Article
Mastering B2B Buying Groups with Hierarchies & Persona Scores
Buying Group Best Practices
As most B2B sales and marketers know, the vast majority of our contacts at any target account don’t have the power to buy our products. Figuring out the handful of people who do have that power is critical to ensuring that your highly-personalized content and precision outreach actually leads to revenue.
A buying group, typically, is a composition of various business leaders and stakeholders who play different roles in the decision-making process at a company. Identifying buying groups in B2B sales and marketing is crucial for targeting the right individuals within an organization who influence the purchasing decision.
Identifying buying groups in B2B sales and marketing generally requires a combination of data analysis, outreach, and ongoing engagement with multiple stakeholders within an organization.
By understanding the roles and influence of each member in the buying group, you can tailor your sales and marketing efforts to address their specific needs and ultimately drive more effective and efficient sales processes.
How do B2B sales and marketers identify buying groups today?
Assembling the buying team typically involves a collaborative effort between the sales and marketing teams, but it often leans more towards the sales side.
Sales representatives identify the key decision-makers and influencers within a target account during their interactions. They map out the organizational structure and determine who is involved in the purchasing process. Sales engages with these stakeholders to understand their roles, influence, and concerns.
Marketing provides data and insights on the target account, including potential stakeholders and their typical roles. They create tailored content and resources to support the sales team in engaging with the buying team effectively. Marketing helps in nurturing leads through personalized campaigns aimed at different members of the buying team.
Sales Enablement and ABM teams work closely with both sales and marketing to develop strategies and tools for identifying and engaging with the buying team. They provide training and resources to the sales team on how to effectively engage with multiple stakeholders within an account.
How to Identify B2B Buying Groups:
Analyze Customer Data: Analyze your CRM data to identify patterns in past sales. Look for common titles, departments, and functions among individuals involved in previous deals. Review engagement history to see who has interacted with your sales and marketing efforts, such as email opens, website visits, and content downloads.
Research: Obtain or create organizational charts to understand the hierarchy and structure of the target company. Tools like LinkedIn and company websites can help map out key stakeholders. Identify departments relevant to your product or service. Common departments involved in B2B purchases include IT, finance, operations, and procurement.
Map Stakeholders: Typically, a B2B buying group includes decision-makers, influencers, gatekeepers, and users. Identify individuals in these key roles within your target accounts. Determine the influence and decision-making power of each stakeholder. Decision-makers have final approval, influencers provide recommendations, gatekeepers control access to decision-makers, and users will be the end-users of your product or service.
Inquiries / Engagement: Use multiple channels (email, phone, social media, events) to reach and engage different stakeholders within the organization. Probe for information from your existing contacts that would be helpful in mapping out the stakeholders. Who at their company is the right person to connect with? Who has the buying power? How is the buying process done at their company?
Technology & Tools: Use marketing automation tools to track and analyze engagement from different stakeholders within the same account. You can also leverage a variety of tools (i.e. LinkedIn Navigator) for insights into organizational structures and key contacts that you can leverage to manually map hierarchies. Persona scoring models and hierarchy mapping tools are invaluable to the buying group identification process!
Major Obstacles to Identifying Buying Groups:
Without understanding hierarchies, we can’t piece together all the players in an account’s buying team or buying group. Unfortunately, manually mapping hierarchies at scale isn’t realistic. We also can’t rely on job titles alone to identify decision makers as the buying power of a particular title can vary significantly between companies. Not to mention, people change jobs constantly, and keeping job titles up-to-date in your system is expensive, tedious and often neglected.
By the time you’ve fully mapped out a target account’s hierarchy and identified the buying group to target, one of the key players may have already moved on to another company.
Naturally, sales and marketing teams have been looking for a way to automate the buying group identification process – quickly – while maintaining the integrity of that customer data. They need a customer data focused solution that will (1) leverage AI for persona scoring, and (2) automatically map hierarchies across their Total Addressable Market (TAM).
The Right Tool for Mastering B2B Buying Groups:
With Leadspace, you can automatically build active buyer profiles for people and companies across your TAM with full hierarchy mapping and job titles, expertise, specialties and persona scores. Each buyer profile is assigned a Persona score (0-100), where a higher score represents a closer match to the level, skills, department and buying center of that profile to your ideal persona.
There are over 80 off-the-shelf personas in the Leadspace Persona Library, and custom Persona models can be built for specific buyer use cases. They range across all departments and job functions in the most popular B2B buying centers.
Leadspace’s Persona scores make it easy to match content accordingly for the targeted nurture programs and content syndication. They can also be used to score entire databases to categorize prospects, leads and contacts into actionable content campaigns.
When integrated into Salesforce or Dynamics, sales professionals can assess the best persona from ambiguous titles to understand the best lead or contact to pursue in an account. Finally, scoring predictions and recommendations are delivered in real-time and models are updated and refreshed on a quarterly or as-needed cadence.
What Does This Mean?
By leveraging Leadspace’s Persona scoring model and automatic hierarchy mapping (powered by best-in-class framework for Identity Resolution & Profiles), you can easily explore target accounts to identify all of the key players and decision makers in the buying process at any target account.
Understand their roles, their responsibilities, who reports to them, and who they report to. Create segments and get a true 360-degree view of buyers and the business environment they live in so you can deliver highly personalized content to the right people within your target accounts who have the power to make it happen.
Leadspace’s profiles are dynamic – updated on a regular basis as the underlying data changes (i.e. some changes jobs, mergers & acquisitions, etc). If the decision maker changes, you’ll know it before you waste time and money trying to reach the wrong person.
Stop guessing who has the buying power. Stop doing tedious equations by hand trying to figure out hierarchies. Identify buying groups quickly, accurately and dynamically with Leadspace. Let's talk.
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