What are Buying Groups and Should You Join One?

Meetings often involve stakeholders from different departments, so focusing only on key decision-makers may overlook the broader buyer group journey. Typically, multiple people identify the need for a solution, conduct research and consult decision makers. Traditionally, marketers focused on the buyer journey as if a single person handled research, evaluation and final selection. Best-in-class organizations measure buying group engagement, segmenting in-pipeline deals by the buying group members present or absent and executing programs to help sales win the engagement of the buying group.

Moreover, buying groups can secure additional benefits for their members beyond pricing, such as exclusive promotions and rebate deals. This allows the group to negotiate better pricing discounts and establish relationships with suppliers on behalf of its members. By joining a buying group, multiple businesses can consolidate their purchasing power to rival that of larger multinational companies. Typically, suppliers offer better pricing and services to businesses that place larger orders or spend more money with them each year. As an independent business owner, you’re constantly seeking ways to minimize expenses, optimize financial management, and outperform the competition. Our unique insights are grounded in annual surveys of more than 700,000 consumers, business leaders, and technology leaders worldwide; rigorous and objective research methodologies, including Forrester Wave™ evaluations; and the shared wisdom of our clients.

• An organizational unit within procurement responsible for specific categories, business units, or functional areas of purchasing activity.
• Enable connects your pricing, rebates, and real-time analytics into an intelligent commercial system.
• The bigger buyer group — the influencers of the sale — do a lot of the work, and sometimes, the person signing the checks is only interested in doing just that.
• Currently, over 700 facilities are contracted with HealthTrust’s procurement service for natural gas and over 250 for electricity.

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Since buyer group a contracting company may be a part of the group, how easy is it to add workers to be able to purchase on that company's account? Knowing and understanding your buying group helps you be more intelligent about how you're going to market to that group and which media channels to use. Just knowing their buying patterns helps you come up with the different strategies to use to help increase sales with group purchasing collectives. Is at one big marketplace with all tools to make it easier to market to everyone in construction? And you can see how it would be easy to differentiate them and sell and market different tools to each of those two groups differently.

We also explain a great deal of the how, including how to use the latest version of the waterfall — the Forrester B2B Revenue Waterfall — to do it. Trying to track multiple opportunities at different lifecycle stages requires an opportunity-based approach. The best buying signal you will ever get is the presence of multiple individuals from the same organization researching your solutions at the same time. The notion that there could be dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people giving us their names and contact information was … very heady stuff. As Forrester analysts, we talk to many B2B organizations, and it’s very rare that we encounter one that has already tuned their revenue engine to buying groups. We’ll cover the possible reasons for the different perspectives in another blog post, but it suffices to say that buyers tend to count people they think were influential, not everyone who was involved.

About buyer groups

Unlike traditional task management tools like Asana or Monday.com, Growth Method combines ideation, experimentation, and analytics into one streamlined platform, helping you run growth marketing more effectively. Teams need blended attribution approaches that credit the research phase, not just the final conversion. Teams that hide pricing or require a demo to understand basic product fit are misaligned with how modern buyers want to buy. Free trials, interactive demos, sandbox environments, and transparent pricing remove the need for a sales conversation at the early evaluation stage. The job for marketing is to be present in this research phase, ranking for broad solution-category queries, appearing in industry publications, and building credibility through third-party validation. Problem Identification is where marketing can have significant impact through thought leadership, content that reframes a business challenge, and demand generation that helps buyers articulate a problem they may not have fully recognised.

Aligning martech to your buyer groups

In the realm of commerce, buying groups emerge as dynamic entities, reshaping the landscape of procurement. IDOC The Connection is an essential member optical conference focused on education, networking, and practice growth.

Six Steps To Buying Group Success

Triggering events may include a company relocation or expansion or a change in regulations. It was extremely easy to learn how to use the platform, buy new deals, and request payments… It was extremely easy to learn how to use the platform, buy new deals, and request payments. I use the buying group because I find them to have a great system in hand with great people working for them. Learn how Siemens, Zendesk, and Palo Alto Networks transformed their revenue strategies by moving from outdated marketing-qualified lead (MQL) models to a buying group approach.

His dedication to transparency and education has made CardFellow a staunch small business advocate in the credit card processing industry. Ben Dwyer began his career in the processing industry in 2003 on the sales floor for a Connecticut‐based processor. Long‑term net-zero commitments, typically framed as emissions reductions aligned with a 2050 timeframe, were a fad across global companies in the past decade. To learn more about how to embrace the shift to buying groups, check out our latest research, Buying Groups For The Win. Making the shift to buying groups isn’t new news, but after Summit this year, it’s buying groups for the win.

“Our revenue process transformation approach resulted in significant improvements. If your organization is aiming to enhance performance and foster sustainable revenue growth, it’s time to pivot from individual leads to engaging multiple members of the buying group. In fact, Forrester’s Buyers’ Journey Survey, 2024, says that on average, 13 people are involved in making a purchasing decision. But for most organizations we talk to, it’s not working like it used to. In addition to these rebates, distributors receive great pricing negotiated by NetPlus for the entire group.

Who They Are Ratifiers are typically brought into the buying process to manage the settlement of terms, conditions, and pricing. But they also help shape the middle of the buying process, when solutions are being weighed against one another. When They Are Involved Influencers can hold sway early on in a buying process, providing information that triggers the desire to break from the status quo or explore competitive solutions.

A buying group can negotiate better deals, set up training programs, and do so more affordably as a group than they are able to as individual companies. From connecting with new suppliers to finding the best ways to succeed with your customer base, there’s a lot to focus on. By engaging all stakeholders effectively, companies accelerate decision-making, reduce delays, increase deal size, and create predictable sales pipelines, driving stronger B2B revenue growth. The key roles include decision-makers who approve purchases, influencers who advise, end-users who use the solution, gatekeepers who control access, and champions who advocate internally. Understanding their priorities helps marketers tailor messaging, speed up approvals, and increase deal value. Engagement data sources can be used to continuously improve the content and the strategy used to engage a particular member of the buying group.

For example, IT leads in the buying committees may prioritize technical specifications, while finance teams focus on ROI. Craft messaging and content specific to each persona’s role, pain points, and stage in the decision journey within the buying committee. Leverage first- and third-party data to build detailed buying group personas. Targeting buying groups that are ready to engage also strengthens account-based marketing (ABM) strategies, enabling more precise outreach within key accounts. According to Forrester, 94% of sellers engage with decision-making units of three or more, and many deal with ten or more members. To stay competitive and aligned with real-world buyer behavior, B2B organizations must shift their focus.

See How Top Brands Shifted To Buying Groups

For example, if we were selling tools on our websites, then contractors would be the most obvious buyers. Once we understand the who, now we start thinking about, "can these potential buyers be segregated into groups that we can then market to, to drive more sales?" Well, a buying group is a collection of people that qualify by some feature, membership, or similarity to get a benefit from a vendor for belonging to that group.