Buying groups overview

Transcript

This video will explain the new concept of a buying group introduced by Adobe Journey Optimizer Business to Business edition. In a B2B market, buying decisions are usually made by multiple individuals from the buyer’s company that are responsible for making a purchasing decision. The goal of B2B marketers and sales is to identify and focus marketing efforts on such individuals, members of a buying group.

A buying group is a new approach to driving demand. It is a group of key stakeholders inside the target account responsible for making a purchasing decision for a specific solution based on their individual role at the company and the needs of the business. Each individual member of a buying group may have a different role. Some common examples of members of a buying group may include the decision maker, influencer and the practitioner. In a buying group, a decision maker is the person who has the authority to make the final decision and allocate the budget, while an influencer is someone who can influence the decision maker’s opinion. It could be a manager or a director who helps evaluate the product or service they are looking to purchase. A practitioner is a user who uses the solution or service. A lot of marketing applications are focused on targeting either accounts or people. Problem with applications that are targeting accounts is that accounts are too broad. A marketer isn’t interested in marketing to everybody on an account that could be hundreds of people. They are focused on targeting the key people who are part of making that purchasing decision.

Problem with applications that are targeting people is that person or a lead is missing context.

When you as a marketer handle a potential new opportunity, a person or a lead to sales, a single person or a lead is missing a lot of context about the account and other potential people involved with making a purchasing decision. AJOB2B is introducing the concept of a buying group that allows you to be more targeted and gives you the right amount of context. There are three key benefits of buying groups approach. It upgrades your lead and account data, it improves your engagement and personalization and it improves measurement of your results. To create a buying group, a marketer will configure three inputs. Who you want to target, what are you selling and to whom are you selling.

The question who you want to target is about the role of a person in making B2B purchasing decision. This could be a decision maker, influencer or a practitioner and this can be managed in AJOB2B with the roles template. The question what are you selling is about the product or service we sell and this can be managed in AJOB2B with the solution interest. The question to whom are you selling is about accounts we are targeting and this can be managed in AJOB2B with an account audience.

You will configure above three in AJOB2B and use them to create buying groups. In this example, my company Luma is a B2B company that is using AJOB2B. Luma sells five solutions, high-tech products and services.

A Luma needs to identify buying groups for each of five products to provide more targeted nurturing and more effective opportunities for sales. For each of five Luma products in AJOB2B, Luma will create three separate entities. Role template, solution interest and account audience are a list of accounts that Luma would be targeting and then use them to create buying groups for each of the accounts it can find people to match the specific solution interest and role.

My company Luma may be selling five different solution categories that they sell products in. With those products, they are targeting different accounts that they want to sell those products to. For each of those accounts, they are trying to assemble a buying group, nurture that buying group and measure the engagement of that buying group so that they can identify which buying groups are ready to hand off to sales. For each of those accounts, they are trying to fill in the roles for the buying groups in relation to the solution interest. Account one may have a buying group for Luma Secure that has a decision maker and influencer in it, while account two may have a buying group for Luma Secure with the practitioner and influencer in it. So Luma is continuing to work to try to fill in those buying group gaps with AJOB2B edition. To launch the application from the Experience Cloud homepage, you will click the Jenny Optimizer B2B edition icon and you will see AJOB2B homepage. Click the Buying Groups menu and you will see the new page with four tabs.

To create a buying group, we’ll use three tabs. Step one is to configure who you want to target by creating the roles template. The first tab is the Roles Templates tab. Once you click on it, you will see the Roles Templates page.

On this page, you may store existing roles templates or create new ones by defining which roles individual people need to have to be a member of a buying group. Once you click the existing roles template, you see that the role template is a group of roles that will be associated to specific buying group. In this role template, we have three roles, decision maker, influencer and the practitioner. Conditions are attributes that are used to match the person to the role.

For example, decision maker is the person whose job title is one of these four CTO, CISO, CFO or VP of IT.

Influencer is the person whose job title is IT Director or IT Manager or Procurement Manager.

Practitioner is the person whose job title is Network Manager or Infrastructure Manager or Risk Manager.

And now we hit the back arrow to return to buying groups main page. Step two is to configure what are you selling by creating a solution interest. This is a solution interest tab.

Once you click on it, you will see the solution interest homepage.

On this page, you may store existing solution interests or create new ones by mapping role templates created in step one to products you want to sell. Once you click the existing solution interest, you see that it represents the combination of a product or service you are selling and the role templates created for this product in previous step. And now we click cancel to return to solution interests homepage. In step three, you will configure to whom are you selling by selecting an account audience and mapping it to the solution interests created in step two. And then you will use inputs from steps one, two and three, role template, solution interest and account audience to create multiple buying groups, one buying group for each combination of a solution interest and account, i.e. one buying group per account for the solution interest.

Browse tab is related to buying groups. Once you click on it, you will see a buying groups page. On this page, you may store existing buying groups or create new ones.

You may click on the hide filter icon to hide filters.

For each buying group, you see three inputs used to create it.

For example, buying group Luma Secure for Acme has been created with the roles template Luma Secure Roles and solution interest Luma Secure. To create new buying groups, you will click create buying groups button and you will see a new page where you click the next button. You will select the solution interest, for example, Luma Secure, and you will click select account audience button. You will select the account audience and you will click add audience button and then you click on the create button. And you confirm the creation. And AJL B2B will create your buying groups.

And this is the end of this video. We have explained the concept of buying groups introduced by Adobe JENE Optimizer B2B edition.