If you’ve been trying to move your organization toward buying group marketing, you already know the hardest part isn’t understanding the concept — it’s convincing everyone else. Leadership wants proof. Sales wants pipeline. Finance wants efficiency. And somewhere in the middle, you’re trying to retire the MQL without starting a civil war.
I attended a webinar co-hosted by Inverta, Intentsify, and Sendoso that tackled this exact challenge head-on. The panel — Jessica Fewless (Head of Marketing at Inverta), Hannah Swanson (VP of Marketing at Intentsify), Shanta Kohli (CMO at Sysdig), and Tyler Bernstein (Head of Sales at Sendoso) — shared the myths they’ve heard, the data that dismantles them, and the real talk on what it takes to get your organization on board. Here’s what you need to make your case.
Start With the Myths — Because Your Stakeholders Are Already Thinking Them
Before you can make a positive case, you need to clear the objections that are already sitting in the room. Here are the four biggest ones, and how to handle them.
“Shifting to buying groups means rebuilding everything.”
This is the most common reason teams stall before they even start. Hannah addressed it directly:
“You don’t have to reinvest in any new tools. If anything, I think it’s smart to invest in data… you can use all the tools that you currently have. It’s about shifting that mindset from volume-based metrics and always chasing a lead.”
The message to bring to your leadership team: this is not a rip-and-replace initiative. It’s a reorientation of how you use what you already have. Frame it as a strategy shift, not a budget ask.
“Marketing to a buying group is too expensive.”
The counterintuitive truth here is that buying group marketing is actually more efficient. When you focus on accounts that are already showing intent signals, you stop spreading budget across a massive pool of unqualified contacts and start concentrating it where it’s most likely to convert. As Shanta noted, “only 10 percent of them are in a buying cycle. How do you spend those dollars? It may not be as expensive as you think because you’re really focusing your dollars on accounts that are in market.”
That last point is worth emphasizing to your finance stakeholders. This isn’t a request for more budget — it’s a case for spending what you already have more intelligently.
“We just need to tweak a few things.”
This is where internal buy-in efforts often fall apart. Teams make surface-level changes — adjusting a report here, updating a metric there — and then wonder why nothing actually shifts.
Shanta was clear that without the CRO actively aligned on the shift, any buying group initiative is set up to fail.
To make the case stick, the conversation has to include compensation design, sales stage definitions, and shared language around what a Marketing Qualified Account actually means at your company. If the team is still comp’d on lead volume, they’ll chase lead volume. Make sure your CRO is a co-owner of this initiative, not just an approver.
“This is just a trend.”
When you hear this one, go straight to the data — ideally your own. Tyler shared that at Sendoso, deals with four or more stakeholders involved were three times more likely to close than single-threaded deals. Sysdig found that getting five key personas engaged at the early opportunity stage drove a 3x higher stage-to-stage conversion rate. These aren’t industry benchmarks — they’re real outcomes from teams that made the shift.
The Data That Makes the Case
Beyond the internal examples, there are a few external stats worth keeping in your back pocket for these conversations:
81% of buyers have already chosen a preferred vendor before they ever interact directly with a sales rep. Your champion isn’t the decision — they’re the advocate. If you’re not engaging the rest of the group, you’re invisible to the people who matter.
Only 3% of buyers fill out a form. If your motion is built around waiting for that hand-raise, you’re missing the vast majority of the buying journey entirely.
The bigger the buying group engaged, the more internal pressure builds on procurement — meaning deals don’t just close more often, they close faster.
Pair these with your own historical win rate data segmented by number of stakeholders engaged, and you’ll have a hard-to-argue-with picture.
How to Win the Internal Room
The panel’s consensus on where to start was clear: audit your own data first. Go back through closed-won and closed-lost opportunities and look at how many stakeholders were engaged at each stage. The pattern will almost certainly be there, and your company’s own numbers will land harder than any third-party stat.
From there, think about who your internal buying group actually is. To make this shift happen you need your CRO aligned on account-level metrics, your CFO bought in on the efficiency story, your RevOps team rebuilding the measurement framework, and your sales leadership co-owning the new stage definitions. Jessica made the point well — you’re not just changing how marketing works. You’re selling a new way of working to a committee of stakeholders.
Hannah offered one practical tactic for the transition period: run two funnels in parallel. Keep reporting on MQLs in a format that feels familiar to leadership while simultaneously introducing account-level engagement metrics alongside it. Let the new data speak for itself over time, and the conversation about which metrics matter will start to shift on its own.
And make it official. As Shanta put it, if buying groups aren’t showing up in your OKRs and victory plans, your team will default back to what’s on the plan. Put it in writing, tie it to compensation, and make it part of how performance is inspected — otherwise the org will revert to what it knows.
The Bottom Line
Making the case for buying groups isn’t just about having the right data — though the data helps enormously. It’s about understanding that you’re navigating an internal buying process of your own, complete with skeptics, competing priorities, and eleventh-hour objections from people who just want to stick with what they know.
The good news? The playbook for overcoming those objections is the same one you’re trying to adopt. Know your stakeholders, speak to their specific concerns, and bring them along together.
Start with the data. Bring your CRO. And make buying groups part of the plan — not just the pitch.
