Hey! I'd love to hear your thoughts, send me a voice note.

Most B2B teams have a buying group problem they don't know they have: they've split buying committees into two silos — marketing owns targeting, sales owns relationships — and neither side is getting the full value of the concept.

In this episode of the B2B Orchestration Podcast, Drew breaks down why buying groups are one of the most undervalued levers in B2B go-to-market, especially at the enterprise level where a single account might have hundreds or thousands of contacts in the CRM, but only 5–12 of them actually touch a given opportunity. The buying group is what narrows that funnel down to the people who matter — and almost every org is only using half of what it can do.

On the marketing side, buying groups enable laser-focused targeting: messaging tailored to a contact's specific role in the committee, plus cleaner attribution reporting, since marketing stops crediting influence on people who have no idea an opportunity even exists. On the sales side, the case is different but just as strong. Buying groups force multi-threading, which de-risks every deal against the classic single-threaded failure mode — including the scenario Drew walks through where a rep suddenly goes on leave and 40 opportunities need to be picked up cold. If the buying group is already mapped, that handoff is trivial instead of a multi-week fire drill. It also gives sales leaders a fast way to audit an opportunity's real health just by looking at who's attached, and makes it far easier to loop in an executive sponsor without a lengthy briefing first.

The conversation then turns to orchestration: what happens once sales identifies the buying group and hands it to marketing. Drew's answer is that this should trigger targeted one-to-one outreach — pushing the buying group into LinkedIn audiences, tailoring messaging to "person A at account X with problem Z" instead of generic account-based messaging — without turning off the broader air-cover marketing (brand, display, webinars) still running underneath. The two operate in parallel, not in place of each other.

The most practical section covers how marketing supports sales before a cold outreach even happens: validating that sales is chasing the right title using personas and product marketing data (since sales sometimes locks onto a title without confirming it's actually the right persona), and pre-warming buying group members with brand and value-prop exposure so that by the time sales gets a meeting, the prospect already has context. As Drew puts it, it's infinitely easier to get a meeting with someone who already knows your brand than someone who's never heard of you — and that head start changes the quality of the first sales conversation, not just whether it happens.

If you're in RevOps, demand gen, or a sales leadership role and your buying group strategy currently lives in either a CRM field sales fills out or a marketing segment nobody on the sales side has seen, this episode makes the case for why that split is costing you pipeline efficiency on both sides.