Why AI Changes Everything

Account-Based Marketing has served B2B organisations well for years, but a fundamental challenge remains: in complex enterprise sales, you're not selling to accounts—you're selling to people. Specifically, you're selling to groups of people with distinct priorities, concerns, and varying levels of influence over the final decision. 

This is where Buyer Group Marketing (BGM) represents a significant evolution in go-to-market strategy.

Why Buying Groups Matter More Than Ever

It's widely acknowledged that between 5 and 20 people can be involved in complex or high-value enterprise purchasing decisions. These aren't passive participants—they're buyers, influencers, blockers, and champions, each playing a critical role in whether your deal progresses or stalls.

Traditional ABM targets high-value companies as accounts. BGM goes further by identifying and engaging specific buying groups within each account. This means mapping the key roles relevant to your solution and ensuring every critical decision-maker and influencer receives engagement that addresses their unique perspective.

For high-performance go-to-market teams, many analysts and practitioners now view BGM as the next logical phase, particularly as complex B2B deals increasingly require consensus among diverse internal stakeholders.

The Strategic Advantages of Buyer Group Marketing

Rather than focusing on a few primary contacts, BGM ensures all personas involved in the buying group are identified and engaged, leading to higher conversion rates and improved win probabilities.

• Precision at scale: Persona-specific engagement lets you deliver the right message to each member of the buying group, based on their unique concerns and responsibilities—finance cares about ROI and risk; IT cares about integration and security; operations cares about implementation and adoption.

• Bridging intent and action: BGM connects account-level intent signals to specific sales actions by clarifying who within the account should be engaged at each stage of the buying journey.

• Revenue expansion: By mapping internal relationships and needs across multiple buying groups within a single account, BGM facilitates more strategic cross-sell and upsell opportunities.

• Competitive advantage: Organisations gain agility and competitiveness by harnessing timely, actionable data and insights about buying group behaviours and engagement patterns.

Why AI Makes Buyer Group Marketing Viable Today

Go-to-market teams have always known buying groups mattered. The challenge has been to identify, map, and engage them efficiently, given the complexity and volume of the data involved.

AI changes this equation fundamentally. AI-driven platforms can now:

Identify buying group members automatically by synthesising signals from both first-party data (website engagement, email activity) and third-party data (job titles, research activity, professional networks).

Surface hidden stakeholders from procurement, finance, or legal departments—individuals who hold significant sway in approval or veto processes but who might never appear in your CRM.

Create persona-specific content at scale, adapting assets for each buyer's perspective and preferred channels (social, email, web) at a speed and scale that's beyond human capability.

Orchestrate intelligent follow-up by prioritising sales actions based on engagement and sentiment analytics, increasing speed-to-engagement and deal velocity.

Drive data-driven differentiation by converting insights into tailored engagement strategies—meaning organisations with innovative AI-driven programmes are outpacing competitors.

The Challenge of Cross-Functional Consensus

Research shows that buying groups increasingly share key data relevant to their respective functions, and this cross-functional exchange is critical in driving consensus and positive attitudes towards vendors in the B2B buying process.

Traditionally, this sharing has been facilitated through:

• Demo analytics and relationship mapping that help identify which stakeholders are forwarding demo links or sharing research documents

• Intent data monitoring that reveals cross-departmental website actions, content downloads, and search queries

• Stakeholder contributions from multiple functions that uncover overlaps and interdependencies

However, fundamental challenges persist:

• Lack of knowledge about who should receive which information

• No common visibility into what different stakeholders are seeing

• Difficulty relating function-specific information to other stakeholders' priorities

Building Consensus Through Shared Understanding

When data is shared effectively across functions, it exposes shared challenges and objectives—ease of implementation for IT, budget efficiency for finance, and strategic alignment for executive leadership. This helps buying groups align around vendors who best address their collective goals.

Research shows that when the first buyer contact (often termed a "mobiliser") involves peers and builds broader consensus early, implementation success rates rise and buying group attitudes towards chosen vendors improve due to shared buy-in and risk mitigation.

Collaborative, early-stage engagement—enabled by intent and engagement data—allows vendors to personalise content for each stakeholder, increasing perceived relevance and trust, which in turn boosts favourable attitudes towards the vendor.

Successful cross-functional buying journeys are marked by centralised sharing and visibility, breaking down silos and keeping all team members aligned throughout the decision process.

What This Tells Us

Perceived alignment between function-specific data and overall business priorities increases willingness to share information and fosters stronger vendor buy-in.

Buyers are increasingly motivated to evaluate vendors based on how well they facilitate shared visibility, collaboration, and data-driven consensus among internal stakeholders—not just the nominal "decision-maker".

The Path Forward

Buyer Group Marketing represents the next generation of B2B marketing methodology. It builds on ABM's foundation but is made effective and scalable by advances in AI and automation, enabling organisations to engage every relevant stakeholder throughout a complex buying journey.

For go-to-market teams seeking competitive advantage in complex enterprise sales, the question is no longer whether to adopt a buyer group approach—it's how quickly you can implement it effectively and what tech do I use..

Cross-functional data sharing within buying groups is essential not only for building consensus but also for fostering more positive, unified attitudes towards favoured vendors during complex B2B purchases. Platforms that enable this sharing whilst maintaining persona-specific relevance will define the next era of B2B marketing success.

Curaley is a Buyer Group Engagement platform specifically designed to deliver curated content at a Buyer Group level, with cross-functional capabilities to enable the sharing of key content within a visible buying group framework.