The concept of buying groups isn’t new. In enterprise sales, understanding the dynamics of the buying group is crucial to tailor the experience across marketing and sales. Yet, still, the use of buying groups isn’t always embedded within an organisation.
Earlier this year, Forrester shared a lot about buying groups at their B2B Summits – why they matter, how to consider them, the impact on marketing, considerations for the sales process and deal evaluation.
Several analysts also floated thinking on how buying groups – essential in large complex deals and ABM programmes – can be used to measure the impact of ABM programmes.
Measuring ABM is a conversation that crops up a lot – and I mean, a lot. There are various approaches, usually all custom designed to fit with how the organisation measures sales and marketing return. These sit alongside traditional demand metrics, programme performance and attribution models. All of which provide insight on various components of the revenue generating elements within a business.
Traditional marketing metrics don’t work for ABM measurement
The problem with measuring ABM though, is it’s all about accounts – and ‘account opportunity generation’. Yet, marketing automation and the CRM is set up to report on leads and people – until sales gets involved and creates an opportunity.
If you’re measuring ‘account success’, you can’t see the success of the account opportunity metrics until you’re much further down the ‘funnel’. So, how do you know if what you’re doing within marketing is engaging the accounts in the right way, and how do you demonstrate success in a high investment programme like ABM?
The burning question is, how do you identify success metrics and demonstrate return on an approach that is fundamentally different to how we conventionally measure marketing activity?
One solution put forward at the Forrester B2B Summit was about going back to the concept of buying groups – and using the level of engagement of buying groups as a measure of success. Before we start to explore this, let’s put some clear explanations in place for terms that might get used later.
What is a buying group?
A buying group is a collection of multiple buyers with different roles, all connected to a single opportunity within an organisation. These groups typically include various stakeholders such as:
- Decision-makers (e.g. VP of HR)
- Champions (e.g. Director of Talent Management)
- Users (e.g. Recruiter)
- Influencers (e.g. Recruiting Manager)
- Ratifiers (e.g. Procurement Manager)
Each member of the buying group plays a unique role in the purchasing process, and their involvement varies throughout the buying cycle.
From a marketing standpoint in ABM, we may only focus on Decision Makers or Champions, but sometimes we extend further to other members of the group. Until an opportunity is created though, we have no idea whether we’re getting traction with the ‘account’. We do know we’re getting traction with Sandra, the VP and John, the Director, but we can’t group these together before an opportunity is created – they’re seen as individuals disconnected from the account.
A deeper explanation: How leads, contacts and opportunities work together
These various buyers may be targeted individually with specific messaging or campaigns enabling us to generate ‘leads’ as part of a demand, or ABM, programme.
As these leads are synced with the CRM, they sit in the lead ‘bucket’. I’m assuming the use of Salesforce when talking about leads, contacts, accounts and opportunities.
In Salesforce, leads sit separately from contacts, accounts and opportunities. They’re all different ‘objects’ within the database. A lead will convert to a contact when an opportunity is created, and at that point the ‘account’ is created. This means that we can only measure the success of ABM at an account level, when we know we have converted a lead to an opportunity and the account is created.
Simple so far. The success of our ABM programme is measured in the opportunity value associated with the accounts that are part of the programme.
This is great, but large complex sales have long sales cycles, so how do you know if the work you’re putting in during the early days is having any traction to drive value across the programme? Investing for 12 months before an opportunity is created is a big risk in terms of strategy, your reputation and keeping all parties within the business engaged.
Reality check: How ABM measurement is today
Right now, the only way to do that is to use an ABM platform such as Demandbase or 6sense, which can surface that information. They show levels of intent, how accounts are engaging and interacting with the brand. But, until the opportunity is created, you’re dealing with leads, and leads don’t have an account associated with them in the CRM, so you can’t get that data until you’re much further into the programme.
You end up stitching together disparate sources of data to get a rough picture of whether your ABM programme is delivering. Yet when the CEO or CMO is asking for demonstrable results against your GTM strategy and the dream of ABM that you sold in… it’s tough.
How measuring buying groups within the CRM can change this
Forrester advocated a rethink of how opportunity stages are structured within the CRM. This is not without pain and complexity, and a huge battle around internal change, but not impossible. The approach is certainly easier in smaller organisations than large complex businesses, with multiple divisions, product areas and propositions.
The concept created much discussion both with other analysts, advocates of the recommendations, and naysayers too at the recent Forrester Summits. Not everyone liked it as it’s a significant change.
The idea evolved around extending opportunities to include new stages focused on marketing within the opportunity stages.
What this would do is enable the creation of a ‘marketing opportunity’ when a set of triggers are met. Triggers might be 2 members of the buying group engaged, X number of engagements across an account, score-based or other type of trigger relevant to your business.
With ABM, the aim is to engage the account, and as marketers we need to know success metrics earlier in our programmes, rather than just when a sales opportunity is created. That’s too late to know.
By using the buying group engagement levels as a measure, you can start to see what accounts are engaged and what stage they’re at. And if they’re surfaced as an opportunity earlier in the process, then you can see them in opportunity level reporting from within the CRM.
There are obvious issues with this approach, but plenty of positives too. It’s not for the faint hearted. And as you can imagine there was a lot of debate around feasibility and success. There were a few piloting the new structure, testing success and gathering insights – but this was only a handful.
For others it was too complex, too challenging for their current operating model. Instead, they were looking at levels of intent and using ABM platforms to measure success – relying on bringing the data together and creating custom dashboards for visibility.
Right now, we’re not seeing this in action with our clients or prospects. Most are still establishing their ABM programmes, considering scaling out or proving the success of pilots. The thought of changing the CRM architecture to measure success is not something they’re going to contemplate soon.
We’re off to the Forrester B2B Summit EMEA in London in October. It will be interesting if this is still a hot topic on the floor.
