Buyer Group Research - How To Find and Understand Your Buyers

When enterprise technology vendors think about marketing and selling their solution, they often focus too narrowly on individual personas - perhaps the CIO or the IT Director. But in many large technology purchases, it’s not just one or two people making the decision - it’s likey to be ten or more. Understanding the full buyer group is essential if you want your messaging, outreach, and campaigns to cut through. Yet we find that many marketing teams are relying on assumptions rather than facts.

Viewpoint Analysis conducts account and contact research for numerous IT vendors, including companies leading their respective markets, such as Informatica, Nexthink, and Riverbed. In this blog, we explore what buyer group research is, why it matters, and how to go about doing it properly.

Stop Guessing Who Your Buyer Group Is

It’s common for marketing and sales teams to develop persona-based strategies around a particular role. Perhaps you’ve done the same - creating content aimed at the CIO, or running paid campaigns targeting Finance Directors. But are you certain those are the right people? Yes they will have an important bearing in the overall decision - but are they your buyers. If they are, that's fantastic - but it's worth just being sure,

Too often, these assumptions are based on internal views or what a previous buyer journey looked like. But organisations and decision-making units vary significantly - especially when you're selling enterprise software or services. No two deals are ever the same, but we can find out what a typical process looks like, and then make sure that we are extending our marketing content to include more contacts rather than not enough.

Buyer group research helps eliminate assumptions. It gives you a clear view of who is actually involved in the decision-making process, what each person most-likely cares about, and how best to engage them.

How to Identify the Buyer Group

So how do you find out who’s in the buyer group for your solution? You start by asking the people who know: your existing customers and your own sales team.

1. Interviewing Existing Customers

One of the easiest, and most overlooked, ways to understand your buyer group is to simply ask your customers. Run structured interviews with the key people involved in past buying decisions and see how their process worked and who was involved in it. Ask:

• Who was involved in selecting the solution?

• Who needed to sign off?

• Who asked the tough questions?

• Who blocked progress?

• Had they heard about your technology previously?

• Did anyone have a bigger say than others?

• Did someone play a role that they didn't expect?

  
  

You’ll likely uncover people and roles that weren’t on your radar. You might also (almost certainly) hear names of roles that you didn't know - we regularly find that some roles are really important but we thought they did something different to what they actually do, and then we bring them into the pot.

When we run customer interviews, we also call it 'inside out research' - because we're speaking to the client and learning from the inside of the business. The more we can do this, the better - it's where the gold is found.

2. Interviewing Your Sales Team

Your salespeople are speaking to prospects every day. They’re being asked the tough questions, dealing with multiple stakeholders, and watching how deals unfold. They are also the point where the rubber hits the road - they are sending emails to lots of clients and learning who is responding and who isn't.

By running structured internal interviews with your top reps, you can quickly build a clearer picture of the roles that consistently show up in deals - and where influence really lies. For one of our largest technology clients, we interviewed 20 key contacts within the business - from the sales, marketing, product management, and customer success teams. We asked each person who they would say is the buyer group, and to give some examples. It proved hugely successful and we developed a list of 23 different buyer personas that are now central to how the marketing team operates.

Understanding What Each Buyer Cares About

Once you know who the buyer group is, the next step is to understand them. It’s tempting to fall back on assumptions again here, e.g. "the CIO cares about security,” or “procurement only wants to talk price.” But these are often oversimplifications.

Buyer group research means validating what each stakeholder really cares about - and again, that comes from interviews.

We frequently conduct persona-based interviews for our clients, speaking directly with roles such as CFOs, Data Protection Officers, or Digital Workplace Leaders to understand. In this case, they don't need to be customers of our client, they can be any persona with that job title or responsibility within the sector that we're looking at. We might ask them:

• What are their goals?

• What do they want from a supplier?

• What puts them off?

• What language do they use?

• What's the most important deliverable in their role?

• Who they listen to within their team?

• etc etc.

This insight can then shape messaging, campaigns, and sales strategies - and reduce friction in the buying process. It means that not only do we know the right personas, but we have made giant strides to understand what we should be talking to them about.

Finding the Buyer Group in Target Accounts

So we now know our buyer group, and we know what they likely care about - but it leaves us with one major piece of the jigsaw missing. Who are those people in the accounts that we care about?

That’s where we come in.

At Viewpoint Analysis, we run contact research and profiling across your key accounts to identify the buyer group. We don’t just give you names and job titles of the key people, we go wide and deep to find all the people that we think you should be communicating with.

Buyer Group Research - Underpinning Your Marketing Plans

Enterprise deals are getting more complex. Committees are getting bigger. Stakeholders are harder to reach. And expectations for vendors are higher. If your marketing and sales strategy is still focused on a narrow view of one or two personas, you’re leaving too much to chance.

Buyer group research gives you the clarity you need to:

• Build more accurate ABM campaigns

• Develop messaging that resonates across departments

• Reduce sales cycles and unstick stalled deals

• Increase win rates by aligning to how buyers really buy

If you’d like support to understand your buyer group, or to uncover who’s really involved in the decisions in your target accounts, we can help. Learn more about our Buyer Research here.