Buying groups make logical sense, but few sales and marketing teams work together to support the way business decisions actually happen. In a recent survey that delivered our 2026 Marketing Edge Report, we found that over one-third (38%) of B2B marketers say they have fully implemented buying groups, but that rarely translates to a coordinated approach across sales and marketing.
Sales teams often consider buying groups in the later stages of the deal process. Once they open the door with a single champion, they’ll get introduced to other people and start to understand each role. However, it’s less common for sales teams to have the full picture of the buying group early in the sales process. And except for some high-touch account based marketing, marketers usually don’t plan their campaigns using buying group insights from sales early or often enough.
Typically, if marketers have a buying group strategy in place, it means they have a data partner that has helped them identify stakeholders in their buying group. The next step for marketers would be to use that information to create buying group campaigns, i.e. they could send the same content to the entire group or create personalized but related content to specific stakeholders and then track how their messaging is driving pipeline.
In my experience, coordinated marketing across buying groups is still pretty nascent. Marketers might have identified buying groups and might be tracking them, but determining how to best engage is less likely. A major challenge for marketers is a lack of context, which the sales team can provide. As sales works on an account, they get a good picture of the different stakeholders, their roles, reservations and needs.
For marketers to get better at using buying groups to drive campaigns – and for sales to tap into the value of buying groups earlier in the pipeline – they need to work more closely together.
From Lead to Group – the New Pipeline
Forrester finds an average of 13 people are involved in a typical B2B buying decision. Compare that to the typical CRM setup that identifies and targets individual leads. Marketers and sales teams with a focus on leads often have multiple leads in a single organization, especially a large company, but they don’t always tell a cohesive story.
Coordinating the messaging sent to 13 or more people is significantly more complex than treating each individual separately, especially when each one requires personalized information based on their role, preferences and opinions. Different people within one company might be the primary decision maker, the budget holder, the person who signs the contract and the person who implements and benefits from the solution.
Aligning Sales and Marketing at the Top of the Funnel
The opportunity and the challenge is getting sales and marketing coordinated around buying groups before a deal is gaining momentum. That requires both teams to operate from a shared framework, starting with a common definition of what a buying group looks like for the business. It’s important to identify which roles matter, which titles signal intent, and what engagement across the group suggests readiness to buy.
From there, marketing can use early engagement signals like content downloads to flag accounts where buying group activity is starting to cluster. Rather than passing over a single lead, they hand off a picture of the group activity. Sales can then enter the conversation with some context, for example, that the CFO has been reading pricing content while the IT lead attended a product webinar, and can prioritize outreach accordingly.
On the sales side, reps should be feeding buying group intelligence back into the marketing ecosystem in real time. When a rep learns that a new stakeholder has joined the evaluation, or that the legal team will be involved in the final decision, that information shouldn’t stay in their notes. CRM fields mapped to buying group roles allow marketing to trigger relevant campaigns. When CRM data and campaign data are aligned, marketing can see exactly which group members have and haven’t been reached by campaigns, and fill the gaps accordingly.
Shared goals are an important factor. When marketing is measured only on early stage pipeline contribution at the lead level while sales is measured only on closed revenue, neither team has an incentive to invest in building buying group coverage over time. Aligning on metrics like buying group engagement, multi-stakeholder pipeline and average group size at opportunity creation gives both teams a common focus.
Buying groups aren’t a new concept, but the strategies and processes to actually act on them are just starting to take off. The companies that connect sales intelligence and marketing execution early in the funnel will be better positioned to win complex deals faster and with less wasted effort.
