A Guide to Building a Buying Group Strategy

We’ve been talking about buying groups for a while, and there’s all kinds of research that shows that the way B2B buyers buy is in groups. But oftentimes marketing is lead centric, like sending lead by lead, one by one, single file to your sales team, and it’s not really the way buyers buy. This is Revenue Makers, the podcast by 6Sense, investigating successful revenue strategies that pushed companies ahead. Hey, Sima. You like to buy things. Right? Hey. I feel it tagged here. No. You know, I’m not saying you’re outspending money, but what was the last big thing that you bought? Big purchase. Oh gosh. Okay. So I just had a birthday, as you know. And so Thirty five. Thirty five. So I’m a fan of, like, sparkly things, and there was some jewelry involved. And it hey. Why not pick your own birthday present? And how many buyers were in your buying group for the jewelry? For the jewelry? One decision maker. I have a teenage daughter who was involved and a enabler. I have a teenage son who was like, you deserve it, mom. And I had a very gracious husband. So maybe four in total. Four. Okay. So that really kind of lame transition that I will make to BV buying groups. And we talk about, and this is something that if you have even been living under rock buying groups as a conversation has been going on for years. It’s like, how do you make a transition in your sales and marketing to a buying group process? And what we have today is a real life example of that actually happening and it driving success. It is a start to finish case study on how you build an internal case of moving towards buying groups. It is a how you start and implement and use all the things you have in place today and and move them toward this buying group methodology. It is about measurement and how you change that. And it is about maybe what you might do differently now that you’ve been down that journey. And we were so lucky to have Jessica Schaff on the show to walk us all through it. Yeah. She’s, you know, heads up growth marketing at Veeam and just a really, really great conversation about all the the ups and downs, how you make it happen and everything in between. And one really great, just like, you take one line away from it about AI, that I just thought was amazing way to look, I’m not gonna tell you. So let’s jump in everyone. Take a listen. Let’s do it. Jessica, thanks so much for joining us today. We are going to talk about something that everyone likes to talk about or it’s all over LinkedIn and social media about buying groups. And well, this is an interesting one, because it’s something it’s a concept that’s not new. It’s been around for a while. But there’s always talk about, like, this is what you should be doing, but who’s actually doing it. And you and Veeam are actually doing it. So we’re gonna really talk about that journey of going there, doing it, of building that model and executing on it and seeing some success. So does it sound good? Definitely. Thanks for having me. Let’s just start it off with, a really super basic question of, like, why? Why did you go down this path of making what is a pretty significant transition about how how you operate from a marketing perspective? Yeah. So like you said, we’ve been talking about buying groups for a while and there’s all kinds of research that shows that the way b to b buyers buy is in groups, talking about, you know, people that are hands on with the solution all the way up to the executive level. But oftentimes, marketing is centric, like sending lead by lead, one by one, single file to your sales team, and it’s not really the way buyers buy. We knew this, but we actually had a very pivotal, like, business change transformation happen that really was a forcing function to move to this model. So we’re a growing company. Veeam is about a one point seven billion dollar ARR company, growing about eighteen percent year over year, and we are needing to continue that growth and really expand that growth. And in order to do that, we believe that doing incremental changes wasn’t really gonna move the needle enough to support that growth. So we needed to make a transformational change. We had an organizational restructuring, and we also wanted to operationalize and operationally change. And so we went all in on this buying group model given the research that shows how it can help you grow. So it’s really that pivotal change in the business that said, okay. We need to make transform we need to, like, make transformational changes, not just incremental changes. And so that was, like, the rip the Band Aid moment to actually go to this model. And once the decision is made, Jessica, I mean, in theory, I think, to your point, there’s so much research to back it up. Everyone understands the need to move, but companies have been operating in a certain way for so long, and you’re not gonna throw out content. You’re not gonna throw out campaigns that exist. So where do you even start in terms of making a change that is fairly substantial? Where do you start? What are those initial considerations? Yeah. So we started with strategy. So looking at our campaign strategy, and we when we looked at our campaigns, we realized, you know, we’re really focusing on one buyer. Like, for example, the backup admin, which is just one person in the buying group, and we’re kinda going all in on that buyer. So we took a step back and looked at really who are the personas that are involved in the buying decision for our solution? Kinda taking a step back. And if we take a look, like, for example, the day to day users of our solution could be more of, like, a backup admin, an IT manager, but also now in our space, there’s a security professional that’s interested in our solution. And they all these day to day users need to get buy in from like IT management, IT leadership, CIO. And so we really took the time to understand who are the personas that are part of the buying group. And then once we did that, okay, these are the personas, really taking a deep dive look at what are their needs, what are their pain points, what are the questions that each of these buyers are asking across the buying life cycle? So for example, the security professional for our solution, you know, if you think about the beginning when they’re in the awareness phase, the security professional might be asking questions like ransomware. Ransomware is a big topic. How is my organization gonna be impacted from a business and an operational point of view if we have a ransomware attack? Where are we vulnerable? Those kind of awareness type questions. Where then as they’re moving down the journey more towards decision, you realize that the questions are more about solution, like what’s the pricing? Do you have a customer example that is like my company that experienced this and they used your solution, or how is this solution integrated into my existing environment? So you start to realize, you know, really thinking through the questions along the buying cycle, the breadth of the questions can, you know, change as people move along the buying cycle. So that’s how we started, like, looking at the personas and what are the questions they’re asking along the buying cycle. And then like you said, you know, you don’t just wanna throw out everything that you’ve already done. We then mapped our content along, like, do we have the content that are answering these questions? So do we have the solution level content, pricing and customer level examples? And then do we also have that upper level content in terms of more learning about the need? So we did that mapping of content. And in our case, we realized that we were pretty heavy in the decision making phase and answering those questions, but more light in the awareness. And so that’s where we realized we had content gaps and started to then did the content plan around to fill those gaps. And then also thinking about our gated and ungated strategy because in the earlier phases of the journey, we wanna make sure that content is ungated because people don’t wanna fill out a form right away. And then as we warm them up, then we start at the end of the cycle, have more gated content. So that is how we started, like, thinking about their persona, mapping out the questions, mapping out our content, not throwing out everything out the window, and then seeing where our gaps are and then building out the content where we had gaps. So were there any surprises along the way? And actually when you said that you had that decision making content, I feel like unlike my experience, especially like coming into roles, it’s usually flip. There’s usually like so much of a heavy top of funnel, like constantly creating top of funnel content. And then as you sort of go down funnel, it gets really kind of thin. But was there anything that you were just, like, shocked by, surprised by either during the persona mapping process or going through the content? Maybe just a realization, like you said, that, you know, we’re heavy in the decision phase. You know, I think sometimes tech companies, you love your product and so you really wanna, like, focus on the tech, and so we were lighter on the awareness phase. And then another surprise or realization is that we were overgated on our content. And if you wanna open it up and get warmer up in the upfront, you have to, like, let go of the gates. That was another cultural change that we had to make across our team. We have AI. Whenever I hear there’s a content gap that we need to fill, we need to start thinking about how we’re providing rich content for individual personas. Obviously, AI can play a role there. How did you and your team take advantage of ChatGPT or whatever else you’re using to really speed up this process of filling in the gaps? It’s definitely a big topic for all of us and especially in marketing and content. We have an internal Veeam, ChatGPT, that we use to help us speed up content. We’re looking at different tools to scale our content. And then also, we consider AI one of the elements of the buying group because our customers are using AI to do their research. So we really, in addition to using it to help us be efficient and scaling content, thinking about it like how are customers using it to research solutions? So taking a little step forward on your question is that we consider AI as part of our buying group, and so also thinking about what’s the content strategy for AI driven search and thinking about long form content, natural language content, making sure that we have an authoritative author that’s recognized in the market, an authoritative tone in terms of getting credibility with AI driven search. So it was both like, how do we use tools to really scale content? And we’re still on that journey. And then also ensuring that we’re considering AI as part of the buying group. That’s a hot, hot, hot topic. Right? So like thinking about it as a member of the buying committee, I think is a really smart way to think about it. You started with strategy, you got strategy, you built that sort of had the framework for it. How did you actually go from that point of saying, okay, here’s what we’re looking at. Here’s all the personas, here’s the content map, here’s kind of strategically what we’re looking to do. And then how do you sort of go and, like, take that to execution across different channels, your teams? And I would imagine given the size, you don’t have a small marketing team, so there’s probably quite a few stakeholders and so forth to work with. Definitely. So the next part is, okay, we have our strategy together exactly, and now we have to put it into execution. So one thought is, like, how do we find out when buyers are asking these questions that we’ve mapped out, and how do we know where they are in their buying cycle? Sixth Sense. So as part of this, we went all in on Sixth Sense. So we use Sixth Sense to understand. We’ve mapped out all the key terms that are part of these questions and built segments within Sixth Sense and pushed those segments across our channels, so digital advertising, email marketing, in our web chat, so that we are orchestrating and finding those buyers that are expressing intent along those questions, along their buying cycle. So that was like, sixth sense is like the input into our execution. And then using sixth sense audiences within our channels, and then also making sure that our teams like, a cultural moment across our teams. A cultural change because we’re so used to, like, thinking lead by lead and also going after one persona. Like, it also just cultural change across our teams. Like, this is the strategy and making sure everybody’s bought into the strategy. Okay. You lead, for example, paid digital advertising. How are you gonna help us go find these buyers? Okay. We’ve got Sixth Sense, making sure we’ve got tracking in place to see how we are capturing these buyers and putting them into a group. So sixth sense was a key part of our execution and making sure that’s a key input, and then the cultural change of getting our teams to make sure that we are executing against the strategy that we just defined and that we’re all bought into it. Was everyone just sort of, like, excited to jump in at that moment? Like, this is a fundamental shift. It’s gonna change how we work, but everyone was excited. You have some stragglers who were like, I don’t know. Like, I love my MQLs, my gated content. You know? There’s always, I think, people across the spectrum, and there was you know, it didn’t go perfectly. Right? Like, with any change that we kinda rolled out this strategy, and then we do a pulse check, and you realize, oh gosh. Gosh. We’re still not fully scaling to all the personas in our buying group. Team, let’s do a regroup and make sure that we are adjusting to the strategy. So it didn’t go perfectly, and we just had to, like, make sure we had solid regroups and tracking and making sure that we are all aligned as we move forward. I imagine part of that alignment, Jessica, comes down to measurement and leading and lagging indicators of how you even gauge the success of this. Right? For any change, that’s where a lot of the questions and sort of the pushback comes from because, you know, the way we measure success is is obviously gonna be very different if you are living in an MQL world to now moving to buying groups and engaging so many different people across that buying group. So what did you do specifically in terms of changing your measurements? And was there, you know, beyond measurement and dashboards, was there dashboards, was there just an overall change in frequency of reporting up and all of that as part of this change? Yeah. And we definitely evolved it as we learned. We evolved our measurement as we learned. And part of it was implementing new technologies. We needed to implement new technologies to have the data to measure. So for example, in addition to Sixth Sense that I already talked about, ZoomInfo, we implemented that in order to enrich data and make sure we know, have more information on the personas that we’re going after. Also, lean data. We adopted lean data, which helps us automate the buying groups so that we’re passing to our SDRs the group together, not just individuals anymore. We implemented Adobe Measure for the attribution and understanding the touch points. And then we started with a scoring model. We have a buying group score so that if you have an account and you’re seeing two people in the buying group start to engage, that that gets scored up for the SDRs who follow-up as a group. We have individual scoring so that we start to see where individuals are starting to become highly engaged or hand raisers. So we have a scoring model around the buying group as well as individuals. And then we’re building out data to understand, are we missing people in the buying group that we need to go after? So evolving the metrics over time, but we’ve moved away from MQLs. We’re focused on pipeline, getting the buying group score moving, and making sure that we are looking at intent signals and engagement signals that are bringing all the personas together to drive pipeline. The measurement part of it is evolving in as we learn and go. Given you obviously, multi persona, and you’re measuring influence, you’re measuring attribution, like, did you look at that front? If you’ve got, say, five or six different personas coming in from five or six different channels or more, how do you sort of bring that up into sort of like a full view across the account journey with all these personas and channels in play? Yeah. So we are able to see, for example, as I was mentioning, how many personas or we call them key players that we have within an account. So we have dashboards that show for this many opportunities, we have this many buyers, and we know that if we have two or more buyers engaged, that we’re able to get bigger opportunities and bigger close one opportunities. So the reporting has had to change to show us that we have multiple personas engaged versus just one lead, and we’re continuing to build that out. Like, for example, we’ve noticed a gap in terms of, okay. We know we have two key players, but can we really drill down? Are we missing more IT admins versus IT leaders so that we can, like, focus our spend on going after the personas that we’re missing the most. So just trying to get more and more granular on which personas we have more of versus less of to, like, focus our spend. Any lessons learned now that you’re kind of on the other side of this journey or you’ve gone through this transformation? Are there any things that you would do differently or you would maybe do first versus second just based on the fact that you are on the other side? Yeah. So we ripped the Band Aid, as I mentioned, and it broke a lot of things. When you talk about measurement, we actually didn’t have measurement for, like, a full quarter, so we were, like, driving a little bit blind because we were still implementing solutions. And so I often think, would I do that again? Would I do the Band Aid, or would I do more, like, have two paths going and, like, slowly move over? And there’s advantages and disadvantages to that. I think the rip the Band Aid just helped us move. Like, we gotta get to this, and it really was like maybe we had one quarter of missing our marketing targets, but after that, like, then the second quarter, seeing glimmers of, okay. This is starting to work. And then the third quarter, blowing our targets out of the water. The fourth quarter, like, okay. We’ve now moved into this motion. So I think the lessons that I think about are that, like, ripping the Band Aid versus doing crawl, walk, run. And so I go back and forth on that one. Would I do it again on the rip the Band Aid or do more, like, gradual? I’m a fan of ripping the Band Aid. I think there’s a little bit of, you know, setting things up at the beginning, but with a change this large, there has to be an organizational sort of, this is the line in the sand. Let’s go. Of course, every company is different. I think every reality is different. But when you’ve done all this prework on the strategy like you had at Veeam, when you’ve done the communication and really getting people on board, I think at that point Just go. Let’s go. Last kind of big question. Where do you think buying group engagement and sort of this sort of approach to sales and marketing is going next? If you had to, like, take out your crystal ball for a second. Or maybe if not that, where are you taking it next within Veeam? So the next phase, and I touched on it a bit, is really making sure AI is gonna become more and more part of the buying group. So, you know, when we started this journey, we focused on the actual personas, and then the next, like, okay. We just, this year, are thinking, okay. We need to adjust that to make sure AI is part of the buying group. And more and more, I think it’s gonna be people are just relying on AI research and part of their buying cycle. So I think that is the phase that we’re in now is expanding the buying group to include AI as one of the personas, really. Love it. Love that. Jessica, we have a question that we ask every single guest of the podcast, and this is not about buying groups. This is about you and your career. Can you tell us the most ridiculous thing you’ve been asked to do in your career, whether it was good, whether it was bad? What’s one of those standout moments that you’re like, this is just ridiculous? I would say in COVID times. So COVID was such a crazy time that you just had to, like, try everything because the world changed. And, for example, events, you know, all of our events got canceled, everybody, and that’s a key marketing motion. And so one thing that we did that was logical at the time, but when I look back on it, gosh, what a crazy thing that we did, is we did T shirt campaigns because, you know, people come to events and they want their giveaways, and we’re like, we’re gonna do virtual events. How do we still do our giveaways to make sure people are happy? And so we did, like, these big virtual T shirt giveaways, and it was just funny and also difficult to do because how do you fulfill this and make sure each individual gets their giveaway still? So that’s one of the craziest things I think that we did, and it was a weird moment back in COVID where you had to think differently and, like, how are you still gonna make people happy and do things make a an event experience in a time where it’s gonna be completely virtual. Some of the best innovations I feel came out of that time. I still look back dead like, man, we lived through one of the wildest times in history. Well, thank you. This was great. A lot of great actionable insights, really good view of things. And, again, AI as a member of the buying group, that’s such a moment idea that I I think that people are gonna just be blown away by that as a concept. So really appreciate it. Thanks so much for jumping on. Thank you. Thank you for having me. You’ve been listening to revenue makers. Do you have a revenue project you were asked to execute that had wild success? Share your story with us at six cents dot com slash revenue, and we might just ask you to come on the show. 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