You know your B2B solution is perfect for a company, but you’re struggling to get your foot in the door. You’ve spoken to some people at the account who sound interested, but they can’t make the deal happen. How do we find the right people – the people who make up their buying team? Obviously, their job title and persona is a strong indicator, but each company is organized differently and there’s a lot of nuance between their job titles versus their actual roles that varies from company to company. Each company has its own organizational structure, and understanding that structure is a critical piece of information when it comes to successfully identifying the people at those companies who actually have the power and influence necessary to buy your product.
B2B hierarchy mapping is a powerful tool for sales and marketing teams to identify and engage buying groups, or clusters of decision-makers within a target organization. Let’s look at some areas where B2B hierarchy mapping helps you identify and target buying groups.
Understanding Organizational Structure
Hierarchy mapping reveals the organizational structure, showing how various roles and departments are connected. For example, a hierarchy map might show the relationship between a company’s marketing director, sales VP, and CTO. By seeing these relationships, sales teams can identify who might influence the buying decision, uncovering hidden decision-makers or influencers who might not have otherwise been visible. Knowing this structure enables teams to better target their messaging and understand each decision-maker’s influence level in the purchasing process.
Identifying Buying Groups and Roles
Buying groups are typically composed of multiple people within an organization, each with a specific role in the decision-making process. These can include initiators, influencers, gatekeepers, decision-makers, and end-users. Hierarchy mapping allows teams to identify each person’s role in this group, providing insights into who needs to be engaged at each stage. This is especially useful for Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategies, where personalized engagement for each role is key. Sales and marketing teams can tailor their content and outreach for each role in the buying group, ensuring that each contact receives relevant information that resonates with their specific concerns or authority.
Targeting Key Influencers and Champions
In B2B sales, certain individuals may not have the final decision-making power but hold significant influence over the purchasing process. Hierarchy mapping can help identify these key influencers or internal “champions.” These influencers often advocate for or against solutions and can significantly impact the final decision. By identifying them early, teams can nurture these contacts to build internal support. By targeting these influencers, sales and marketing can establish internal advocates who support and accelerate the buying decision.
Mapping Out Engagement Strategies
With hierarchy mapping, teams can develop layered engagement strategies that speak to each group’s unique pain points, motivations, and objectives. For example, finance teams care about ROI, while end-users focus on ease of use. This allows sales to prioritize outreach based on each person’s influence level, customizing communication and moving contacts through the pipeline more strategically. Targeted engagement boosts the chances of success because each team member sees how the solution directly addresses their needs and challenges.
Streamlining Complex Sales Cycles
In complex B2B sales, decisions are rarely made by a single person. Understanding and mapping the hierarchy reduces uncertainty about who to contact and when. By identifying and mapping out the buying group, sales can reduce delays in the sales cycle by knowing exactly who needs to be consulted next, where approvals are required, and which steps need follow-up. Streamlining the sales process saves time and resources, helping accelerate deal closures and ensuring that no key decision-maker is overlooked.
Developing Tailored Messaging and Campaigns
Knowing each person’s position and role in the buying group allows marketing to design tailored campaigns for each role. For example, C-level executives may receive content on high-level ROI, while managers receive hands-on information about features and usability. Hierarchy mapping data can inform campaign segmentation, allowing teams to develop messaging that’s more relevant to each member’s priorities, making campaigns more effective. Tailored content and campaigns help increase engagement, build rapport with each member of the buying group, and increase the likelihood of conversion.
Improving Cross-Functional Team Collaboration
Hierarchy mapping can also bridge communication gaps within your sales and marketing teams by making the customer’s structure transparent. This helps in aligning teams on shared goals and improves the coordination between different departments. For example, marketing can provide insights on content that resonates best with different roles, while sales can share feedback from direct conversations with decision-makers, ensuring a cohesive strategy. Better collaboration between sales and marketing leads to more effective ABM campaigns, seamless hand-offs, and a more aligned approach to engaging the buying group.
In short, B2B hierarchy mapping offers a structured view of buying groups within target accounts, enabling sales and marketing teams to connect with the right people, in the right way, and at the right time. This empowers teams to personalize their outreach, shorten sales cycles, and improve win rates by aligning strategies with the dynamics of complex B2B decision-making processes.
Unfortunately, keeping hierarchies mapped across your CRM and marketing automation systems is not an easy task. Most sales and marketing teams are not taking advantage of hierarchy mapping because they don’t have the tools to make it happen. Companies M&A and people change jobs constantly. Even if you went in and manually mapped hierarchies across your Total Addressable Market (TAM), keeping it up-to-date will be expensive and tedious. Sales and marketing teams need a way to manage profiles for all people, companies and accounts across their TAM, connect them all together with hierarchies, and keep it updated automatically – all without breaking the bank.
Historically, that’s been a pipedream, but with advancements in technology, certain Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) now offer such a solution with Dynamic B2B Data – when the underlying data changes, it’s updated across all of your existing systems automatically through direct integrations. So, if you’re ready to take your B2B data to the next level for a better understanding of your target accounts, the decision makers, and the environments they live in, look for a CDP solution with automatic hierarchy mapping and Dynamic B2B data. For more information about winning with B2B hierarchy mapping, check out 10 Ways To Win with B2B Hierarchies.