Guest edition by Jordan Adams, Co-Founder as a Service at 3AM Thoughts

You’ve heard the line. The B2B buying group is now four people. No, six. No, eight. Actually it’s twelve, and the latest figure I saw was fourteen. The implication baked into all of it is that there’s some mystical room where the CEO, IT, CMO, FD and CRO all don cloaks and chant while they collectively choose the next CRM system, and your job as a marketer is to capture every one of them at once or lose the deal.

I’ve been a CEO. I’ve signed off on tech. And I can’t recall a single time when me, IT, the CMO, the FD and the CRO all got in one room, virtually or otherwise, to discuss a buying decision. It didn’t happen. Not once.

Here’s what actually happened. Decisions started at department level. They involved inter-departmental conversations that then got discussed both horizontally and vertically across the business. Information got passed around, dots got joined, someone championed it quietly to someone else. And when it came to sign off, that was usually a small group of three, possibly four. The “buying group” was real, but it was never a group in a room. It was a relay.

So, let’s stop convincing ourselves that the four, six, eight, twelve or fourteen people supposedly in the decision are all sitting at one table waiting to be captured simultaneously. Most decisions around tech are bottom-up recommendations, not top-down mandatory orders. The energy comes from below and works its way up, picking up advocates as it goes.

This matters because it changes what good marketing actually looks like. So, let’s make a rethink happen. Here’s where I’d start.

1. Map the relay, not the room

Stop drawing your buying group as a static org chart of personas you need to “hit.” Draw it as a flow of information instead. Who hears about a problem first? Who do they tell? Where does that conversation go next, and who has to be convinced before it travels upward? You’re not trying to capture a committee. You’re trying to understand how information moves through an organisation and where it tends to get stuck.

2. Arm the advocate, don’t just reach the buyer

If decisions are bottom-up recommendations, then your most valuable person is rarely the one who signs. It’s the one who champions you internally when you’re not in the room. That person needs to be armed. They need the one-pager that answers the FD’s cost question, the line that handles IT’s security concern, the proof point that makes the CRO nod. Most marketing is built to persuade the buyer directly. The smarter play is to make your advocate impossible to argue with.

3. Swarm the organisation, don’t ambush the group

You can’t go all-in on a single buying group at a single moment, because that moment doesn’t exist. What does exist is a set of conversations happening at different levels at different times. So, swarm around the organisation. Bend and twist to the flow of information rather than forcing everyone into one funnel at one stage. Be present where the dots get joined, not just where the contract gets signed.

Here’s the trap underneath all of this, and it’s worth naming. We suffer from visibility bias. We optimise for what shows up in the data and ignore what doesn’t. The form fills, the demo requests, the people who put their hand up. But the most important movements in a buying decision are the quiet ones you never see. The Slack message between two managers. The hallway conversation. The advocate making your case in a meeting you’ll never know happened. If you only optimise for the visible, you’re optimising for the wrong thing.

So, here’s where I’d genuinely love to hear from you, because I know plenty of you will disagree, and that’s the point. For those of you who’ve actually been in the room when a real buying decision got signed off, how many people were truly in it? And be honest. Was it twelve cloaked decision-makers, or was it three people and a relay of conversations that got you there? Tell me in the comments.

If figuring out how to swarm an organisation rather than ambush a committee sounds like a problem worth solving properly, that’s exactly the kind of work Chris and the team at Launch Marketing do day in, day out.