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A conversation is building across B2B GTM circles about whether leads and accounts are even the right units to score anymore.
The argument: leads are too narrow, accounts are too broad, and the buying group, the actual cluster of people involved in a given purchase, is the unit that should have been at the center all along.
It's an accurate critique. However, it's missing a fundamental step, one that threatens to derail ROI if skipped...
The problem with leads
A lead tells you one person is engaged. In a typical complex B2B purchase, that's one of somewhere between six and eleven decision makers involved in the decision. Three people at the same account engage with your content, and you get three MQLs, often routed to three different reps with no visibility into each other's activity. The committee is invisible and only the fragments show up.
The problem with accounts
Accounts fix the fragmentation issue and introduce a new one: one account, one status. Close a deal with one buying group inside a large account, and everyone else in that account inherits a "customer" label, including people who had no involvement in the purchase and may still be genuine prospects for a different solution entirely.
Neither object was ever built to hold the full picture on its own.
Why the fix isn't 'replace with the buying group'
The emerging answer in the market is to make the buying group the primary object: score it, track it, run the whole motion on it instead of leads or accounts.
We think that's only half right.
Buying groups are expensive to build properly, even with AI doing the inference work: mapping titles to roles, matching engagement patterns, working out who belongs to which opportunity and who's missing from the picture. That effort is worth spending on accounts that are genuinely in-market. It's a poor use of it spent evenly across every account in the CRM.
This is the same logic behind our own scoring approach, just extended one step further.
Account level intent tells you where to look. It's the strongest signal because there's simply more of it to observe, which is why it carries the most weight in a properly built model, roughly 60% of a defensible score.
Individual level intent tells you who to talk to and how, weighted lower because it's a weaker signal on its own.
Buying group depth is the third factor, the piece that tells you how to sequence the conversation once you already know the account deserves the attention.
1. Prioritize on the account.
2. Personalize on the individual.
3. Sequence on the buying group.
Skip the first filter and go straight to buying group mapping, and you risk building beautifully complete committee maps for accounts that were never actually in-market to begin with.
Where the buying group argument is genuinely strong
The sharpest part of the emerging thinking is post-sale, not pre-sale. Most lead and account methodology, including plenty of standard practice, treats the buying group as something you build to win a deal and then set aside. But the group that expands an account is rarely the same group that signed the original contract, and for most B2B companies now, the largest source of growth sits inside the existing customer base rather than in net new logos.
Tracking how a buying group's composition shifts through upsell and cross-sell, not just through the initial deal, is underused. It's a genuine gap in how most teams, including plenty operating with our methodology, currently think about the post-sale motion.
What this means in practice
Buying groups aren't a replacement for account and individual level scoring. They're the layer that makes prioritized accounts easier to act on, and a layer most teams currently build by hand, guessing at personas, hunting for matching contacts, routinely underestimating the quiet stakeholder who can stall a deal just as easily as the obvious economic buyer can move it forward.
Get the sequencing right, account first, individual second, buying group third, and the whole model gets sharper without needing to throw out the objects that already work.
How to implement this methodology
If you're building toward this and don't have the in-house intelligence layer or channel expertise to run it, that's exactly what we do. We run intelligence-led demand generation campaigns that deliver pipeline, not just lead volume.
If you want the mechanics behind our buyer intelligence scoring and the buying-group map, our free strategy sessions walk through exactly how it works, alongside the rest of the intelligence system it plugs into.
See how we drive pipeline →
