conversation, and it is one that both functions can contribute to meaningfully.

The practical mechanism for this is a buying group score at the account level, not a lead score at the contact level. You are measuring coverage and engagement across the group, not just activity from one person. That changes what marketing optimises for and what sales prioritises in their outreach.

Forrester’s intelligent growth model makes the case that sustainable B2B growth requires aligning the full revenue function around customer and prospect behaviour, not internal process metrics. Buying group marketing is one of the more concrete ways to operationalise that principle.

The Measurement Challenge

Measuring buying group marketing is harder than measuring lead generation. That is not a reason to avoid it. It is a reason to invest in building the right measurement framework before you start, not after you are six months in and trying to justify the programme.

The metrics that matter in buying group marketing operate at three levels. At the account level, you want to know whether you have reached the relevant roles, whether those roles have engaged with content appropriate to their position in the decision, and whether the account is progressing through the pipeline. At the opportunity level, you want to understand buying group completeness: have you made contact with enough of the group to give this deal a realistic chance of closing? At the revenue level, you want to see whether opportunities with higher buying group coverage convert at better rates than those without it.

That last analysis is the one that tends to convince sceptical leadership. When you can show that deals where marketing reached three or more buying group roles converted at materially higher rates than deals where only one contact was engaged, the case for the approach becomes self-evident.

Semrush’s overview of market penetration strategy is a useful reference point here. Growing within existing markets, which is what most B2B companies are trying to do, requires reaching more of the right people in the right accounts, not just generating more leads from the same pool.

There is more on how to build measurement frameworks that connect marketing activity to commercial outcome across the Go-To-Market & Growth Strategy section of The Marketing Juice, alongside thinking on pipeline strategy, positioning, and how to structure a go-to-market programme that holds up under commercial scrutiny.

What Buying Group Marketing Is Not

It is worth being clear about what this approach does not solve. Buying group marketing is not a substitute for a product that genuinely meets market needs. If your customers are churning because the product underdelivers, reaching more stakeholders in the buying process will not fix that. It will, if anything, accelerate the discovery of the problem.

It is also not a magic fix for a broken sales process. If your sales team struggles to build relationships, handle objections, or handle complex accounts, giving them better-mapped buying groups will not automatically improve their close rate. The inputs improve. The output still depends on execution.

And it is not an excuse to generate less. Some marketing teams hear “quality over quantity” and interpret it as permission to produce fewer leads with less accountability. Buying group marketing is about smarter targeting and more complete account engagement, not about doing less and calling it strategic.

The organisations that get the most from this approach are the ones that treat it as a commercial discipline, not a marketing philosophy. They map the buying group rigorously, build content that serves each role, measure coverage at the account level, and use that data to make better decisions about where to invest sales and marketing resource. That is not complicated. But it does require a willingness to hold marketing to a commercial standard, not just an activity one.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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