Maximise your marketing impact with marketing qualified buying groups (MQBGs)

Sales teams require more than just qualified leads or accounts from marketing teams. The buying committees or groups they speak to are only becoming more complex. To gauge how ready they are to make a purchase, sales needs deep insights into each member of the buying group within the context of the entire committee. The solution lies in focusing on marketing qualified buying groups (MQBGs). MQBGs act as a metric for tracking purchase readiness at the individual and broader buying group level for a specific product or service offering. They provide additional context — beyond marketing qualified leads and accounts — that let sales and marketing teams adapt to the collaborative nature of B2B purchasing.

This post explores how data and insights, automation and AI can help you to start gathering and using MQBGs more effectively, ultimately leading to more successful marketing efforts and business growth.

Data and insights — the foundation of understanding your buyers

According to Gartner, the typical buying group for a complex B2B solution involves 6 to 10 decision-makers each with their own needs and concerns. To increase the effectiveness of your marketing and sales efforts, you need an in-depth understanding of each buying group and the individuals within them. And while MQBGs can provide these nuanced insights, they are only as valuable as the data you are using to create them, especially in the era of AI, where the quality of insights depends on the data’s accuracy.

Customer data platforms (CDPs) play a crucial role in this process. They provide marketers with the most comprehensive and precise data possible. CDPs excel at transforming data previously managed by IT into marketing-friendly formats.

The first step to using a CDP to help you to qualify buying groups is to ensure that marketing data is unified and actionable. To do this, marketers need to identify the products they aim to sell and the accounts they want to target. The CDP then acts as a preparation station, unifying first-, second- and third-party intent data from other sources such as marketing automation tools, CRM systems, customer service interactions, product usage data and anonymous web behaviour. This unified data allows marketers to create detailed account lists for any business strategy and then activate them in revenue marketing solutions for more accurate and personalised buying journeys.

Engagement and automation — nurture buyers in a personalised way to convert them to MQBGs

Effective buying group engagement demands relevance and consistency at scale. Nearly 90% of buyers say they are more likely to work with vendors who understand their specific needs and challenges according to their roles at the company and within the buying committee. By automating engagement across popular B2B channels — email, social media, webinars, SMS messages and events — marketing teams can maintain consistent interactions with stakeholders. Targeted automation ensures that each interaction feels personalised, even when scaling to hundreds or thousands of buying groups.

To improve the prioritisation of buying groups within the sales process, marketers can use scoring mechanisms like completeness and engagement scores.

• Completeness scores quantify the coverage of each group, helping to identify missing members in the buying group. You can use these insights to create more complete buying groups.
• Engagement scores measure the involvement of both individual members and the collective buying group.

Automate the connection between sales and marketing

With the right solutions in place, these scores act as qualification metrics, automatically converting a buying group into an MQBG and triggering alerts to sales representatives when thresholds are reached. This ensures timely follow-ups, maximises conversion opportunities and empowers sales teams to focus their efforts on the most promising prospects. By prioritising efforts where they matter most, this scoring strategy optimises resource allocation and improves overall sales efficiency.

In addition, if a buying group has low engagement scores, your marketing team knows further qualification is needed prior to passing along to sales.

AI-driven precision — the key to sales and marketing alignment

Artificial intelligence (AI) can take MQBG generation to the next level by finding deeper insights within the data you’re collecting, ranking buying group purchase readiness and identifying when an MQBG is ready to pass along to sales. AI can help with ranking MQBGs based on real-time behaviours from first-party intent data and third-party intent data, allowing marketing teams to respond to changes in buyer intent in a timely way. With 60% of top-performing companies using AI in their marketing strategies, the potential efficiency benefits are clear.

Predictive analytics and sales alignment

AI-driven predictive analytics deliver a competitive edge by pinpointing high-intent accounts and buying groups early in the funnel. When marketing and sales teams have shared visibility into engagement levels and readiness to buy, they can align their efforts and action on prioritised buying groups more effectively. This alignment significantly increases the conversion rate for MQBGs, resulting in more consistent and predictable outcomes and improving the collaboration between sales and marketing.

Take the next step with Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition

To thrive in a buying group-centric landscape, consider solutions to centralise data, engagement and AI capabilities. Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition, built on Adobe Experience Platform, empowers both marketing and sales teams to track and engage MQBGs with precision. By harnessing the power of data, automation and AI in a powerful journey orchestration solution, Journey Optimizer B2B Edition transforms complex buying groups into high-quality sales opportunities, paving the way for increased pipeline and revenue.

Learn more about how Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition can help you to create and nurture MQBGs, driving business success in today’s dynamic B2B market.

Mitch Folks is a group manager of product marketing at Adobe and is responsible for developing and executing go-to-market strategy for Adobe’s B2B product portfolio.