Support for Buying Groups

With this release, Oracle has introduced explicit support for Buying Groups within its Marketing and Sales platforms. In modern B2B sales, purchases are rarely made by a single decision-maker; instead, a team of stakeholders—each with distinct roles, influence, and requirements—collectively evaluate and approve a buying decision. The Buying Group construct allows organizations to formally define, track, and leverage these groupings within accounts and opportunities, reflecting real-world customer dynamics.

Buying Group

A Buying Group is an account-specific collection of contacts—individuals associated with a real-world product or solution buying process. The Buying Group serves as a focused container, identifying all key contacts involved in and relevant to a particular product’s go-to-market motion within an account. Buying Groups aim to include every meaningful participant, but not everyone at the account, increasing targeting effectiveness and supporting better sales engagement.

Buying Group Definition

A Buying Group Definition establishes the blueprint for which personas and buyer roles should be included for a specific product or solution. It serves as the foundation for assigning contacts to Buying Groups at the account level, even in the absence of in-market behavioral signals. Each definition is product-specific, associating personas (such as IT Director or Procurement Manager) with the appropriate buyer roles.

Once Buying Group Definitions are activated, the system automatically generates and refreshes Buying Group and Buying Group Member data every day by evaluating these active definitions against the customer evolving account and contact data.

*Note: In this release, Account criteria is set at the customer level by default and cannot be specified per Buying Group Definition. This capability is planned for a future release.*

Buyer Role

A Buyer Role describes the function an individual plays in a buying process (for example: Decision Maker, Influencer, End User, or Champion). Roles clarify the expected contribution, influence, or responsibility a contact has in a group. Multiple contacts can play the same role, and one person can hold several roles within the same Buying Group.

Persona

A Persona represents a segment of contacts with similar characteristics, typically defined by attributes such as job function, seniority, and department. In a Buying Group Definition, each persona is assigned a buyer role reflecting their likely participation for a given product.

Business Benefits:

  • Increased Targeting Precision: When go-to-market (GTM) teams utilize Buying Group data, outreach can focus on the most relevant personas and roles for each product, improving campaign and sales effectiveness.
  • Supports Complex Buying Processes: By modeling real-world buyer group structures and roles, organizations can ensure engagement strategies align with actual purchasing dynamics—provided these structures are embedded in GTM execution.
  • Enhanced Personalization: Leveraging role and persona data enables tailored messaging and interactions, resulting in improved customer experiences and higher conversion rates.
  • Improved Sales and Marketing Alignment: Shared visibility and understanding of Buying Group data across Sales and Marketing fosters collaboration, ensuring both teams are focused on the same key contacts and coverage gaps.
  • Coverage Insight and Contact Development: By monitoring Buying Group coverage, organizations can quickly identify missing personas or roles, guiding contact development initiatives to build more complete buying teams.

Note: These benefits are realized when Buying Group data is actively leveraged in go-to-market processes.

Steps to enable and configure

1. Configure Buyer Roles

  • Review the out-of-the-box list of Buyer Roles (such as Decision Maker, Influencer, End User, Champion, etc.).
  • Add, remove, or customize Buyer Roles as needed to reflect your organization’s needs. Each customer can define their own set of Buyer Roles in addition to the pre-defined options.

2. Set Account Criteria

  • A default Account criterion is established at the customer level and will be applied to all Buying Group Definitions.
  • Administrators can review and edit this default Account criterion as required.
  • Note: In this release, Account criteria cannot be set per Buying Group Definition. This capability is planned for a future release.

3. Define Product List

  • Ensure the list of Products is current and accurate, as this determines what products can be associated with new Buying Group Definitions.

Tips and considerations

How you can start using Buying Groups in Fusion Marketing: 

1. Enable/Access the Feature

  • Buying Groups is a controlled availability (CA) feature and must be enabled for your customer instance.
  • Contact your Oracle representative or support team to request access if needed.

2. Ensure Initial Setup

  • Review and customize the list of Buyer Roles (e.g., Decision Maker, Influencer), including adding company-specific roles as necessary.
  • Review and update the account criteria at the customer level.
  • Maintain the list of available products that can be used for Buying Group Definitions to ensure it aligns with your organizational needs.

3. Define Personas for Buying Groups

  • Identify and create personas based on key attributes such as job level, job function, and department.
  • Ensure personas reflect your target audiences for each product segment, and review them periodically for relevance.

4. Define Buying Group Definition

  • For each GTM product, create a Buying Group Definition by associating relevant personas and assigning them appropriate Buyer Roles.
  • Validate that each Buying Group Definition has complete coverage of buyer roles to support your GTM processes.
  • Only one Buying Group Definition is allowed per product

5. Activate Buying Group Definition

  • Once a Buying Group Definition is complete, activate it so that Buying Group and Buying Group Member data can be generated and refreshed on a daily basis.
  • Activation enables downstream processes and reporting.
  • Once activated, Buying Group and Buying Group Member data is generated and refreshed daily by evaluating active Buying Group Definitions against the customer account and contact data.

6. Leverage Buying Group Data

  • Use Buying Group and Buying Group Member data to drive segmentation, targeted marketing, opportunity management, and analytics.
  • Review Buying Group coverage and member assignments regularly to identify gaps and develop contacts for missing key personas.
  • Share Buying Group insights across Sales and Marketing to ensure coordinated outreach and improved alignment.

NOTE: In this release, Account criteria is set at the customer level by default and cannot be specified per Buying Group Definition. This capability is planned for a future release.