1. The unit you are measured on is not the unit that decides.

For Marketing & Sales

Walk into almost any B2B marketing meeting and you will hear a version of the same sentence: we hit the lead target, but pipeline did not move.

The hunt for a culprit starts. The content was too generic. Sales did not follow up fast enough. The nurture flow needs rebuilding. Someone suggests a new tool.

The culprit is almost never anyone in the room. It is the number at the top of the report. A lead is one person. A purchase is not.

The average buying group has 10 people globally. Most of them will never fill in a form.

Most of them will never appear in your CRM. And yet every one of them has a say in whether the deal closes.

The most important shift here is not a technology change. It is a measurement change.

As long as your board slide shows leads and MQLs, that is what your teams will optimise for. Change what you measure and you change what gets built.

Our GTM 2027 recommendations

Build at least one account-level or group-level metric into your next QBR. Lead volume with a cost per lead beside it makes a clean slide. Group coverage and group progression do not, at least not until someone builds the reporting. Start building it.
Map your target accounts against all the roles that typically appear in a buying group for your solution. Finance, Legal, Procurement, IT, and end-user functions each have a different reason to say yes or no. Know which roles you are reaching and which you are missing.
Review how your marketing partners are briefed and measured. If the contract is built around leads and MQLs, that incentive will always pull against buying group thinking regardless of what the strategy document says.
Make sure branding, demand generation, sales engagement, and sales enablement are coordinated around the same buying group definition. If sales enablement knows nothing about the roles your demand generation is reaching, you are running programs, not a campaign.