3.4 Understanding buying groups
Do you have a favourite place you like to eat out? Perhaps it’s a favourite because you enjoy going there as a family? Or it’s a convenient location for a group of friends to all get to? Or somewhere that you just know that when a group of you go there you’ll have good food, good service and a good time. So what happens if its closed on a night you planned to go there? What do you do? How do you decide where you go instead? Maybe you already have a place in mind. Does you partner agree with you – is that the type of food they want? If you have children, is that where they want to go? If you were planning to meet friends there, how do you find somewhere that’s convenient for all of you to get to? Does it cater for all your dietary requirements? Do you end up with a WhatsApp chat full of different options with everyone politely advocating for their own choice but no one making a decision? Do you even get to a decision, or do you decide to reschedule for another night and go back to the place you all agree on?
Enterprise B2B purchases are often described as ‘complex sales’ because they have many moving parts and take time to complete. An impulse purchase in a store requires only you, the buyer, to make a decision. Deciding where a family or a group will go out to eat on an evening might feel like a complex decision but it’s not. In a complex sale, many stakeholders will have inputs and criteria that need to be met meaning that purchasing decisions are commonly made by a buying group.
The larger the group that needs to make a decision, the more complex it is to get to agreement and in a complex sale not only are the groups larger but they also have more diverse understanding, experiences and technical requirements. But buying groups are fundamental to the way most complex sales occur and so are critical to understand, scope correctly and operationalise communication against.
Buying groups will include many roles. Most commonly, they’ll include:
The decision makers – the person or people that make the ultimate decision
The influencers – stakeholders that don’t make the final decision but who have heavy influence upon it
The budget holders – the person that signs off on the funding and may be separate from the decision makers
The technical stakeholder – the person or people that own key requirements that the solution must meet
The users – end users of a solution that may be consulted within the decision
The consultant – another type of influencer, usually a third-party contracted to bring their opinions and expertise to inform the group
Too often buyer persona analysis focuses on the individuals within a decision rather than trying to understand the dynamic of the group. Are decision makers actually the ultimate decider or do they simply ratify the conclusions of a group? Does the group recognise who the decision makers are or are there different opinions among them – research has shown many buying groups have multiple execs who feel they are the ultimate decider even though the definition of ultimate decider is that there is only one. How heavily are different inputs weighted? Does everyone have an equal voice? And if the buying group cannot make a decision, what happens to the project?
Organisations develop a natural rhythm by which productive work flows through them, and as technology has enabled them to become more interconnected across teams and departments so the number of stakeholders actively involved in many decisions has increased significantly. When smaller, point solutions were more common it was more straightforward to sell because a consensus on requirements was easier to reach. As a purchasing group forms and more members enter, so the diversity of viewpoints within the group is likely to grow, though, and an increase in the number of stakeholders involved directly correlates to a decrease in the likelihood of any decision being made. For larger buying groups, arriving at a state of ‘no decision’ where stakeholders realise they either cannot align on one solution, or they realise they need to evaluate and restate their requirements is more likely.
In a ‘traditional’ marketing model a ‘lead’ is the unit of tracking. Marketing Qualified Leads – those loved, loathed and vilified units of marketing impact – are typically generated when a contact engages with marketing touchpointss. But consider the scenario where three people in a buying group download a piece of content each.
Three leads are generated.
Three potential leads for Sales to follow up on.
But those three leads won’t go on to produce three opportunities; they’ll all be part of one opportunity.
So, great that you’ve engaged them, but not very useful for follow on. They create noise within the system and if those leads are routed to different sales people there will be no integration in the follow-on experience – no one connecting the dots. Potentially just as damaging is the perception that Marketing just hand over lots of unqualified names to Sales with little real insight.
Compare that scenario to one where a single person downloads three separate assets. A lead scoring system may rate that person more highly than three individuals with one download even if they’re a low-level influencer. Higher qualified marketing leads aligned to lower qualified opportunities for Sales to take forward should not be the standard.
Marketing automation systems that engage at a lead level also won’t bridge this gap. There’s a reason that enterprise Sales teams talk about accounts or opportunities they’ve closed, not leads closed. Operating at an account level may be acceptable if your business model only has one solution you aim to sell but could be too general if you have multiple; operating at an lead level may be acceptable if you only sell to one stakeholder in an organisations; but buying groups are, by their very definition, groups of people that are involved with a purchase and form an effective middle ground.
From the outside a buying group may appear stable but over the course of an extended sales process participants may change roles, leave the organisation or just decide to defer to someone else. Communicating with a buying group means tracking how the full buying group is evolving its engagement in the process. Not everyone will be a decision maker when you speak to them. Not everyone will be aware of the business challenge you’re proposing to solve from the start. But they will be involved at a future stage of the process and collectively may represent a more complete view than at a lead level.
Engaging the buying group to work with each other reduces the risk of no decision being made, and when the group works together they will also collaborate to align on your value, vision and benefits. Driving the buying group’s understanding of, alignment to and evaluation against a value calculation is key since it represents the objective Sales will be looking to take forwards as they continue the engagement. For Sales, selling only to people that can buy is tenet. For marketers, marketing to people that will have influence on a future purchase may be the rule. Great marketing is a sales efficiency engine, so aligning buying and enabling groups is the best accepted approach to strategic optimisation of activity and objectives.
Beware: Buyer Personas
Buyer Personas help organisations visualise their ideal customer.
This is Rohit. He’s a CIO. He is 47, married and has two children. He likes tennis on the weekend and reads blogs to stay in touch with his industry.
Can you see the problem with building discrete buyer personas in a model where you’re trying to engage a buying group? For Sales, individual persona definitions may still be useful to plan conversations in one-to-one or one-to-few settings where they can prepare based upon their audience. For marketers, however, understanding that they are marketing to a collective with different roles is key.
Even personas developed for Sales can benefit from showing how individuals typically work with each other. Who are their stakeholders? What are they accountable to each other for? Who has responsibility within decision making? Ideal customers need to reflect ideal buying groups. Buying Group personas need to move beyond the simplistic Rohit approach to ideal customers. These personas can have limited differentiation in roles they cover and perpetuate the myth of the individual decision maker. They are costly to develop, time-consuming to maintain and pointless when they’re not used.
When B2B purchases are made by groups the personas need to provide useful, relevant insights into the dynamics of the group. They must leverage data to help marketers and sales people communicate how they enable stakeholders to add value to the rest of the buying group as well as to their own function.