If you sell into businesses, you’re not selling to a decision-maker anymore. You’re selling to a committee. A shifting constellation of roles, priorities, and politics that can make a great deal feel like herding cats.
The good news: there’s a growing body of fresh research that shows exactly how B2B buying groups behave today. The even better news: once you realign your marketing and sales motion to the group (not the person), your win rates, velocity, and deal quality improve. Below is a practical, research-backed guide to what’s changed, and a playbook you can put to work now.
The big shifts in B2B buying (and why your old funnel struggles)
Buyers want less “rep,” more proof—and they do most of the decision-making before your team shows up.
Gartner’s 2024–2025 data shows a strong preference for a rep-free experience: 61% of B2B buyers say they’d prefer to buy without a sales rep, and 73% actively avoid vendors that blast irrelevant outreach.
At the same time, we are finding that many buyers have already chosen a winner before they ever talk to sales. Translation: your content, brand, and word-of-mouth do the heavy lifting long before a discovery call.
Group purchasing is the norm, and those groups keep getting bigger and more senior.
Our research indicates that about 13 people in a typical B2B organization are involved in some way in buying decisions. Many committees also skew more senior, with over half including VP-level decision makers. That raises the bar on business cases, risk management, and consensus building.
The “Jobs” of Buying
Gartner describes buying as a set of “jobs” including problem identification, solution exploration, requirements building, and supplier selection. People bounce between these tasks and revisit them as new stakeholders weigh in. Your funnel needs to dynamically support all jobs at once.
Committees are conflicted, and conflict kills deal quality.
In 2025, Gartner reported that 74% of buying teams experience unhealthy conflict. When committees do reach consensus, they’re 2.5x more likely to call the outcome a high-quality decision. Often your job isn’t just to persuade—it’s to align.
Sellers get a tiny slice of buyer time.
This stat remains sobering: buyers spend only about 17% of their total buying time with potential suppliers. If they look at three vendors, you might get ~5–6% of the calendar. Your enablement must work when you’re not in the room.
Friction is real, leading to long sales cycles, deals stalling, and post-purchase regret.
Forrester’s State of Business Buying 2024 found that 86% of purchases stall, and 81% of buyers are dissatisfied with their chosen provider, a sign that expectations and internal alignment often miss the mark.
What these shifts do to your funnel
The classic linear funnel assumes a single champion moves neatly from awareness → interest → consideration → purchase. Today’s reality looks more like a pinball machine:
- Multiple parallel tracks: Security is assessing risk, while Finance models ROI, and Ops checks integrations. All at once.
- Stop-start tempo: A new stakeholder joins and reopens requirements. Legal raises a blocker. Finance moves a review meeting, adding weeks.
- Dark-funnel influence: Anonymous research, peer communities, Slack groups, and social “lurking” shape preferences before form fills.
If your marketing and revenue ops aren’t built to detect and support group behaviors across channels (not just the one person who fills out a demo request), you’ll miss the real action.
Kerry Anderson, Co-Founder of RankingCo, had a breakthrough when they started layering Google Ads search query data with Meta engagement patterns.
“When we see multiple searches from the same company IP hitting high-intent keywords like ‘Google Premier Partner Brisbane’ within days of different job titles engaging with our lead gen content on LinkedIn, we know there’s a committee forming.”
They shifted from single-contact nurture to role-specific retargeting. “The CMO gets ROI calculators, the ops person gets our process documentation, and whoever’s searching gets case studies showing the $1M-to-$200M growth path.”
The modern buying committee: who’s in the room?
Exact rosters vary by deal size and category, but patterns are clear:
- Economic owner (CFO or VP/Head of Finance): scrutinizes ROI, payback, total cost, and vendor risk.
- Business sponsor (functional leader): owns the pain and outcome; cares about adoption, time-to-value, and competitive advantage.
- Users/implementers (managers, ICs): evaluate usability, integrations, and workflows.
- IT/Sec/Compliance/Legal: validate risk, security posture, data handling, SLAs, and regulatory needs.
- Procurement: enforces process, negotiates terms, and compresses price.
- Mobilizer/Change-agent: the person inside who can align others and drive the decision over the line.
Research also shows more senior involvement than in years past, meaning your content must speak CFO and CIO fluently, not only direct user benefits.
A marketer’s playbook for group buying in 2026
1) Market to the group, not the lead
Orchestrate multi-threaded journeys at the B2B buying group level. The goal isn’t one MQL; it’s to drive visible, rising engagement from multiple stakeholders across functions. That means:
- Role-specific content hubs:
- For finance: ROI models, benchmark payback ranges, and cost-of-status-quo calculators.
- For security/IT: architecture diagrams, SOC2/ISO docs, DPA templates, and RFP-ready answers.
- For operators/users: 2-minute workflow videos, implementation day-by-day plans, and admin guides.
- Signals, not just form fills. Track research surges across an account: web visits by function, review-site activity, community mentions, and content consumption spikes. Alert sales when a group (5+ people) is active, mirroring data that most purchases now involve 5+ stakeholders.
Intentsify makes this possible at scale. We can aggregate and analyze intent signals from multiple stakeholders in an account, revealing when the collective behavior points to active evaluation. Instead of chasing one contact, you’re now engaging the full committee at the exact moment they’re aligning internally.
2) Win the “anonymous decision phase”
If 81% choose a winner before talking to you, you must influence preference early. Tactics to consider:
- Own the key queries (SEO + paid) for the four buying jobs Gartner outlines (problem, solutions, requirements, supplier). Map content to each job so a buyer can complete that task without calling you.
- Short, decisive proof: 30–60 second customer clips, interactive ROI calculators, security one-pagers, and annotated architecture PDFs.
- Plant evidence where buyers look: analyst notes, peer reviews, community AMAs, and customer references that match their industry/size.
3) Make consensus your focus
Because unhealthy conflict is common (and consensus multiplies deal quality), your marketing should facilitate alignment:
- Consensus brief (one page): “What good looks like,” required capabilities, risks mitigated, and a simple scoring rubric everyone can share.
- Pre-wired business case with configurable benefits and a CFO-friendly summary (payback, IRR, sensitivity analysis).
- Risk ledger mapping security/legal concerns to your evidence and controls.
- Adoption plan with owners, milestones, and success metrics to reassure the sponsor and ops.
4) Treat the “buying jobs” as your content spine
Build content for Gartner’s four buying jobs; then tag and route it by role. Example:
- Problem identification → market shifts, cost of inaction, and diagnostic checklists.
- Solution exploration → category explainer, “build vs. buy,” and integration maps.
- Requirements building → editable RFP templates, security questionnaires, and success criteria.
- Supplier selection → side-by-side comparisons, ROI models, and a legal terms explainer.
Expect stakeholders to hop between jobs; your resource center should make that easy.
5) Reframe enablement around when you’re not there
Given sellers only get ~17% of buyer time, assume most persuasion happens without you present. Package “leave-behinds” that travel inside Slack threads and email chains: one-pagers, 3-slide executive briefs, 90-second demo links, and “forwardable FAQs.”
6) Align measurement to group momentum
Move beyond single-touch MQLs. Track and report:
- Account Engagement Lift: number of engaged contacts, by department and seniority.
- Job Completion Signals: assets that indicate a job is done (e.g., requirements doc downloaded).
- Consensus Health: are finance, security, legal, and the sponsor all active in the same 14-day window?
- Stall Predictors: time since last cross-functional activity (a leading indicator of the 86% of deals that stall).
Potential assets to ship this quarter
- Use this as a menu. Pick 4–6 items (or as many as your team’s bandwidth permits) that match your segment and ACV:
- The CFO sheet (1 page): problem cost model, payback math, assumptions, and risks.
- Security dossier: SOC2/ISO letters, pen test summary, data flow diagram, and breach comms policy.
- Editable RFP + scoring rubric: aligned to your strengths but fair.
- 90-second role-based demos: finance view, admin view, and end-user view.
- Interactive ROI calculator: shareable link and export to PDF.
- Consensus brief: “What good looks like,” five must-have criteria everyone can agree on.
- Implementation playbook: day 0 to day 90 with owners and milestones.
- Executive 3-slide deck: the narrative your champion will actually present.
- Deal room template: one link for all stakeholders, version-controlled.
- Reference matrix: customers by industry/size/use case, with quick quotes and contacts.
Messaging angles that land with committees
- “Time-to-value, not just ROI.” CFOs want payback windows and leading indicators that adoption is on track (usage milestones, enablement hours, and admin workload).
- “Integration reality.” Show exactly how you connect, with screenshots and support boundaries; ops and IT will love you.
- “Risk removed.” Explicitly map common objections (data residency, SSO, SLAs, and termination rights) to your controls.
- “Expandability.” Committees fear lock-in. Highlight modularity, APIs, and how you scale without costly re-platforming.
- “Proof from people like us.” Peer evidence beats pitches. Pair references and case studies by industry, size, and stack.
Where marketers lose momentum (and quick fixes)
One-size-fits-all content. Fix: create mini-tracks by role and job.
- Single-threading the deal. Fix: instrument site + product analytics to alert when new departments engage; route SDR/AE to open a parallel thread.
- Late security/legal engagement. Fix: publish your security dossier and standard terms up-front; invite legal/IT to a “risk review” call before pricing.
- Measuring MQLs, not momentum. Fix: redefine SAL/SQO gates to include cross-functional engagement and completion of at least two buying jobs.
- Spray-and-pray outbound. Fix: relevance > volume. Remember 73% of buyers avoid suppliers who send irrelevant outreach. Personalize messaging by role, account context, and current buying job.
TL;DR
- The B2B committee is the customer. Design journeys, content, and metrics for groups, not individuals.
- Preference is set early. With most choosing a winner before speaking with sales, earn trust in the “anonymous” phase with decisive, role-specific proof.
- Facilitate consensus. Unhealthy conflict is common; give buyers the tools to agree (consensus brief, risk ledger, business case, etc.).
- Measure group momentum. Track multi-contact, cross-functional engagement and “job completion” signals instead of isolated leads.
- Enable when you’re not in the room. Because you only get ~17% of buyer time, make your assets forwardable and irresistible.
- The teams that win in 2026 won’t just create more content. They’ll use solutions like Intentsify to detect, decode, and activate the entire B2B buying group before their competitors even see the signal.
Why this matters now
Budget scrutiny and risk aversion aren’t going away. They’re pulling more senior stakeholders into more deals and stretching sales cycles. That’s why Forrester is seeing high stall rates and post-purchase disappointment: many vendors still market to the lone lead with a linear nurture. The teams that win in 2026 and beyond will look different:
- They plan for committee dynamics from day one.
- They build evidence systems, not just content libraries.
- They measure and optimize for consensus.
Don’t fight the modern B2B buying reality. Partner with solutions like Intentsify to make your dynamic marketing funnel a competitive advantage.
FAQs
Why is the traditional linear funnel failing to convert modern B2B buying groups?
The traditional funnel assumes a single lead moves neatly through stages. In reality, B2B buying groups operate in parallel tracks: Security assesses risk, Finance models ROI, and Ops checks integrations all at once. If your GTM motion isn’t built to detect and support these simultaneous “buying jobs” across an entire account, your deals will likely stall or fail to reach consensus.
How can we influence the 81% of buyers who choose a winner before talking to sales?
You must win the “anonymous decision phase” by providing role-specific proof points that buyers can find during their independent research. This includes planting interactive ROI calculators, security dossiers, and implementation playbooks in the places where committees lurk—such as peer communities and analyst notes—long before a discovery call is ever booked.
What is the most effective way to measure “momentum” in a complex deal?
Instead of tracking isolated MQLs, move to measuring Account Engagement Lift. Track how many different stakeholders from the same account are active in a 14-day window. When you see “cross-functional surge”—meaning Finance, IT, and the Business Sponsor are all consuming content—you have a high-quality signal that the group is reaching consensus.
