The Lead-Based Approach Has Failed Us: It’s Time to Move On

Q: Are buying groups a new thing?

Thought experiment: Imagine what the buying process for an IBM mainframe would have been in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Is it conceivable that one or even just a few people in an organization would have established the business requirements for such an expensive, transformative purchase — much less conducted evaluations, developed proof of concept projects, and designed the implementation strategies for the large corporations that purchased mainframes during that time? A purchase that cost a million or more dollars at the time would have required input from senior executives, the nascent information technology department, the finance, operations, and procurement departments, and multiple representatives from end-user functions such as manufacturing, supply chain, engineering, and others, depending on the type of company making the purchase.

For most B2B purchases, the buyer is and has always been a group of individuals acting together to solve a business problem. Our focus on individual leads has hampered B2B revenue production. Learn how to move from lead-centricity to doing B2B properly in this guide.

April 1, 2024 —

Kerry Cunningham

Chapter 1

Introduction and Quick Summary

Chapter 2

This B2B Buyer Is a (Mostly) Anonymous Buying Group

Chapter 3

Transforming the Demand Process: Aligning to How Buyers Buy

Chapter 4

Adapting Measurement Practices

Chapter 5

Managing Change

Chapter 1

Introduction

There is a fundamental disconnect between what we know about how B2B buying is done and how B2B companies pursue buyers.

B2B buying is done by teams, not individuals. Yet the traditional methods of reaching potential customers are geared to recognize and respond to individuals rather than buying groups.

The purpose of this report is to arm you to make the case for change in your organization. In this report, we detail:

Why B2B is about buying groups, not leads
How traditional B2B marketing causes missed deals and wasted time
How to use buying group signals — rather than just individual leads — to drive massive productivity gains

While we encourage you to read the entire report, we intend it as a reference to return to as you progress in evolving your organization.

The main body of the report is preceded by an executive summary, as well as a section-by-section summary. These are intended to help introduce the main arguments of the report, and to guide you to the parts of the report that are germane to your organization.

The Executive Summary: (342 words, about 2 minutes) A very brief summary of the argument for moving on from lead-based demand practices.
A Section-by-Section Summary: (673 words; about 4 minutes) A brief overview of each aspect of the argument for moving on from the lead-based approach to revenue generation, including what to do next, how to adjust measurement strategies, and managing change.
The Report: (11,475 words; about an hour) The complete argument for moving on from leads, with in-depth analysis, detailed support from the research, and recommendations from former SiriusDecisions and Forrester analyst Kerry Cunningham, who leads 6sense Research.

Executive Summary

342 words, about 2 minutes

This executive summary states the argument of the report in brief. We encourage you to read beyond this section to understand the context of the insights and their implications for B2B sales.

The Reality: B2B purchases are dictated by buying groups that are typically around 11 people – but can balloon to dozens, most of whom remain anonymous until after they have chosen a winner.

Most B2B revenue teams still do not have mechanisms in place to notice when a buying team, rather than a lone individual, is demonstrating interest.

Why It Matters: By the time a buying group member fills out a form on a vendor website, their buying group has likely had hundreds of interactions across the internet and dozens on the vendor website. And by the time a member of the buying group speaks with a seller, his or her buying group has already decided which vendor they would like to buy from more than 80% of the time.

To influence buying groups and win more deals, B2B sellers need to recognize when clusters of individuals within a target account are researching solutions at the same time – even when they are doing so anonymously. This group activity is a the best early-warning signal of a potential deal. But it’s nearly always missed.

We Are Missing What Matters: Many common sales and marketing tools are blind to buying group activity. Worse yet, they may see multiple leads from one buying group as duplicates – effectively stifling the best buying signals available.

Bottom Line: Revenue teams that are focused on leads burn precious resources chasing leads that are not part of active buying groups, while ignoring real buying groups that are largely anonymous but will make a purchase. Buying group signals focus revenue teams on the needs and purchase timing of real buyers. Armed with this intelligence, revenue teams can develop relationships with these buyers and turn them into customers at a much higher rate. This transformation can be undertaken in a step-wise manner that includes evolving success measurement strategies.

Section-by-Section Summary

673 words, about 4 minutes

Below is a summary of the main arguments for moving on from leads. This summary is intended to enable you to reference sections of the document that are most pertinent to your company’s current state.

Buyers are Groups, Not Individuals

Buying groups consist of about 10 people. Larger deals may involve even more. Buying team members come from various departments, and include senior executives who do their own research.

The Signals Are There, But You Must Act on Them

Buying group signals are the most reliable signals for determining which accounts are in market.
Because only 2 out of 10 buying group members will fill out a form to see content*, every B2B organization should deanonymize their existing web traffic to reveal which accounts are already there researching.
Even with that, less than 20% of buyer research is conducted on vendor websites, so revenue teams must look to 3rd party intent data to complete the picture of which accounts are truly in market.
The combination of anonymous traffic and 3rd-party intent arms revenue teams to effectively enable buyers, while optimizing marketing spend and productivity.

MQL: By the Time You See the Signal, It’s Too Late

Buyers don’t engage with sellers until they are more than two-thirds (70%) through their journey.
37% of buyers respond to BDRs or sellers, but 50% reach out proactively when they need to talk
And 84% of the time, buyers have already decided on the winning vendor by the time they initiate contact.
Revenue teams that wait for form fills and conventional MQLs to alert them to potential buyers are missing deals or getting in too late to influence decisions.

Understanding Buyers

Aligning marketing and sales on an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) of high-potential prospects is essential.
Better data can help marketing, sales, and customer support align around the best accounts to target.
Because at most just 5% – 10% of accounts are ready to buy at a given time, ICP is only the beginning of effective account prioritization. The 10% you really want to identify are those that are in-market – the In-Market Ideal Customer Profile (IICP) accounts.
AI powers IICP targeting by using historical customer data to discern patterns, then compares every ICP account to those patterns to identify the in-market accounts.
Those same patterns not only identify which accounts are in-market, but where in their journeys they are. This enables even more refined targeting and messaging.

Winning Buyer Hearts and Minds From Day One of the Journey

The best B2B companies win over buyers and develop relationships long before buyers and sellers interact.
This means making relevant, up-to-date content easily available and consumable across the buying journey and for all key buyer personas.
Even before discovery calls and demos, there are numerous tools available to build buyer relationships, including online communities, industry events, as well as interesting and educational experiences for buying group members.

It’s Time to Focus Marketers on a Different Set of KPIs

Focusing measurement on lead production and conversion does not directly improve revenue productivity — and is often counterproductive.
Abandoning comfortable goals and metrics is hard, but the reward is a much clearer picture of marketing’s contribution to deal flow.
ABM-focused organizations that compensate marketers based on opportunity production rather than leads have experienced an 8% increase in financial performance.
Revenue teams should be analyzing anonymous engagement, marketing influence, buying stage progression, and other engagement trends to understand what is engaging buyers.

Transitioning to a Buying Group-Centric B2B Model

For marketers, there must be a fundamental shift from generating leads to generating opportunities.
Though it has never been true, revenue teams have treated each lead as a unique selling opportunity. Treating each lead as a unique selling opportunity has led to the false appearance of abundance.
Shifting the focus to buying groups can feel like reducing the volume of selling opportunities. In reality, it is simply focusing the organization on real opportunities, rather than random form fills.

We’ve provided checklists to help guide your teams through the transition. Transparency and communication are the keys to success.

* Source: PathFactory report: The Rise of the Anonymous B2B Buyer | Data collected, July 1, 2021-October 31, 2022.

The Report

This document is intended to present a full argument for why organizations need to leave lead-based demand generation practices behind. Most of that “why” argument is built around the primary shortcomings of the lead-based approach, which:

Doesn’t target the best accounts.
Misses most of the real selling opportunities while sending BDRs and Sales chasing after the professionally curious content consumers, and
Leads to measurement practices that fail to capture the value that marketing is producing.

The rationale presented here is often given as an argument for why organizations need to move to an ABM approach, but in this document, we avoid framing it that way. In B2B today, ABM is considered a demand creation approach for part of a company’s GTM strategy. What is presented here – moving away from lead-centric practices – is universally applicable to nearly all segments of B2B audiences.

What we present here is not a strategy for part of a company’s go-to-market strategy but for doing B2B properly.

This document goes into considerable depth in each of the areas it covers, but it isn’t intended as a how-to manual. Instead, it is a why-to that necessarily touches on some of the ‘how’s that must change.

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Chapter 2

The B2B Buyer Is a (Mostly) Anonymous Buying Group

Section Summary: B2B purchases are made by collaborative groups, not individual buyers. Surveys from Forrester, Gartner, 6sense, and more consistently confirm this. Intelligence platforms Clari and PathFactory emphasize the substantial size variation in buying teams, ranging from seven up to over 100 individuals, depending on deal size and company scale. While the existence of multiple buyer personas is common knowledge in B2B, this realization is not integrated into core demand creation and capture processes. Shifting from an individual-centric approach to one that better matches how buying and selling in B2B works is vital for an effective B2B marketing strategy.

For most B2B purchases, the buyer is and has always been a group of individuals acting together to solve a business problem. There is ample evidence for this derived from surveys of both buyers and sellers. There is evidence that comes directly from marketing and sales systems, such as marketing automation (MAP) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems.

Forrester Research has reported that 94% of respondents said that they sell to groups of three or more individuals. Thirty-eight percent sell to groups of 10 or more (Forrester)
Gartner reported buying groups of between six and 10 decision makers (Gartner)
6sense Research findings have been consistent with analyst firms. In two distinct studies separated in time by approximately one year, 6sense found that buying teams average between nine and 10 individuals.

But we don’t have to rely solely on survey findings. Revenue intelligence platform Clari captures data by logging all individuals who are invited to meetings or are on sales emails. In their 2020 study, they found that buying teams ranged from seven to 19, depending on the size of the deal. Content intelligence platform, PathFactory, which captures individuals, both known and anonymous, who interact with content, reported that the number of individuals who engage with vendor website content ranges from 30 when the prospect is a smaller company, to well over 100 when the buyer has more than 1,000 employees.

Thought experiment: Imagine what the buying process for an IBM mainframe would have been in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Is it conceivable that one or even just a few people in an organization would have established the business requirements for such an expensive, transformative purchase — much less conducted evaluations, developed proof of concept projects, and designed the implementation strategies for the large corporations that purchased mainframes during that time?

A purchase that cost a million or more dollars at the time would have required input from senior executives, the nascent information technology department, the finance, operations, and procurement departments, and multiple representatives from end-user functions such as manufacturing, supply chain, engineering, and others, depending on the type of company making the purchase.

The realization that purchasing decisions involve multiple individuals is hardly a revelation in B2B marketing. For years, marketers have routinely created content and tactics to attract and engage multiple buyer personas in prospect organizations. But they’ve normally failed to build processes that recognize when multiple individuals from those organizations demonstrate interest. In fact, the term “buyer” in B2B is still largely synonymous with an individual person who shows interest.

The Gap Between Marketing Output And The Value It Could Be Producing

Section Summary: B2B marketing excels at generating interest in the form of web visitors, yet most organizations fail to capture, use, and measure the dozens – even hundreds –of buying group interactions that occur on their digital properties during a buying journey. This failure wastes most of the investment marketers make in generating interest. For example, organizations receive 1.5 to 2.5 leads per in-market account but existing systems (MAPs, CRMs) lack mechanisms notice when this is happening. Business Development Representatives (BDRs), who are driven by lead-conversion incentives, are oblivious — or even hostile — to the presence of buying groups. These challenges not only obscure the organization’s revenue productivity, but also weaken performance measures.

B2B marketing teams successfully generate interest from buying groups within prospect accounts. This interest appears primarily as anonymous website visits and leads. As we will describe in detail below, for every lead from an in-market account, there are likely to be at least five more anonymous visitors from the same account. However, 69% of B2B revenue teams have no insight into where that anonymous traffic is coming from (for a full discussion, see this report). This gap leads to significant inefficiencies in generating and capturing demand in B2B markets.

Our earlier discussion has already established that the buyer in B2B is a team of approximately 10 individuals. 6sense research has also shown that virtually all members of a buying group do some of their own research. Across all organizational levels and roles in the buying process, each member of a buying group is having more than 14 interactions with each vendor during a buying journey. The result is a treasure trove of buying signals to help identify the organizations that are truly in buying mode. Just as important: These signals help distinguish real buyers from other organizations where one or just a few individuals are demonstrating some interest.

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Table 1: Digital and Human Interactions per Person per Vendor by Level and Role

Metric	Champion	Financial Ratifier	Influencer	Procurement	Decision Maker	Average
Individual Contributor			15	7	6	11
Manager	18	21	19	15	17	17
Director	13	24	18	21	18	18
Vice President	12	14	22	10	13	14
Sr./ Exec Vice President	15	8	19	11	11	12
C-Level	21	22	24	15	13	16
Average	16	19	20	16	15	16

Note: Values in the cells represent the average number of interactions per person per vendor evaluated during a buying journey. Source: 6sense Research, Buyer Experience Study, 2023

With all these interactions, it should not be surprising to learn that most B2B organizations generally receive from 1.5 to 2.5 form-fill leads per account that is in–market.

Buying Signals Hidden in Plain Sight

Section Summary: Despite clear evidence that interest from multiple individuals in an organization signifies a strong buying signal, current B2B systems like marketing automation platforms (MAPs) and customer relationship management systems (CRMs) are not designed to highlight this key signal. These systems treat each lead as a unique selling opportunity, missing the big picture when multiple leads show interest from the same account. This leads to a critical gap in recognizing and acting upon the strongest buying signals, ultimately affecting opportunity production and marketing performance metrics.

It is indisputable that multiple individuals from the same account demonstrating interest in a solution at the same time is a stronger buying signal than if just one individual demonstrated interest. However, the systems and processes B2B organizations have been using (e.g., MAP, CRM) were not designed to surface this fundamental B2B buying signal.

Marketing automation platforms (MAPs) treat each lead as a unique selling opportunity, and none have provided a facility to effectively aggregate lead scores within an account.

Customer relationship management systems (CRMs) do not provide this functionality, either.

As a result, most organizations are unaware when they are receiving multiple leads demonstrating interest in the same solution or solutions from the same account.

The crucial job of noticing that an account is showing interest is largely left to the individuals who receive and follow-up on those leads. In most organizations, these are the Business Development Representatives (BDRs) or Sales Development Representatives (SDRs), who are generally the least experienced members of a revenue team.

Even if BDRs do notice that they are receiving interest from multiple individuals within the same account, other factors discourage them from taking the appropriate actions:

Buying Group Blindness: Most organizations do not prioritize accounts that produce multiple leads. There is simply no recognition that different actions should be taken and no plan for capitalizing on this glaring signal of buyer interest.
Misaligned Incentives: Conventional BDR incentive structures are designed to incentivize the production of a single qualified lead within an account – one meeting for a sales representative per account.^[1] As a result, the second or subsequent leads from the same organization are treated as duplicate leads rather than mounting evidence that a buying team is conducting an evaluation.
Second Lead Syndrome: Making matters worse, rather than being valued as signals of deepening interest, second and subsequent leads from an account are often treated as “duplicate” or “bad” leads. Instead of driving the right actions, they count against the lead conversion rates by which marketing is evaluated. Producing more leads inside a set of target accounts often hurts marketing statistics.

The Buying Group is Almost Entirely Anonymous

Section Summary: A tiny fraction of B2B website visitors convert to form-fill leads, averaging just over 3%. PathFactory shows that 85% to 90% of identifiable account visitors remain anonymous throughout their buying journeys. Even eventual buyers only fill in forms 30% of the time, leaving seven out of 10 individuals who will eventually be customers anonymous. On average, B2B buying groups have 160 interactions with each vendor, mostly being anonymous digital interactions. Resolving anonymous web traffic to its origins offers crucial insights, identifying active buying processes without form-fill leads.

Yet another obstacle preventing marketers from capitalizing on the enormous volume of signals emitted by buying groups is that the form-fill leads discussed above constitute only a minute fraction of the visitors to a B2B provider’s website. Echoing findings from analyst firms and others, more than 500 respondents to a spring 2022 survey conducted by 6sense Research reported an average conversion rate from unique web visitors to lead (completed form) of just over three percent. This number is consistent with findings from other researchers dating back to 2011.

While website visitor counts include bots, students, competitors, and other non-buyer visitors, evidence from content intelligence platform PathFactory shows that 85% to 90% of visitors from identifiable accounts remain anonymous throughout their buying journeys.

Further, buyers responding to another 6sense survey – all of whom were part of a buying group that completed a purchase within the past 24 months – reported filling in a form on the website of the vendor they ultimately chose just 30% of the time. This suggests that members of active buying groups are more likely to fill in forms than other visitors. However, that still leaves as anonymous more than two-thirds of the buying team members who completed a purchase.

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In all, B2B buying groups report that they have 187 interactions, digital and human, with each vendor they evaluate during their buying journeys. The research suggests that most of these are anonymous, digital interactions (The 2024 Buyer Experience Report).

Put simply, for every visitor from an in-market account who fills in a form, there are between three and 20 or more others who remain anonymous.

Given this, there are two primary benefits to resolving anonymous web traffic back to its origins.

Early buyer awareness system. Resolving anonymous traffic to its corporate origins can alert B2B organizations of active buying processes in organizations from which there are no form-fill leads.
Better lead prioritization. Rather than basing lead prioritization on how much content a single individual consumes, organizations should prioritize leads where there is evidence from anonymous traffic that the form-filler is not acting alone, but is part of an active buying group.

Both anonymous and known individuals visiting the website represent outcomes from marketing activity. Harvesting maximum value from them is the best way to generate return on marketing’s investment in demand generation.

Buying Groups, Not Leads, Are the Pathway to Revenue

The most important reason to have buying groups at the forefront of the design of a demand generation process is that buying group signals are far and away the most important, reliable signals available for identifying the next best prospects to engage.

Prioritizing buying groups in demand generation is crucial because signals from these groups provide the best clues about which accounts to engage next. Here’s why: Almost every professional, no matter their role, visits B2B vendor websites. Their reasons vary from solving business issues to following industry trends or just exploring out of curiosity. As a result, most website traffic and even form submissions don’t indicate intent to purchase. They simply indicate some level of interest in the subject. While this activity could hint at future purchases, the actions of a single person from a company are not reliable indicators that the account is in-market.

However, if two people from the same organization are researching the same type of content and solutions, it is more likely to indicate an interest of the business, not just a person in the business. And, with every new individual from a company that comes to the website to research the same solution, the odds of that behavior pointing to an active buying process increase.

Most Solution Research Is Done on Non-Vendor Sites: The Role of Intent Data

Section Summary: With less than 20% of buying research occurring on vendor sites, B2B providers can tap into anonymous website traffic and other sources to capture valuable digital footprints. Intent data, which aggregates those anonymous interactions, offers a more reliable gauge of company interests than does the content consumption of lone individuals.

Organizations can dramatically increase the number of signals available for identifying active buying groups by harvesting their anonymous website traffic. However, any given B2B provider’s website traffic is just a small fraction of the total volume of signals available. As Gartner found in their survey of buyers, less than 20% of buyer research is conducted on vendor websites. Buyers conduct most of their research with industry publications, influencer websites and blogs, analyst firm and consultant content, plus social media.

B2B intent data is the category of buyer signal that encompasses the digital tracks left by buyers as they conduct research and consume content during their buying journey.

Buying groups have hundreds of interactions with each vendor they evaluate, but they have thousands of interactions in total. Some third-party sources, such as syndicated content2 and product review websites, identify the individuals who consume content.

Not surprisingly, however, most buying research on third-party sites is anonymous. As with anonymous website traffic, a meaningful volume of this activity can be resolved back to the accounts from which it comes. When this type of activity from multiple sources is combined, it is packaged and sold as intent data.

Just as with anonymous traffic, intent data is virtually always a record of the activity of multiple individuals from a given company. As such, it is a more reliable barometer of a company’s interests than the content consumption of any given individual.

By itself intent data is not an effective driver of seller activity. It is, however, an effective driver of marketing actions. As will be discussed below, intent data provides an early warning system to help marketing target its efforts and ensure that potential deals are not missed.

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Summing Up The Buying Signals

Section Summary: Resolving anonymous traffic provides a significant advantage over relying on individual form-fill leads. The true value surfaces when combining leads, anonymous traffic, and external intent data intelligently. Connecting all these signals and creating one coherent signal from them demands robust artificial intelligence.

As we have seen, form-fill leads represent a tiny fraction of the signals that are available to B2B providers from their own digital properties. When anonymous traffic is resolved back to its source, organizations can dramatically increase what they know about which companies are truly evaluating their solutions. But the volume of signals available from leads and anonymous traffic pale in comparison to what is available through externally sourced intent data.

The highest value from all these signals is achieved when they are intelligently combined. When combined, leads, anonymous website traffic, and third-arty intent provide an enormously powerful signal for telling which accounts are in-market and which are not. Where prospect accounts are demonstrating interest through all three, organizations should take notice – and action. Capitalizing on all these signals requires robust artificial intelligence, which we discuss later in this report.

The MQL Is Too Little, Too Early

Section Summary: Buyers engage with sellers on their own terms, initiating contact approximately 70% of the way through their buying journeys. Notably, when buyers do reach out, they’ve already determined who the winning vendor will be 84% of the time. Relying solely on form fills risks missing two-thirds of the buying process and engaging too late to influence decisions significantly.

Revenue teams should adapt outreach strategies, recognizing that leads from in-market buying teams have likely already chosen a vendor. Asking new prospects if they were the first vendor contacted can provide crucial insights for effective engagement.

Buyers Engage With Sellers On Their Own Terms

So far, we have established that buyers are large groups of individuals who emit an enormous volume of signals, which offers the most reliable indication of which prospects are genuinely in-market. And leads – particularly MQLs – represent just a tiny fraction of that available pool of signals.

There is yet another reason to look beyond the lead. Our recent research, corroborating numerous other sources, found that buyers report engaging directly with vendor representatives when they are 70% through their buying journey. For the average B2B buying journey that lasts 11 months, this means that buyers are in month eight of their journeys before engaging with sellers.

Even more, buyers report that when they do engage with sellers, they do so at a time of their choosing: eighty-three percent of buyers reported initiating contact with vendors. Even those that did report that their first direct interaction was in response to a vendor overture engaged at 70% mark of the buying journey. Buyers are clearly in control of their journeys, including when they first engage directly with vendors.

Buyers engage when they are ready. Even when B2B providers require that interested individuals fill out forms to view content, the data strongly indicate that outreach to these individuals is unlikely to succeed until they have completed their internal research process as a team.

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Buyers Engage After Choosing A Favorite For The Business

Critically, however, buyers also reported that when they reached out to vendors to begin direct interactions, they reached out first to the vendor that ultimately won the business. Coming more than two-thirds of the way through the buying process, this tells us that when buyers reach out to vendors to initiate direct contact, they have already decided which vendor they expect to be the winner 81% of the time.

Further, 81% of buyers reported that their requirements either didn’t change or changed only slightly after that point of first contact. Buyers have clearly decided what they want and from whom they want it most of the time before they interact with sellers.

Revenue teams that rely on website form-fills to identify buyers run the risk of missing two-thirds of the buying process and 81% of buying decisions.

When B2B organizations receive contact, demo, and trial requests from organizations that are truly in-market, it is overwhelmingly likely that the person filling out the form represents a buying group that has largely established their vendor preferences.

Sellers from organizations that wait for MQLs will be attempting to win over buyers too late to meaningfully influence the outcome.

Given what we know about buying team members who initiate contact with vendors, BDR and sales teams conducting outreach to leads should consider asking the prospect if they were the first vendor contacted. An answer of “yes” is a strong indication of a potential new customer. When the answer is “no,” the likelihood of winning the deal at this point is low, but there is still a chance. Sellers should consider the potential value of the prospect and prioritize resources accordingly.

Chapter 3

Transforming the Demand Process: Aligning to How Buyers Buy

To make the most of the available intelligence on in-market buyers, B2B revenue teams need to change their approach to creating, capturing, and converting demand. Many teams use account-based marketing (ABM) strategies. However, ABM alone isn’t sufficient. In the following sections, we’ll outline how organizations should adapt to be more effective.

Demand Creation Processes Must Be Precision-Targeted

Section Summary: B2B organizations need a clear Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), ideally centered on prospects with potential for profitable, long-term partnerships. However, that’s only the beginning. Effective prioritization requires alignment among all revenue disciplines. Revenue teams should effectively allocate marketing resources by focusing on the small set of accounts in their ICP that are most likely to be in buying mode soon — the In-Market Ideal Customer Profile (IICP). To create the IICP, AI-powered analysis identifies patterns in buyer behavior, distinguishing true intent from the professional curiosity. Going further to identify buying journey stages allows tailored investment and messaging, ensuring effective resource allocation and impactful outreach.

Above all else, B2B organizations must have a crystal-clear understanding of which companies they are targeting. In cases where companies have multiple offerings, that understanding must be extended deeper into prospect accounts to identify which parts of those accounts are the best prospects for each offering. Moreover, marketing, sales and customer success teams must be fully aligned on the definition of which companies are the best fit.

The Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) Is Just the Beginning

Ideal customer profile (ICP) is the term used to define a good customer. Importantly, a company’s ICP should be based on not just which types of companies are most likely to buy, but which are most likely to be the best long-term customers. That may mean excluding some companies that might be easier to sell but less likely than others to remain as customers, contribute to profitability, or help the organization win new customers.

For companies with addressable markets comprising only dozens or hundreds of companies, it may not be necessary to engage sophisticated analytics. In these cases, company leadership often has a clear understanding of which accounts they should be pursuing. For these small addressable market companies, it is still critical that marketing, sales, and customer success be aligned on which accounts those are.

Even more, all three functions must be aligned on where the best potential opportunities inside that set of accounts are. If marketing is targeting companies with tactics supporting one solution, but sales is keen to sell a different solution, simply being aligned on which accounts to market and sell to is not sufficient.

The Role of AI in ICP Definition

For companies with larger addressable markets, understanding how to segment and prioritize the universe of potential customers requires more sophisticated analysis. There are many methods available to conduct this analysis. The most effective methods employ AI operating against massive data sets to identify patterns that pinpoint which accounts are likely to become and be the best customers. While it may be possible to home in on a narrow set of accounts using standard firmographic measures, advanced AI operating against large datasets can reveal segments and accounts within segments that standard firmographic filtering would not.

The Importance of Revenue Team Alignment

At the end of the analysis, however, all three revenue production disciplines must agree about that prioritization. In particular, if sales has doubts about their ability to be successful against the set of accounts identified by the analysis, those doubts must be explored and resolved. In some cases, sales will have legitimate concerns based on their experience, and these concerns must be addressed. It may be that the product, pricing, or competitive positioning must be addressed before consensus can be reached. Failure to do so often results in poor sales performance, irrespective of the quality of the analysis.

Why We Can (and so Must) Dig Deeper than Just ICP

Section Summary: In the past, B2B buyers relied on sales reps as the primary source for most of their product research. With the rise of online content, buyers shifted to researching solutions independently. While this transition empowered buyers, it hid early buying stages from sellers. Now, abundant online evidence and widespread AI have reversed this, providing crucial insights into early stages of buying journeys.

Before B2B companies had websites, buyer research was limited to trade publications, industry experts, and the provider organizations themselves. As such, buyers had to rely more heavily on sales representatives to supply required information. Buyers had no choice but to engage with sellers earlier, so providers discovered in-flight buying journeys earlier than they do today.

As providers made more content available online, buyers were able to do more of their solution research online. And, as we have described above, from the earliest days of B2B content consumption, buyers have preferred to remain anonymous.

While web-based marketing has certainly simplified the purchasing process for buyers, it has simultaneously obscured the initial phases of the buying journey. This has made it challenging for providers to see early stages of buying journeys.

Fortunately, this disadvantage for sellers has largely been reversed as more of the digital evidence of buying journeys has become available, and as the artificial intelligence required to make sense of these signals has become ubiquitous.

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Not Just The ICP, The In-market ICP (IICP)

Section Summary: In an ideal scenario, B2B organizations would continuously reach all key individuals in their target accounts with relevant messaging. Yet, real-world constraints require strategic budget allocation and prioritization. Knowing the small fraction of one’s ICP fit accounts that are in buying mode (the in-market ICP) is crucial for maximizing returns.

Under optimal circumstances, B2B organizations would have robust campaigns delivering impressions to all key individuals inside every ICP fit account at all times. Under real-world conditions, however, organizations must make hard choices about where and how to spend precious marketing dollars.

Understanding which small fraction of their addressable market is likely to be in buying mode soon is the single most important thing most organizations could know to optimize the return on their marketing spend.

This is especially true because only a small fraction of organizations is in-market in any given quarter. In 2023, approximately 500 B2B revenue professionals reported to 6sense Research that only 9% to 11% of the accounts in their addressable markets make purchases in any quarter (About 10% of Your Potential Customers Are Ready to Buy This Quarter). That means that even for companies that have identified a set of accounts that fit their ICP, only about 10 out of every 100 of those companies are likely to be in buying mode at any given time. Research from the Eherenberg-Bass Institute and LinkedIn’s B2B Institute suggests that most for most B2B companies, the in-market figure is closer to the low end of the range we found.

Further, 6sense research also showed that B2B organizations have only 22% of the accounts that are in-market in their CRM systems (About 10% of Your Potential Customers Are Ready to Buy This Quarter).

Organizations that can prioritize their budget and resources toward the small set of accounts that are likely to be in-market in the near future have a great advantage.

Visibility into Account Buying Stages Enables Smarter Selling

To determine which accounts to focus on, it’s essential to constantly monitor the signals that Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) accounts emit. As we’ll explore, identifying which accounts are actively seeking solutions and pinpointing their stage in the buying journey is achievable.

Buying Journeys Have Stages – And They’re Not Funnel Stages

Section Summary: B2B buying and selling cycles both involve stages but are distinct processes, with buying cycles reflecting the buyer’s decision-making process and sales cycles describing the organization’s progress in securing a deal. Buying journeys and sales cycles sometimes run parallel once they intersect, but B2B buying journeys begin well before buyers engage with sellers, typically around two-thirds into their journey.

Like sales cycles, buying journeys in B2B have stages: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, and Purchase. These stages mark milestones on the path to making a purchase. While there are many different models to explain these stages, the key point is that buying groups go through a process to solve business problems. It’s important to recognize and measure this progression.

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At each step along the path to identifying a solution, buying groups research across a variety of media and sources. As their business requirements are clarified, buying groups look for the best solutions to meet those requirements, and seek information that will ultimately lead to the selection of a solution.

6sense Research has shown that these journeys require more than 4,000 digital and human interactions by a team of roughly 10 individuals over a period of 11 months (The 2023 Buyer Experience Report).

In contrast, sales cycles capture a selling organization’s progress in winning a deal, marking milestones in the seller-buyer relationship. Sales cycles also have stages, but those stages do not directly correspond to buying journey stages.

Confusion arises because buying journeys and sales cycles sometimes run parallel once they intersect. However, that intersection only occurs when buyers are around 70% of their way through their journeys (The 2024 Buyer Experience Report). As a result, a buying journey lasting twelve months likely corresponds to sales cycles that last only 5 months. On some occasions, of course, provider sales processes intersect with buying journeys much earlier, but our research has demonstrated that this is a rare occurrence.

Identifying Journey Stages In The Data

Section Summary: The thousands of interactions buying groups have during the buying journey generate a vast array of third-party and first-party signals, empowering modern marketing teams to discern genuine buying behavior through data. AI can look back in time at historical opportunity records, mapping intent, anonymous traffic, and lead signals to the weeks and months of the buying journeys that led up to opportunities being created. This facilitates precise mapping of the entire buying group journey, supporting targeted strategies tailored to each account’s current buying stage.

It’s clear that B2B buyers have many interactions during their buying journeys, with only a few occurring on vendor sites. For B2B companies, this large volume of data from outside their sites is key. It helps to identify patterns in buyer behavior. This way, companies can tell serious buying actions from general curiosity or research that isn’t related to a purchase.

A level deeper, the way accounts conduct solution research can reveal their position in the purchase process. This identification of buying stages leverages a company’s historical opportunity data, which records recent sales opportunities. Data science then aligns these opportunities with historical intent data, anonymous traffic, and lead information from the same accounts. For a typical five-month sales cycle, this retrospective analysis might cover an additional 10 months preceding the opportunity’s creation.

Subsequently, AI analyzes web traffic patterns, interest topics, and the number of distinct individuals showing interest. These algorithms, working with extensive datasets on buyer research behavior, can identify patterns linked to the phases accounts pass through during their research.

For instance, companies deep into their research for several months might shift their focus increasingly towards vendor website content. As buying teams become more acquainted with this content, their attention may turn to information that compares different vendor capabilities. Such behavioral shifts enable the mapping of the entire journey of a buying group, allowing for the identification of distinct journey stages.

After establishing these models, the behavior of each account within a company’s Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) can be assessed against the model to determine its current stage in the buying journey. For most B2B solutions, we already have ample data to make highly reliable predictions about which buying cycle stage a prospect account is in.

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Transforming Revenue Production with Buying Journey Stages

Because just 11% or less of ICP accounts are likely to buy a given B2B solution in any given quarter, even a reasonably good estimate of which accounts are in buying mode and which are not allows organizations to aim their demand generation and capture efforts at the serious buyers, while reserving lower-cost branding and awareness tactics for the accounts that are not in-market.

However, knowing which stage each account is in allows organizations to further refine their investment and messaging to meet buyers where they are with the information they need. This unlocks a new level of efficiency and productivity for revenue teams.

Journey Stages Drive Content and Tactics

Having mapped buying journeys into stages, organizations can examine how buyers’ information needs change as they progress through those stages. By examining patterns of keyword data and content consumption, revenue teams can determine which questions typically arise early in a buying journey and which late. Armed with this intelligence, revenue teams can assess existing content and tactics to identify and remediate gaps.

The Win-Win of Precision Buying Journey-Mapped Targeting

Providers that precisely tailor content and tactics to prospects based on their needs and preferences as they progress through their journeys simplify the highly complex job of buying in B2B. Revenue teams that excel at this establish themselves as reliable, value-adding partners to their buyers, all the while creating brand and solution preference.

At the same time, this level of precision targeting transforms how revenue teams utilize budget. Rather than spending budget at random across an ICP, revenue teams can now precisely allocate resources where they will best serve both buyer and revenue team goals. ICP accounts that are not in-market are targeted with high-scale, lower cost branding efforts, while those that are in the decision-making stages of buying journeys are targeted with high-value, lower-scale tactics that give the revenue team the best chance to compete for and win deals.

Yes, Account-based Marketing (ABM/ABX), But There Must Be More: The Role of Demand Capture

Section Summary: The benefits of account-based marketing are well-established but aren’t guaranteed. Without measuring in-market accounts and their buying stages, the benefits of targeted approaches remain unrealized. Many organizations, even those with ABM/X programs, fail to do this.

Many readers will have thought to themselves as they read the preceding sections that this sounds like account-based marketing (ABM/X). Indeed, it should. ABM/X is one approach organizations have adopted to being more targeted about the companies they market and sell to. Most involve,

Identifying an ICP and aligning marketing with sales on the definition of that ICP;
The selection and prioritization of the accounts in the ICP; and
The strategies, tactics, and messaging that will be used to attract and convert key buyer personas within those accounts.

To be sure, when organizations focus more marketing and sales resources against a well-chosen and agreed-upon set of targets, they tend to produce better results. The benefits of account-based marketing are well-established (see this article for a quick summary of ABM benefits), but they are not automatic. And for most organizations today, the results are far from optimized. That is because most organizations – even those that have ABM practices – have not adapted their demand capture and conversion processes to capitalize on the output of those ABM practices.

Most B2B organizations today, even those with ABM/X programs, do not measure which of their ABM accounts are in-market, much less which journey stage the accounts are in (Doing One Thing, Measuring Another). As a result, most are not able to take advantage of the precision targeting and resource utilization as described above. And most fail to establish robust demand capture strategies to capitalize on their more targeted marketing and sales motions.

Consider what we have established so far about the nature of B2B buyers and the signals they emit as they are researching solutions. When organizations focus more of their attention on a targeted set of accounts, initial success will be marked by two outcomes that most B2B organizations are still not likely to notice or exploit:

More anonymous traffic
Multiple form-fill leads per account.

Companies that are not identifying where their anonymous traffic is coming from, or which do not have the means to respond effectively when multiple individuals from the same account fill in forms, will be less able to distinguish the truly in-market buyers from those that may be much earlier in their consideration process. As a result, they will squander much of the benefit that their targeted approach has produced.

Finally, ABM/X programs are nearly always implemented as a strategy to execute against a very limited segment of a company’s total ICP. Most potential buyers do not receive ABM/X treatments.

But, unless B2B organizations are selling to businesses with fewer than 30 employees, they should apply the methods and strategies described above in this document to all their potential buyers.

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Winning Deals Prior to the Point of First Contact (POFC)

Section Summary: Winning B2B deals requires establishing a strong solution preference prior to direct seller engagement. Marketers should provide comprehensive information aligned with buyer information needs across each stage. B2B revenue teams must prioritize relationship-building outside of sales calls through online communities, subject matter experts, and small-group events that enhance brand preference. These strategies are not quick fixes, but contribute to long-term success by building early relationships with key decision makers.

The research into how B2B buyers buy is clear: buyers conduct most of their research anonymously, and they only talk to provider representatives when they have created and ordered a short list of vendors and chosen a favorite.

In other words, marketing organizations must win buyers over and establish a strong preference for their solutions prior to seller engagement.

Enabling Buyers at Every Step of Their Buying Process

First and foremost, what this means is that marketers must enable buying groups with all the information they need to make favorable buying decisions on their own. The organizations that make this information easily accessible and consumable have the advantage.

As a best practice, organizations should inventory both the key questions their prospects must satisfy through the course of their buying journeys, as well as their content and tactics. Aligning content and tactics to specific buyer questions allows organizations to identify content gaps. This content alignment should be completed for key buyer personas. Last, as described earlier, organizations should also ensure that buyer questions and corresponding content items are matched to the best-fit stage in the buying journey.

It is common to find that one or more critical buyer question is either not adequately covered or is attached to a seldom-used tactic type. For example, an organization may have an asset that answers a critical early-stage buyer question, but the asset is a document that does not meet current brand guidelines, uses out of date information, or is simply challenging for prospects to find.

Ultimately, organizations should strive to make finding and consuming all information that will help buyers choose as easy and frictionless as possible. This suggests that as much of this information as possible should be made available to anonymous website visitors. In other words, do not gate any content that might help buyers decide.

When tactics have been deployed, they should be measured for how well they foster engagement from the intended buyer personas at the intended buying journey stage.

Establishing Relationships Outside of Sales Calls

Buyers have clearly expressed their preference not to engage in sales conversations until they are ready. However, “ready” for buyers appears to be too late for sellers.

Nonetheless, B2B companies are not rendered helpless. The most effective organizations use a variety of techniques to establish relationships with prospects outside of typical selling processes.

To fully deploy these techniques requires that organizations have clearly identified their in-market ICP accounts. Many of the techniques described below are either expensive to execute, or do not have an immediate impact on opportunity production – or both. As such, they are not quick fixes for revenue production and may not be applicable to all ICP accounts.

However, when executed well, these tactics position the organization as a trusted member of the professional communities in which they operate and allow the provider to deliver value and build brand preference with key decision makers in prospect organizations before and during buying journeys. In this way, the tactics described below increase the odds that a brand and its solutions will be preferred by buyers whenever they go into market for solutions.

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Communities

Subject Matter Experts

Small-group Events

Customer Advocates

Communities

Subject Matter Experts

Small-group Events

Customer Advocates

Chapter 4

Adapting Measurement Practices

Section Summary: Shifting from lead-centric to opportunity-centric measurement is essential for the success of today’s B2B revenue teams. Our research highlights that focusing on opportunity production significantly impacts revenue, with organizations embracing such measures experiencing an 8% increase in financial performance.

However, only 16% of B2B organizations incorporate these metrics in variable compensation. Organizations should shift their focus to measure how many leads are received per account, and how more buying group engagement leads to greater opportunity production and conversion.

Our discussion has shown that the traditional focus on leads in B2B marketing is outdated. Indeed, many companies now use account-based marketing strategies to overcome the shortcomings of the lead-based approach. However, even ABM-centric revenue teams still struggle to update how they measure success. When old measurement methods are used with new marketing strategies, there’s a risk. Companies might undervalue effective strategies and overvalue less useful ones. It’s essential to align measurement practices with the latest marketing strategies for accurate evaluation.

The Flaws In Lead-based Reporting

When the organization is focused on identifying, progressing, and converting opportunities rather than leads, continuing to focus measurement on lead production and conversion does not help and is often counterproductive.

In our report, Doing One Thing, Measuring Another, we observed that more than half of marketers with account-based practices failed to measure the volume of opportunities produced from their target accounts. The numbers are progressively worse for measuring pipeline and revenue they produce inside the set of accounts they are targeting. Instead, nearly all marketers simply continue to measure lead production and conversion.

We also found that organizations that included at least one of the above measures in the variable compensation for marketers involved enjoyed an 8% increase in company financial performance. This is simply common business sense: measure and reward what you are trying to produce. And yet, only 16% of respondents even utilize these measures.

It is also critically important for revenue teams and senior leadership to understand that focusing on opportunity production may have a substantial positive impact on revenue production, while having no impact on the volume of leads produced. In fact, account- and opportunity-centric practices may reduce the total volume of leads, even while increasing pipeline and revenue.

Further, when organizations apply best practices for targeting ICP and in-market ICP accounts, more of the leads produced will be concentrated in a smaller number of accounts – the accounts being targeted. For the reasons described in detail above, this is a highly desirable result. But for most organizations, this will hurt rather than improve lead conversion rates as they are typically calculated.

Today’s standard B2B lead-to-opportunity conversion rates divide the number of leads that were converted to contacts and attached to opportunities by the total number of leads produced. In most B2B organizations, only one lead from a given account is likely to be attached to an opportunity and counted as a converted lead. An organization that produces three leads for a given opportunity will measure this as a 33% conversion rate. An organization that produces only one lead for an opportunity would have a 100% conversion rate.

Across many prospects, the accounts for which there have been multiple leads will convert to opportunities and revenue at a higher rate, but they will drive lead conversion rates down. Clearly, driving more engagement from target accounts is a desirable result. But our measurement practices punish this outcome (for more, see Forrester’s blog on this issue).

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It is also critically important for revenue teams and senior leadership to understand that focusing on opportunity production may have a substantial positive impact on revenue production, while having no impact on the volume of leads produced. In fact, account- and opportunity-centric practices may reduce the total volume of leads, even while increasing pipeline and revenue.

Meaningful Lead Measures

This suggests that rather than measuring the volume of leads and conversion of leads to opportunities, organizations should instead measure how many leads are produced within the target accounts. Where accounts represent multiple selling opportunities, lead production should be apportioned according to the solution and/or buying center they represent.

Once lead counts per potential selling opportunity are in place, it becomes possible to correlate the number of leads produced per account with the performance of the resulting opportunities. When marketing teams know how many contacts per account they must engage to optimize opportunity conversion, they have a clear and meaningful target.

Key questions to answer include:

If marketing produces more leads for a given opportunity, what impact does that have on the likelihood of sales closing that deal?
Are other key measures, such as sales cycle time and deal size, improved when marketing drives a higher level of engagement?^[1]

Measuring Anonymous Engagement

Section Summary: To assess B2B demand generation success accurately, organizations must prioritize measuring anonymous website activity, which often surpasses form-fills by three to 10 times in volume. Understanding and measuring this anonymous traffic is crucial, especially considering that most engagement from in-market buying teams remains anonymous in the initial 70% of the buying journey. Incorporating anonymous engagement metrics is essential for organizations to identify genuine interest among target accounts and evaluate the effectiveness of various tactics.

As described above, by far the most prominent, immediate result produced by B2B demand generation efforts is anonymous website activity. The volume of anonymous visitors, even those from high-value target accounts, is typically three to 10 times greater than form-fills. And as the research described earlier makes clear, virtually all the engagement from in-market buying teams will be anonymous during the crucial first 70% of the buying journey. And we also know that only a third of buying group members from organizations that actually execute a purchase fill out a form on the website of the winning vendor (The 2023 Buyer Experience Report).

We have already established that understanding which buying organizations are truly in-market requires visibility into anonymous buying research — both on third-party intent and owned-and-operated digital properties. It makes sense then that organizations should be measuring anonymous engagement for all of their ICP accounts.

Organizations interested in knowing which tactics are driving the most response must measure which tactics are driving the most anonymous web traffic.

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Any measure of marketing effectiveness that does not include anonymous engagement is bound to mislead the organization about which accounts are demonstrating interest and which tactics are generating engagement.

Adapting Sourced and Influenced

Two staples of current B2B measurement strategies are marketing sourced and influenced metrics. These are also the sources of substantial misalignment and infighting between marketing and sales.

Revenue teams must put aside the notion that the only valuable outcome from demand generation is the form-fill and understand instead that even if buyers do fill out forms early in their journey, they are not going to respond to BDR and sales overtures until they’ve made their way through more than two-thirds of their buying journey. Further, we know that approximately 10% or less of form-fill leads ever convert to sales-ready opportunities. Nonetheless, countless BDR and sales email and phone call cadences are executed against these leads.

For all the reasons described above, marketing-sourced metrics that rely on connecting form-fill leads to opportunities are destined to mislead revenue teams about which tactics are truly driving opportunities and revenue. However, it is still useful to identify which tactics induced buying group engagement. Instead of basing ‘sourced’ metrics on leads that make their way onto opportunities, organizations should be measuring which tactics produced the most initial engagement — anonymous and known — from an account.

Identifying First Signs of a Buying Process

When measuring buyer engagement, it is important to remember that B2B providers will often experience a consistent monthly level of engagement from accounts in their ICP. In this case, measuring ‘sourced’ makes little sense. However, revenue teams can identify the moments in time when that consistent level of engagement changed. A spike in engagement – both anonymous and known – often indicates the arrival of a buying process. When that point in time has been identified for a set of accounts, the tactics buying teams engaged with can be identified.

In some cases, the tactics, such as announcements of new products, new differentiating features, pricing changes, and the like, may genuinely be responsible for helping initiate buying journeys. Organizations should clearly identify assets and tactics of this variety.

In most cases, however, the reasons for launching a buying journey are internal to the buying organization and reflect its internal business conditions. The tactics the buying team first engages with will simply be the ones with which they were presented at that time.

Organizations should resist the temptation to credit typical marketing tactics with having sourced opportunities, simply because they were the tactics associated with a spike in engagement.

Timing, more than messaging and creative, is often the key factor in determining which tactics are associated with the engagement of particular accounts.

From Leads to Accounts and Opportunities

In our report, Doing One Thing, Measuring Another, we found that even among marketing organizations that have an account-based or target account practice, fewer than half were measuring how many opportunities were produced from those accounts. Measuring pipeline and revenue from these accounts was substantially less common than that. This needs to change. Every organization should report on opportunities, pipeline, and revenue produced for every opportunity within every account that is touched by marketing.

This doesn’t imply that marketing takes credit for the outcomes, but there must be an accounting of which marketing initiatives touched accounts and opportunities, and as described above, whether marketing’s efforts against the account were associated with improved sales outcomes. Over time, teams can measure which tactics were most often associated with accounts that progress in their journeys.

Buying Stage

Every B2B marketing organization should strive to maintain a comprehensive record of the buying journey status for every account within their ICP. For B2B companies that sell to mid-sized and large accounts, that accounting can and should be complete. For those selling to smaller organizations, it may only be possible to account for ICP accounts that are actively researching solutions.

There should be a report that indicates which accounts meet the ICP definition, as well as the current buying journey stage for each. Naturally, many accounts will not be currently engaged in a buying journey and would be categorized as dormant. All others should be mapped to their respective buying journey stages.

Funnel/Waterfall stages

A funnel is distinct from a buying journey and depicts the state of the organization’s relationship with each target account. As with journey stages, an attempt should be made to map all current target accounts to a funnel stage. And again, most accounts will be in a dormant stage, indicating there is currently no buying-selling relationship.

Under ideal circumstances, the buying stage that most closely mirrors the funnel or waterfall stage is the target or dormant stage. This signifies that if a journey is underway, that is reflected in both funnel and journey stages. Where funnel and waterfall stages incorporate metrics for digital engagement (such as in Forrester Research’s B2B Revenue Waterfall), selling organizations should be tracking buyer engagement long before direct interactions occur between buying group members and vendor representatives.

Tactics measured based on tactic goals

When marketing tactics and assets are aligned with buying journey stages – when they have specific jobs assigned – it becomes possible to assess how well the tactics do those jobs. When tactics are all evaluated against each other for how much revenue they are associated with, tactics that engage buyers earlier, but not later in their journeys will always lose out.

Critical tactics that invite early-stage buyers to engage may be very effective and necessary, but will still not be associated with revenue as frequently as tactics intended to help buyers over the last hurdles in a buying process.

The key question is: Which tactics and assets are more likely to be associated with accounts and opportunities that successfully progress through the specific buying journey stage for which it is designed?

Lift metrics

Section Summary: Marketing success is determined by its impact on revenue production. Key metrics include increased engagement volume from prospect accounts, involvement of more unique individuals in buying groups, and high-touch engagement from key individuals. Evaluate these outcomes collectively without fixating on specific tactics, extending the assessment to early indicators like opportunity creation and forecasted pipeline production.

The ultimate measure of marketing’s efforts is whether they increase the likelihood and volume of revenue production. In other words, if marketing executes marketing tactics against a given set of accounts, do those efforts increase the likelihood of producing revenue? And if so, by how much?

To get there, marketing must measure the volume of engagement from prospect accounts. Then, examine whether greater engagement is leading to better revenue production results. It is important to resist the temptation to focus on any single tactic in isolation, but instead to focus on the impact on revenue production from:

More total engagement from buying groups
More unique individuals from buying groups who engage
More high-touch engagement from key individuals (e.g., event attendance)

While the goal of marketing is to impact revenue production, it’s important to measure impact or lift on early outcomes. The same set of questions applied to revenue production should be extended to its leading indicators, such as opportunity creation and forecasted pipeline production.

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Chapter 5

Managing Change

Section Summary: Shifting from a lead-centric to a buying-group centric model is a substantial transformation for revenue teams, especially marketing. Tactics marketing has employed to generate lead volume become irrelevant. Emphasizing buying signals and understanding relevant buying journeys helps marketers adapt to the change, ensuring capture of all available selling opportunities.

The changes to systems and processes that organizations need to make in order to move away from outdated, lead-based practices and optimize revenue productivity are straightforward and well understood. The technologies and data required are readily available and mature. And there are countless examples of companies that have already made the transformation. However, despite the clarity and readiness of these changes, adopting them still represent a substantial transformation for most revenue teams.

For Marketing: An Unfamiliar, More Complex Target

For marketing organizations that have relied heavily on lead and MQL production, shifting to a buying-group centered model can give rise to numerous important concerns. Marketers experienced in lead-centric approaches often employ two techniques that allow them to maximize lead production.

Deploying specific tactics that are more likely than others to produce form-fill responses, irrespective of the intentions of the individuals completing the forms. For example: offering giveaways and high value experiences designed to drive form completion.
Adapting manual lead-scoring techniques that dial up or down the flow of MQLs as situations demand.

Neither of these tactics does anything to change the volume of true, in-market buyers that sales receives.

When organizations shift to a process that is based solely on the prioritization of in-market buyers, it is not as easy to manipulate volume. Buyers may be enabled to move through their buying processes more quickly, but it is rare that marketing tactics will be able to substantially alter the timing of the buying process or the number of in-market buyers.

Instead, by accessing all the available buying signals, marketing can ensure that the organization sees all available selling opportunities. And by targeting those accounts with the right messaging at the right time, buyers will be enabled to move through their journeys, and to develop a preference for their offerings.

Here, providing all involved marketers with a complete grounding in what relevant buying journeys look like fosters a sense of confidence. Emphasizing the need to enable and measure stage-by-stage progression will further focus marketers on the job at hand.

For Sales & BDRs: The Fear of Missing Out and Slowing Down Lead Production

Section Summary: In B2B, sales often complains about lead quality, yet typically just asks for more of them, hoping that quantity can overcome shortcomings in quality. Clear communication is vital as the shift to buying groups surfaces potential buyers earlier. It’s crucial to provide selling teams with buying journey-based reporting, enabling them to track account status and progress.

One of the most reliable phenomena in B2B is sales and BDRs complaining about lead quality. Somewhat ironically, sales teams have, at times, urged marketing to generate more leads, even if of lower quality, in the hope of uncovering a revenue needle in the haystack of curious content consumers.

For teams dependent on marketing for names, names, names, any perceived threat to the pipeline of leads — however poor those leads may be — may be taken as a threat to their ability to earn a livelihood.

To overcome this, marketing leaders must communicate clearly with sales about what will be surfaced and what will not. In the new world of buying groups signals and in-market ICP accounts, marketing will be surfacing many potential buyers much earlier in the buying journey. However, it’s crucial to recognize that these early journey accounts may not be receptive to human outreach, and many of those accounts may not yet be represented by a lead.

Enabling selling teams with buying journey-based reporting so that they can see the status and progress of the accounts they care about is critical.

At the same time, marketing should ensure sales prioritizes individuals who request contact immediately, even if the account does not appear to be in-market.

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Crawl, Walk, Run: Meeting Sales Where They Are

Section Summary: Take a crawl, walk, run approach to shift from traditional lead-centric practices. In the crawl stage, maintain lead production but integrate buying group intelligence for prioritized follow-up. During this time, sales learns about buying journey stages. In the walk stage, BDRs prioritize leads based on account buying stage and begin outbound prospecting to in-market ICP accounts. Marketing shifts focus to opportunity progression and total engagement of target accounts. In the run stage, lead follow-up is halted, concentrating resources on in-market accounts. Marketing emphasizes account and opportunity engagement reporting, replacing lead metrics with leads per account and unique visitors per account/opportunity. Attribution reporting shifts to marketing lift/influence reporting, showcasing marketing-driven engagement impact on pipeline production.

Most organizations are best-served by taking a stepwise approach to the transformation away from leads and toward buying groups and opportunities. This is particularly true with respect to BDRs and sales. This approach gradually introduces the changes that make up the transformation process.

Crawl Stage

In the crawl stage, organizations continue to produce and deliver leads and MQLs under current practices. BDRs and sales are introduced to buying group intelligence (intent, anonymous traffic signals, and overall engagement scores) as a means of enabling their follow-up with leads. BDRs should also be encouraged to use that intelligence to prioritize their efforts. For example, where a BDR has two MQLs to work that have received similar MQL scores, BDRs are encouraged to prioritize the MQL for which there is more buying group and intent engagement. In addition, BDRs should be encouraged to multi-thread when they follow-up on in-market accounts.

At the same time, the sales organization is introduced to buying journey stages and buying journey stage-based reporting that shows how accounts are progressing in their buying journeys – and what marketing is doing to enable those accounts.

Where organizations rely on marketing-sourced and influenced metrics, those are still reported, but they are supplemented by reports showcasing the various marketing tactics that accounts interact with as they advance through their journeys. This reporting helps cement the idea that virtually all opportunities are influenced by multiple marketing tactics.

After as much as a quarter in the crawl phase, conduct a comprehensive review of lead performance, comparing the performance of leads from in-market accounts to others. In most cases, this reporting aids BDRs in preparing for the next stage. If the reporting does not favor in-market accounts, then the organization must examine whether appropriate efforts have been applied. It may also be necessary to further examine why in-market accounts have not progressed.

Crawl Stage Checklist
Action
❑ Continue lead and MQL production as per current practices.
❑ Introduce buying group intelligence to BDRs and sales (intent, anonymous traffic signals, engagement scores).
❑ Encourage BDRs to prioritize leads using buying group intelligence.
❑ Encourage BDRs to multi-thread when they follow-up on in-market accounts.
❑ For those who report marketing-sourced and influenced metrics, continue to do so while supplementing with reports showcasing various marketing tactics that accounts interact with as they advance through their journeys.
❑ Analyze a comprehensive review of lead performance, comparing in-market accounts to others.
Mindset
❑ Emphasize the importance of multi-threading in follow-up on in-market accounts.
❑ Introduce buying journey stages and buying journey stage-based reporting to the sales organization.

Walk Stage

During the walk stage, BDR lead follow-up is prioritized according to the buying stage of the account the lead comes from. Prioritization includes both timing and effort: leads from in-market accounts are handled first, and that more effort is applied to them. Consequently, multi-threading is now required for all in-market account leads.

If the organization does not have an outbound prospecting motion, one is introduced to work with accounts that are identified as in-market, but for which there are no current leads. Because the lead follow-up motions include multi-threading to individuals who may not themselves have been leads, the introduction of this motion should not be entirely new, even to organizations that do not have pure outbound motions.

In the walk stage, marketing still reports on lead production and conversion, but has adopted opportunity progression reports as a primary measure of demand generation success. As described above, these reports emphasize the production of legitimate selling opportunities. Marketing also reports the progression of ICP accounts/opportunities through buying journeys.

Marketing also introduces deeper account engagement reporting: How many leads and how much anonymous traffic were received from each ICP? These reports help demonstrate the relationship between buying group activity, account/opportunity progression and the production of selling opportunities.

Walk Stage Checklist
Action
❑ Task BDRs with prioritizing leads based on the buying stage of the account.
❑ Require multi-threading for all in-market account leads in BDR follow-up.
❑ Introduce outbound prospecting motion for accounts identified as in-market.
❑ Continue reporting on lead production and conversion but shift focus to opportunity progression reports.
❑ Report the progression of Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) accounts/opportunities through buying journeys.
❑ Introduce deeper account engagement reporting, detailing leads and anonymous traffic from each ICP.
Mindset
❑ Place importance on leads from in-market accounts, positioning them as the primary focus.
❑ Emphasize legitimate selling opportunities as a primary measure of demand generation success.

Run Stage

In the run stage, organizations cease following up on leads unless follow-up is specifically requested. Instead, organizations focus on outreach to in-market accounts. As in the walk stage, some of these accounts will also have leads associated with them, but many will not.

Marketing is no longer reporting on lead/MQL production and conversion and is instead focused on account and opportunity engagement and progression reporting, along with opportunity production for sales. Leads per account and unique visitors per account/opportunity replace lead volume and conversion metrics. Attribution reporting has been replaced by marketing lift/influence reporting that shows the impact of marketing-driven engagement on pipeline production.

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Run Stage Checklist
Action
❑ Cease following up on leads unless specific follow-up is requested.
❑ Focus outreach efforts on in-market accounts.
❑ Replace lead volume and conversion metrics with leads per account and unique visitors per account/opportunity.
❑ Replace attribution reporting with marketing lift/influence reporting, showcasing the impact of marketing-driven engagement on pipeline production.
Mindset
❑ Encourage collaboration between marketing and sales for a unified approach to account-based, buying-group centered strategies.

Final Word: What Held Us Back No Longer Does

The systems and processes that B2B revenue teams have relied on for over two decades – most notably, marketing automation platforms – were not purpose-built for the reality of B2B buying and selling, as described throughout this document. Marketing automation platforms excel at capturing the interest of individuals but fail altogether to allow observation of the large and complex buying teams that make most of the purchases in B2B.

The ubiquity of these systems has led to generations of revenue teams focusing more on the actions of individuals than on buying teams. This is not the fault of the revenue teams. This is all that technology would allow.

Those times are over.

With the wisdom of experience and the intelligence provided by AI, modern B2B revenue platforms make it possible not only to attract and engage buying teams, but to fully capitalize on all of the signals these teams emit as they look for solutions. By taking advantage of these advances, revenue teams improve their productivity and the buying experience.

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Kerry Cunningham

Kerry Cunningham is a thought leader in B2B marketing and is a former SiriusDecisions and Forrester analyst. He’s an expert in the design and implementation of demand-marketing processes, technologies and teams for a wide array of B2B products, solutions, and services. He’s also developed a wealth of expertise in the alignment of marketing and sales organizations.

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The Lead-Based Approach Has Failed Us: It’s Time to Move On

Chapters

Chapter 1

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Table of Contents

Introduction

Executive Summary

Section-by-Section Summary

The Report

The B2B Buyer Is a (Mostly) Anonymous Buying Group

The Gap Between Marketing Output And The Value It Could Be Producing

Buying Signals Hidden in Plain Sight

The Buying Group is Almost Entirely Anonymous

Buying Groups, Not Leads, Are the Pathway to Revenue

Most Solution Research Is Done on Non-Vendor Sites: The Role of Intent Data

Summing Up The Buying Signals

The MQL Is Too Little, Too Early

Buyers Engage With Sellers On Their Own Terms

Buyers Engage After Choosing A Favorite For The Business

Transforming the Demand Process: Aligning to How Buyers Buy

Demand Creation Processes Must Be Precision-Targeted

The Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) Is Just the Beginning

The Role of AI in ICP Definition

The Importance of Revenue Team Alignment

Why We Can (and so Must) Dig Deeper than Just ICP

Not Just The ICP, The In-market ICP (IICP)

Visibility into Account Buying Stages Enables Smarter Selling

Buying Journeys Have Stages – And They’re Not Funnel Stages

Identifying Journey Stages In The Data

Transforming Revenue Production with Buying Journey Stages

The Win-Win of Precision Buying Journey-Mapped Targeting

Yes, Account-based Marketing (ABM/ABX), But There Must Be More: The Role of Demand Capture

Winning Deals Prior to the Point of First Contact (POFC)

Enabling Buyers at Every Step of Their Buying Process

Establishing Relationships Outside of Sales Calls

Customer Communities

Adapting Measurement Practices

The Flaws In Lead-based Reporting

Measuring Anonymous Engagement

Adapting Sourced and Influenced

Identifying First Signs of a Buying Process

From Leads to Accounts and Opportunities

Buying Stage

Funnel/Waterfall stages

Tactics measured based on tactic goals

Lift metrics

Managing Change

For Marketing: An Unfamiliar, More Complex Target

For Sales & BDRs: The Fear of Missing Out and Slowing Down Lead Production

Crawl, Walk, Run: Meeting Sales Where They Are

Crawl Stage

Walk Stage

Run Stage

Final Word: What Held Us Back No Longer Does

Kerry Cunningham

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