Ask a senior marketing leader whether their organization has implemented buying groups and there is a reasonable chance they will say yes. Ask one of their team members the same question and you will get a more complicated answer.
That gap between the strategy on a slide and the reality in execution is one of the most telling findings in this year's B2B Marketing Edge report.
The report found that 38% of B2B marketers say they have fully defined and activated buying groups, with those groups central to their go-to-market strategy. That is real progress. A year ago, most marketing teams were still treating buying groups as a future-state ambition.
Look at who is claiming full implementation, though, and a more honest picture emerges. Marketers at executive level are significantly more likely to say their organization has fully implemented buying groups. However, more junior team members, who are typically the ones actually building the account lists, mapping the stakeholders, and running the programs, are far less likely to agree that the strategy is mature.
Moving to a buying group strategy is not a campaign change. It is an architectural one. Instead of marketing to a single lead, you are now identifying, reaching, and tracking a group of 10 to 20 stakeholders across a single account who all have different roles, different concerns, and are at different points in their decision journey.
Buyers today travel in groups of 13 or more and stay invisible until they are 70% of the way through the decision. By the time someone raises their hand, the shortlist is nearly set. Marketing to the one contact who filled in a form, while the other 12 people who influenced the decision never heard from you, is a structural problem. No amount of campaign optimization fixes it.
The challenges marketers cite when implementing buying groups are consistent. Technology limitations make it difficult to track and activate against a group rather than an individual. Coordinating outreach across multiple stakeholders trips up teams built around a lead-based workflow. And buying group data quality is a genuine barrier. Identifying who is in the buying group for a given account, keeping that data current, and having enough depth across target accounts to actually activate against it is a challenge.
A buying group profile that is six months old, or that only surfaces three of the twelve stakeholders involved in a decision, is not a buying group strategy. It is a contact list with a different name.
Anteriad holds a 5/5 score in the Forrester Wave for Buying Group Detail — the highest possible rating. Our AI-driven Buying Group Profiles give marketing teams the depth, accuracy, and recency to run a buying group strategy at scale, not just describe one.
The report's recommendations are direct. Here is how we see teams turning them into action:
A mature buying group strategy requires data infrastructure, cross-channel orchestration, and analytics that track group-level engagement rather than individual lead scores. Most marketing teams are not set up to build all of that from scratch.
Our team brings the data, the AI-driven profiles, and the execution capability to run coordinated multi-stakeholder programs, so you can move to a serious buying group strategy without rebuilding your entire operation to get there.
We put together an eBook covering everything you need: how to build your first buying group profile, what a fully activated strategy looks like, and how to measure it in a way that means something to your sales team and your CFO.