Unlocking personas within buying groups is key to GTM success

Written by Chloe Swierzbinski, Senior Director Product Marketing
October 20, 2025

For complex B2B sales, focusing on an individual lead is no longer tenable. A survey of B2B businesses found that an average of 13 people within an organization are involved in the buying decision, with 89% of purchases involving two or more departments.¹

Forrester recommends, “Organizations must shift to looking beyond the lead to the group of individuals involved in making buying decisions.”² This insight underscores the need for marketing and sales teams to align their efforts around group-based engagement models that reflect how real-world B2B decisions are made. Furthermore, businesses that adopt a buying group approach see higher conversion rates, improved pipeline velocity, and better attribution of marketing efforts to revenue impact. ³

Buying group dynamics – and why they matter to B2B sales

B2B buying groups can include multiple stakeholders and agendas. Stakeholders’ roles in the buying process can include champions, decision-makers, or ratifiers – and at times their priorities may compete with each other. Therefore, understanding how and when, in what order, to appeal to different buying group members according to their role is critical for sales and marketing teams.

GTM teams must determine who is driving buying group activity in order to focus efforts, align across marketing and sales, and engage the right roles at the right time.

Yet connecting with members of the buying group can be difficult because some members can remain just out of view of demand management processes, leading to “buying group blindness.”⁴ In fact, some members of the buying group are only discovered very late in the sales process. These unknown, yet influential, stakeholders can turn out to be blockers in the buying process, in part because they weren’t engaged early enough by GTM teams.

Because of the lack of visibility into all the members of the buying group, GTM teams may focus outreach on personas who aren’t even involved in the decision, costing time and money – and potentially derailing sales.

Personas are the building blocks of every buying group

Knowing the personas within buying groups allows GTM teams to discover which roles are driving discovery and evaluation and who’s shaping demand inside your accounts.

In a recent Bombora survey of B2B marketers:

97% agreed or strongly agreed that “The ability to effectively target specific personas is important to our GTM strategy.”
95% agreed or strongly agreed that “Understanding which roles in a target account are showing intent will uplevel our ABM campaigns.”
94% agreed or strongly agreed that “Our sales teams will be more impactful if they can personalize outreach to specific personas at target accounts.”

As the value of persona-level intelligence gains traction, GTM teams are seeking role-based signals that reveal what type of stakeholder within a company is demonstrating intent. This shift represents not just a tactical adjustment, but a fundamental evolution in how B2B organizations should think about their audiences.

Personas provide more durable insights than names

Another advantage of persona-level insights is that they have lasting value compared to contact names. The value of knowing a person’s name evaporates the moment they leave their company: what remains relevant is that someone in their role was actively researching your category. In addition, persona-level insights help inform long term account strategies by providing the likely mix of players across functions and levels. That gives the team transferable knowledge across target accounts, whereas names are only good for one account. Importantly, personas also offer more privacy-first business intelligence compared to contact names.

Bombora B2B Personas

To enable GTM teams to unlock the value of buying group member insights, Bombora now offers B2B Personas. This new offering provides a deeper level of Intent intelligence by layering persona-level insights (functional area, seniority, and decision-maker status) onto Company Surge^®, revealing who within an account is driving research activity.

Where account-level Intent tells you where to look, B2B Personas reveal who is driving the research and what topics they care about to create more effective, individualized strategies across the entire go-to-market (GTM) motion.

Company Surge^® enriched with B2B Personas reveals who is actively researching inside your target accounts. That clarity helps GTM teams:

Focus on the right stakeholders
Personalize campaigns and outreach
Align sales and marketing around shared buying group intelligence

How does this work in practice? Let’s say your company sells cloud security services. Rather than broadcasting generic messages, with persona-level insights you can send highly-relevant messages to different roles:

IT decision makers – emphasize technical details
C-suite executives – promote strategic benefits
Finance team – highlight operating cost reduction opportunities

Tailoring marketing assets and messaging to each persona’s concerns can accelerate sales conversations and create buy-in across teams.

Let’s say your deal is stalling with the two contacts you are in touch with at the account. With B2B Personas, you’ll discover additional personas doing active research, enabling you to expand outreach across the buying group and strengthen multi-threaded deal coverage with new influencers.

Built on the industry’s most trusted Intent data, Bombora’s B2B Personas gives sales and marketing leaders the visibility they need to prioritize with confidence and engage with precision.

Persona insights need trusted behavioral signals

To realize the true promise of persona-level insights, data needs to be rooted in real behavioral signals, tied to the context of actual B2B research, and enriched with the scale necessary to distinguish patterns from noise.

In 2025, Forrester named Bombora “the gold standard in B2B Intent data providers.”⁵ Bombora originated Intent data, and our signals are derived from research across our proprietary Data Cooperative of thousands of influential B2B publishers and millions of unique domains. With this one-of-a-kind digital infrastructure, we’re able to track billions of monthly content consumption events across the B2B web. So the insights available in Bombora’s B2B Personas cannot be replicated by any other solution provider.

The Next Level of Account Intelligence

B2B Personas meet the industry’s need for more specific and actionable account intelligence, giving sales and marketing teams a deeper understanding of which personas within companies are engaging and how their interest is trending over time. It’s time to elevate your account intelligence and engage every member of the buying group with precision. Find out more about B2B Personas today by contacting us.

https://reg.techtarget.com/Identifying-and-Overcoming-Buying-Group-Blindness-Web.html
The Forrester Wave™: Intent Data Providers For B2B, Q1 2025