Marketing to a single lead in B2B is like pitching to one person in a boardroom and ignoring everyone else. It doesn’t work. Groups, not individuals, make buying decisions. So why is so much marketing focused on leads or entire accounts as a single unit?
The gap between martech capabilities and B2B reality
We’re all excited about martech and its constant improvements that enhance our campaigns. However, B2B marketing practices have evolved dramatically in recent years, often outpacing the capabilities of martech tools.
I enjoyed Eric Dates’ recent MarTech article, “How the Salesforce Lead Object broke B2B marketing (and how to fix it).” He makes a strong case that structuring Salesforce — and most CRMs — around leads is inherently flawed.
Dates emphasizes the need to move beyond campaigns targeting individuals and instead focus on influencing at the account level. He rightly points out that because different stakeholders have varying degrees of influence over buying decisions, the more effective approach is to map out these relationships. A cohesive campaign that engages most stakeholders is far more effective than a fragmented strategy catering to individuals separately.
Is the account at the right level?
The lead model does not reflect the reality of B2B purchases. For high-involvement purchases, typically subject to the scrutiny of a buying committee, the idea that a single lead drives the sale is just wrong.
Change your thinking: In addition to mapping relationships between the different members of a buying committee — or decision-making unit — you have to understand the role of each member.
Some buying committee members will initiate the purchase, others as gatekeepers, influencers, financial controllers or approvers. Each stakeholder views a proposal through their own lens, shaped by their role and personal motivations for approving or rejecting the deal. Your marketing must address these varied expectations.
Mapping the buying committee and marketing to them is always more effective than targeting individual leads. Many committee members may never take actions like filling out a form for a content offer and, therefore, may never become leads. However, they still play a crucial role in the decision-making.
Dig deeper: Why buyer groups matter in B2B demand gen and how to target them
Companies are inconsistent when making buying decisions
If you’ve ever tried to sell to large enterprises, you’ll quickly realize that they rarely act as a single, homogenous unit. Countries fight for independence, groups within an organization build fiefdoms and design teams assert their importance. The result is that the company doesn’t act as a single entity.
Anyone who has sold to a large, multi-site, or multinational enterprise has had one of the customer’s locations that is incredibly loyal to your brand, but another only buys your competitor. Simply put, disparate teams within the same company don’t always behave like one account.
Buying group marketing beats ABM
No large account will decide consistently at the corporate level. Silos and interest groups within the organization make it ineffective to treat a large enterprise as a single account.
The best companies fragment each account into buying groups. This is not easy, as behavior is the key factor determining what parts of the company fit into each buying group. Some accounts may behave consistently across a single business unit or division, while others may show consistency across a region.
Even when behavior is consistent, individual buying committee members may have different priorities. For example, when selling components to engineers, technical stakeholders may act consistently and prefer reusing existing designs, while others focus solely on price, product availability, or supply chain considerations.
Dig deeper: New ways to identify B2B buying group members
Keeping it simple: The Goldilocks zone
Identifying different buying groups may sound complex and time-consuming, but it’s often straightforward in practice. Whether based on projects, teams, countries or other factors, your sales teams likely know the best way to segment each organization and focus on that target as a buying group rather than an account.
Once implemented, buying group marketing simplifies the accounts you want to influence. While it may not perfectly reflect an account’s actual behavior, it comes closer than other approaches.
On the other hand, chasing individual leads is ineffective because no single person controls the purchase. The decision-making group is too small to represent what the account will do. Overall, the account-level approach is somewhat better but has drawbacks because it’s too big, and large accounts don’t behave consistently.
The key is to develop a buying group model that finds the “just right” balance.
Start your buying group marketing campaigns
We’ve established that leads don’t accurately reflect how your customers buy, yet martech software remains stuck in the lead model. The good news is that building buying groups isn’t much more complicated than targeting at the account level if you have suitable data in your CRM.
Within each group, you must assign personas that reflect each member’s role and behavior. After that, it’s simply a matter of creating personalized campaigns that resonate.
Why are CRM systems so dated?
If you’re ready to build campaigns around buying groups — or at least at the account level — you might also wonder why your CRM still relies on an outdated lead model. Like Dates, I can’t understand why these tools lag what modern marketing truly needs, holding back marketers.
It could be because reporting is easier or because too many marketers are stuck in the past. But if you work for a CRM company, I would love to know why your tools are holding marketing back instead of driving it forward.
Dig deeper: Redefining ‘leads’ in B2B: Why data enrichment is key for lead gen
The post Why buying-group marketing beats ABM every time appeared first on MarTech.