A buying group is the set of people inside an organisation who take part in a single business-to-business (B2B) purchase. It includes whoever signs off the budget, the staff who will use the product, the technical evaluators, and the finance, legal and procurement officers who can delay or veto the deal. The term is also written as buying committee, and academics call the same thing a buying centre or decision-making unit. It exists because companies rarely buy expensive products on one person's say-so, while most marketing systems were built to track individuals: a form fill, a lead, a contact record.

The size of a typical group depends on who is counting. Gartner has put it at six to ten decision makers for a complex B2B solution. Forrester's "The State of Business Buying, 2026", released on January 21, 2026, counted 13 internal stakeholders and nine external influencers in a typical decision.

How a buying group is assembled

A vendor does not see a buying group directly. It builds one from fragments, usually in five steps.

The first is the account. Marketing and sales agree a list of target companies, often scored for fit by industry, headcount and technology in use. Second comes the role map. For each product, the vendor defines the roles it expects to find. A cybersecurity platform might list a chief information security officer as decision maker, an IT director as champion, security engineers as users, the chief financial officer as budget holder, and procurement and legal as approvers. Adobe, Demandbase, 6sense and Intentsify all build groups from role templates of this kind.

Third, contacts are matched to roles from the customer relationship management (CRM) system, marketing automation records and third-party contact databases. Demandbase said its Buying Group AI, announced on June 5, 2023, drew on more than 150 million contacts to fill these slots with generative AI. Fourth, engagement is read across the whole group: email opens, webinar attendance, ad clicks, website visits resolved to the company by IP address, and third-party intent signals showing research on a topic. Fifth, a threshold decides when the group is passed to sales. Adobe's Journey Optimizer B2B Edition sends a "sales qualified buying group". Intentsify's QuantumDemand, launched on August 11, 2026, replaces the marketing qualified lead (MQL) with the marketing qualified account (MQA), an account backed by engagement from several committee members.

A simple worked example shows the difference. Under lead scoring, a security engineer who downloads three white papers might cross a 65-point threshold and be called by a sales representative, even though the engineer controls no budget. Under a buying group model, the same activity fills one of six role slots. The account is passed to sales only when, say, three roles are engaged, including someone in finance or the leadership team. Forrester has reported that clients who delivered three or more buying group members to sales saw a 50% lift in conversion from meeting to closed-won.

Advertising platforms sit at the targeting end. LinkedIn lets advertisers combine a company list with job function and seniority, so that one campaign reaches several roles in the same firms. On September 23, 2025, LinkedIn launched a Company Intelligence API that measures engagement by company rather than by lead, citing buying committees of six to ten people and sales cycles beyond 200 days. LinkedIn introduced Buyer Groups at the same time, an AI-built and continually refreshed list of the people likely to be involved in a purchase, according to diginomica.

Origin and evolution

The idea is older than the software. Patrick Robinson, Charles Faris and Yoram Wind's "Industrial Buying and Creative Marketing" (1967) described purchases as group decisions and classified them into straight rebuys, modified rebuys and new tasks. Frederick Webster Jr and Wind published "A General Model for Understanding Organizational Buying Behavior" in the Journal of Marketing in April 1972. It named the buying centre and five roles within it: user, influencer, buyer, decider and gatekeeper.

Sales research gave the idea commercial weight in 2015. CEB, later bought by Gartner, put the average number of people in a B2B purchase at 5.4. Karl Schmidt, Brent Adamson and Anna Bird argued in "Making the Consensus Sale" in the March 2015 Harvard Business Review that sellers should help those people agree with each other. The book "The Challenger Customer" followed later that year. Adamson stressed that the figure meant "5.4 different perspectives", and said consensus tended to break down 37% of the way through a purchase.

Measurement followed. SiriusDecisions' Terry Flaherty and Kerry Cunningham presented the Demand Unit Waterfall in 2017, which counted buying groups rather than individual leads. Forrester bought SiriusDecisions and, on May 4, 2021, released the B2B Revenue Waterfall to "target buying groups", citing its finding that 95% of purchases involved three or more people across two or more departments. Monica Behncke, a Forrester research director, said "the new role of marketing and sales is to help buyers progress through their buying journey."

Software vendors then rebuilt their data models. 6sense added a Persona Map of an account's "buying team" in March 2023, Demandbase announced Buying Group AI in June 2023, and Adobe made Journey Optimizer B2B Edition generally available on August 7, 2024, after Adobe's Brian Glover described it as an "industry-first approach around the journey orchestration of buying groups" at Adobe Summit that March. Adobe later added an Audience Agent, generally available on October 9, 2025, that identifies buying group personas and assembles groups for specific offerings.

Forrester widened the frame again in April 2025, describing buying networks that add outside parties, including peers, partners, influencers and AI agents, to the internal group.

Why it matters for marketers

The group changes what gets counted. Lead volume and cost per lead reward reaching any one person, while revenue depends on a whole committee agreeing. Fewer than 1% of leads become closed deals, according to Forrester. Intentsify chief executive Marc Laplante said when launching QuantumDemand that "enterprise buying decisions have never been made by individuals. They're made by buying groups."

It also changes who receives the advertising. A LinkedIn and Bain & Company study published on June 11, 2026, found that finance, legal and procurement staff hold roughly half of decision influence while rarely engaging with vendor marketing. The same research said vendors were 20 times more likely to be chosen when the whole group knew them, rather than only the technical champion. Lost deals point the same way: about 40% of B2B deals die from indecision rather than defeat by a competitor, according to LinkedIn data presented by Brainlabs in June 2026.

Groups are also getting larger and slower. Dreamdata's 2026 benchmarks, based on more than 3.5 million customer journeys, put the average committee at ten stakeholders, up from 6.8, with journeys lengthening from 211 to 272 days. When a purchase includes generative AI features, the buying group doubles in size, according to Forrester research reported by Digital Commerce 360.

Limitations and disputes

The headline numbers do not agree. CEB's 5.4, Gartner's six to ten, 6sense's 11 in its October 2024 Buyer Experience Report, Dreamdata's ten and Forrester's 13 measure different things: people named by survey respondents, people observed engaging with vendors, or everyone with any role. ServiceNow's chief marketing officer, Colin Fleming, said his company's buying groups had "ballooned to 22 people", according to diginomica. None is a census.

Attribution of individual figures also wobbles. PPC Land's report on LinkedIn's June 2026 research gives the statistic that 94% of buying groups consult large language models before contacting sales as LinkedIn's, while its report on the Brainlabs summary traces the same 94% figure to 6sense.

The data underneath is fragile. Contact databases decay as people change jobs, and IP-based company identification struggles with remote work and shared networks. The people who matter most, such as procurement and legal, are the least visible in engagement data. In Europe, assembling named people into profiles from bought contact lists raises questions under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Adoption lags rhetoric. Forrester's own blog argues "it's no longer a question of IF they leave MQLs behind, but WHEN and HOW", an admission that many organisations still run on leads.

Not the same as

Buying committee is usually a synonym. Some writers reserve it for a formally constituted panel, such as a public-sector evaluation board, while buying group covers informal participants too.

Decision-making unit and buying centre are the academic terms from Robinson, Faris and Wind (1967) and Webster and Wind (1972). They describe the same phenomenon, without the targeting and scoring apparatus vendors built later.

Buyer persona is a composite description of one type of buyer, such as a typical IT director. A buying group contains several personas, with real names attached.

Media buying group describes something different: the media divisions of agency holding companies, such as WPP Media or Publicis Media, which pool clients' spend to negotiate rates and, increasingly, trade inventory on their own account as principal. PPC Land's holding company explainer covers that structure. A related sense in retail and healthcare is the group purchasing organisation (GPO), which combines members' orders for volume discounts. The Healthcare Supply Chain Association traces the first US GPO to 1910.

Recent developments

The concept is moving into AI agents for sales. Demandbase said on October 15, 2026, that users of Salesforce's Hunter prospecting agent can access buying group and intent data without a separate contract, including identification of buying group members. Hunter remains in pilot, with general availability planned later in 2026.

Procurement's weight is rising: Forrester's 2026 study found it was a decision maker in 53% of buying cycles. As of October 2026, the main platforms have converged on the buying group as the unit of targeting, while the evidence for how large such groups really are remains a matter of method.

Timeline

  • 1967 - Robinson, Faris and Wind publish "Industrial Buying and Creative Marketing", introducing the buy-class framework and group buying decisions.
  • April 1972 - Webster and Wind publish their model of organisational buying behaviour in the Journal of Marketing, naming the buying centre and five roles.
  • March 2015 - Schmidt, Adamson and Bird publish "Making the Consensus Sale" in Harvard Business Review; CEB puts the average purchase at 5.4 people.
  • 2015 - "The Challenger Customer" by Adamson, Dixon, Spenner and Toman is published.
  • 2017 - SiriusDecisions presents the Demand Unit Waterfall, counting buying groups rather than leads.
  • May 4, 2021 - Forrester releases the B2B Revenue Waterfall, built around buying groups.
  • March 14, 2023 - 6sense introduces a Persona Map of an account's buying team.
  • June 5, 2023 - Demandbase announces Buying Group AI.
  • March 2024 - Adobe unveils Journey Optimizer B2B Edition at Adobe Summit.
  • August 7, 2024 - Journey Optimizer B2B Edition becomes generally available.
  • October 9, 2024 - 6sense's Buyer Experience Report puts the average buying group at 11 people.
  • December 4, 2024 - Forrester's State of Business Buying 2024 counts 13 people in a typical decision.
  • April 2025 - Forrester introduces the buying network concept at its B2B Summit.
  • September 23, 2025 - LinkedIn launches the Company Intelligence API, alongside Buyer Groups.
  • October 9, 2025 - Adobe's Audience Agent for assembling buying groups becomes generally available.
  • January 21, 2026 - Forrester reports 13 internal stakeholders and nine external influencers per decision.
  • June 11, 2026 - LinkedIn and Bain publish research on hidden buyers in finance, legal and procurement.
  • August 11, 2026 - Intentsify launches QuantumDemand with marketing qualified accounts.
  • October 15, 2026 - Demandbase brings buying group data into Salesforce's Hunter agent.

Summary

Who: Buying groups are made up of the decision makers, users, technical evaluators and finance, legal and procurement staff inside a purchasing organisation. Vendors' marketing and sales teams target them, using platforms from LinkedIn, Adobe, Demandbase, 6sense, Intentsify and Salesforce, with frameworks from Forrester, Gartner and academic researchers.

What: The set of people who jointly make a B2B purchase decision, treated as a single unit for targeting, scoring and measurement in place of individual leads.

When: Described academically in 1967 and 1972, popularised by CEB in 2015, built into Forrester's measurement frameworks from 2017 and 2021, and adopted by software platforms from 2023 onwards.

Where: Inside account-based marketing platforms, marketing automation and CRM systems, and B2B advertising platforms such as LinkedIn, with signals drawn from contact databases, website activity and intent data.

Why: Large B2B purchases are made by committees, while lead-based marketing tracks individuals. Counting the group aims to predict deals better and to reach the hidden approvers who can stall them, though group sizes vary widely by method and the underlying contact data is incomplete.