Surfacing Demand Units

A decade ago, B2B marketing shifted from leads to accounts.? Lead-based marketing was problematic as it focused on individuals, not accounts, and lacked lead-to-account mapping.

“A B2B buying committee can involve anywhere from three to 20 people, with six to 10 being most common.? So, consider a scenario where a typical buying committee has six members, and three members engage with your website or events, becoming leads.? Marketing automation platforms can’t make the connection between those individuals, so you’d say you generated three MQLs, not a single potential opportunity.? Even worse would be if those three leads got routed to different sales reps to pursue, an all-too-common occurrence,” blogged Jon Miller , who witnessed this issue as a founder of Marketo and Engagio and CMO at Demandbase.

Likewise, lead-based marketing couldn’t distinguish between one person downloading ten items or ten people downloading one content piece each.

Account-based Marketing was a significant improvement over lead gen as it took a broader view of signals and activity across accounts and the open web.? However, it also has its weaknesses.

“But ABM isn’t always right either, especially if a prospective account presents multiple selling opportunities.? You might sell different products to the same buyers, the same product to different groups, or some combination — each embarking on its own unique journey,” continued Miller.? “With ABM, you would say that an account is a customer if they own one of your products.? But that same company might be a target prospect for a second product, and perhaps engaged in a sales cycle with a completely different set of people for a third product.? Treating everyone at that account as a “customer” risks alienating potential members of prospect buying committees with wrong nurture tracks, disjointed messaging, etc.? Simply put, an account-based lens isn’t designed to support multiple selling opportunities at different lifecycle stages.”

Thus, focusing on the buying committee is the Goldilocks approach, as a buying committee lens recognizes the different decision-makers and influencers at the opportunity level.? Demand Units represent the decision-making team with which sales teams coordinate their activity.? Furthermore, with the digitization of the sales process, identifying these individuals and measuring their engagement is much easier, providing a more holistic view of the opportunity, its health, and emerging risks to be addressed.

Sales teams have been advised to focus on buying committees since SiriusDecisions updated its Demand Waterfall in 2017.? But Sirius Decisions merely expanded on an insight that my mother made in the 1970s.? She sold hospital equipment in the ’70s and ’80s and built relationships across hospitals and nursing homes for years before RFPs were issued.? She had plenty of time to introduce herself to the heads of nursing, engineering, and purchasing before capital budgets came around to the next purchasing cycle.? Her trojan horse was a birthing bed that was sold off-cycle from the large bed replacements, allowing her to establish credibility with a market-leading product.

However, most enterprise sales reps lack the time and discipline to build multi-year, cross-departmental relationships.? Doing so has been difficult for multiple reasons:

1. The demand unit is opportunity-based, so it can vary from deal to deal.
2. Except for named account reps, most sales reps don’t have the time to build anticipatory relationships.? Marketing manages the nurture process and waits for sufficient intent signal strength before handing accounts off to sales.
3. The buying committee is often cloaked behind a front person who serves as a gatekeeper across the deal.? The gatekeeper feeds the rep positive news but does not ensure the engagement of the broader committee.? Unfortunately, the rep is frequently a backup option for negotiating leverage when engaging with the buyer’s top vendor selection.? Solution Selling called this position “Column Fodder.”? The rep remains overconfident about the deal until they are notified of the bad news. Not realizing that they mishandled the situation through single threading and failing to establish their value proposition, reps then record these deals as losing on price.
4. Sales reps have often focused on single threading their way into accounts, but increased employee turnover and growth in demand unit size and complexity make single threading an increasingly poor approach to account-based sales.? Fortunately, Revenue Intelligence and Sales Engagement tools warn about single threading and weak engagement across critical roles.
5. There were few tools for identifying who was participating in a deal.? However, with sales digitization, much of this activity can be collected from emails, meeting invitations, chatbots, and digital sales rooms.? Unfortunately, collecting, enriching, and analyzing this multi-channel (often multi-platform) data remains an unmet need.? Nobody has built a tool that explicitly collects this intelligence across the broad scope of digital channels, enriches contact profiles for the CRM, and identifies unknown participants (e.g., procurement, security, IT, general counsel, compliance, etc.)

Combining Buying Group discovery with ABX functionality helps revenue teams identify in-market buying groups and reach out to them when they are early in the discovery process.? Marketing can advertise to key personas in the demand unit, deploying targeted, persona-specific campaigns.? Likewise, sales reps can perform warm outreach to likely decision-makers and track their engagement.

Today, vendors talk about the buying committee, but it is often an approximation of who is involved.? Soon, engagement data and AI will distinguish between confirmed buying committee members and likely members (in the example above, Demandbase calls likely members “Buying Group Suggestions”).? The confirmed members will attend meetings, be looped into emails, or view content from the DSR.? They may also be mentioned in emails or calls but are not yet participating.? Confirmed member data should be enriched and attached to the opportunity.? Likely members will have roles that indicate potential participation, but there will be no direct evidence that they are involved (or will be involved) in the decision process.

Sales Intelligence vendors such as ZoomInfo , Introhive , People.ai , and Demandbase are messaging around this need, and Revenue Intelligence vendors are analyzing threading and access to power (conversational engagement with key decision makers).? Still, I’m not convinced anybody has quite nailed all the elements (e.g., intent data, multi-channel engagement insights, enrichment, prioritization, risk assessment, and suggested buying group members).? Nevertheless, the pieces are coming together.

As AI evaluates the buying committee, it will determine their role (technical decisionmaker, financial decisionmaker, influencer, blocker, etc.) and monitor member engagement and concerns, providing a much more reliable gauge of deal health and risks.? AI will then prioritize and recommend activities to keep deals on track and mitigate emerging deal risks.

Additional Resources

• Company Mentions: Demandbase | Introhive | People.ai | ZoomInfo
• GZ Consulting Topics: Outreach | Digital Sales Rooms | Buying Committees

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