From MQLs to BGM: spanning the buying group marketing maturity chasm

The 2026 Buyer Group Index, from Pretzl with the ANA and NewtonX, measured 28 go-to-market practices across 200 senior leaders. Greg Salmon and Jeff Lowe explain how the leading teams earn trust across the whole buying group, and a free assessment lets others see how they compare

The case for a truly joined-up go-to-market function, with sales and marketing working as one to win over the whole buying group, has rarely been more widely made. Yet in most organisations, the practice still trails some way behind the rhetoric.

That gap between intent and practice is what the 2026 Buyer Group Index sets out to measure. Commissioned by Pretzl in partnership with the ANA, and conducted by independent research firm NewtonX, it surveyed 200 senior go-to-market leaders and scored 28 practices against commercial outcomes such as pipeline velocity and time to market. Like most commissioned research, it is self-reported and worth reading with that in mind. But the questions it raises apply to any B2B team, whoever they choose to work with, and they come back to trust: if buying is done by groups, how well are marketers earning the confidence of everyone in them?

I explored the findings on a recent episode of the Trust & Influence in B2B podcast, sponsored by Pretzl, with two people from inside the business: Greg Salmon, Pretzl’s CEO, and Jeff Lowe, a go-to-market advisor at Pretzl and a long-time technology CMO, most recently Chief Commercial Officer at Smart Technologies. Their’s is the view of the people behind the research, but both were candid about where the data flatters the market, and where the market flatters itself.

Somewhere between aspiration and reality

The Index’s headline finding is an average score of 63.2 out of 100. Greg doesn’t dress it up. “It’s kind of a D minus, isn’t it? It’s probably not a huge surprise.” In his view, the data and technology needed to do buyer group marketing properly are only now arriving, and much of it is still nascent. “It stands to reason that people are on the journey rather than completing that journey.”

Jeff thinks the real picture is tougher still. To qualify for the original study, organisations had to be well on their way, because the research was testing outcomes. Since the assessment opened to everyone, the numbers have shifted. “We’re seeing the average come way down,” he said. “Most companies are in the 40s and 50s, even in the 20s and 30s.” If your own team feels behind, you’re in large and honest company, and that is a better starting point than a flattering benchmark.

Part of the problem is that the language has moved faster than the practice. Greg has sat in plenty of rooms where a team declares that buyer group marketing is what it’s all about, then describes persona-based nurture programmes under a different name. “That’s almost the worst of all worlds,” he said, comparable to an ABM team concluding that because it bought 6sense, it must be doing ABM.

The comfort of a single score

So why has progress been so slow? Greg’s answer starts with the MQL, and he’s fair to it. Segmenting by demographic and behavioural fit was a sensible improvement on marketing the same thing to everybody. The trouble came when the model was pushed to its limit: a single linear path, a readiness-to-buy score, and the assumption that “complex buying is led by one individual as opposed to groups”.

Real buying looks nothing like that. “You have known buyers, you have hidden buyers, you have champions, you have detractors,” Greg said, and each of them needs different messages, in different formats, through different channels. What keeps the old model alive is that it feels trustworthy. “There’s something reassuring about the notion of a single score and a single path,” he said, likening it to his health wearable telling him he scored 82 for sleep last night. The number is tidy. It just isn’t the full picture, and confidence in a tidy number is not the same as earning the confidence of the people actually making the decision.

Earning trust with people you never meet

The Index shows that organisations are reasonably good at identifying who is in a buyer group (a performance score of 71.7) but noticeably weaker at finding the hidden influencers within it (60.6). Greg put it in terms any salesperson will recognise: “You have the person in the room and then you have someone who might sit opposite them at a desk who’s kind of in their ear.” You may be selling to the CIO while the CFO makes the call, with procurement and legal shaping that decision in turn.

Reaching those people is fundamentally a question of trust, and Greg breaks it into two parts. The first is the message: “What does somebody need to understand about your organisation in order to trust you and therefore consider you?” The second is the medium. A procurement lead may want “unbelievably dry long-form content”; someone else needs something short and digestible. Then there’s the champion, the person who has to carry your case into rooms you’ll never enter. “How can I best arm them to build consensus and build support for their line of argument with their peers?” Trust in a buying group isn’t won once. It’s earned person by person, and then passed between them.

Map before you scale

Where to begin? Greg is clear that ownership is “a team sport”, bringing marketing, sales and data stakeholders together. His practical advice is to avoid boiling the ocean. Take a handful of in-flight opportunities, or one segment that matters, and work through what you know about the people involved: at each stage, for each role, what are they trying to get done, what worries them, and what would prompt their next step?

He is wary of false certainty here too. Mapping a buying group at Lloyd’s won’t tell you exactly what one looks like at Citibank. What it gives you is a representative baseline you can keep refining, separating what is objectively known (this person is definitely the CFO) from what is inferred (this is how we think decisions get made), and steadily raising your confidence in the second.

Out of sight, and at speed

Two forces make all of this harder. The first is visibility. In the study’s follow-up interviews, around 60% of leaders said most buyer research now happens outside a vendor’s view, and Greg expects AI research agents to finish off “the notion that you can fully see and fully own and fully influence everything that goes into a buyer journey”. Attribution, in his words, is “possibly the greatest villain in this space”.

The second is AI itself. Most interviewees said AI is already reshaping how vendors are found and evaluated, yet the Index suggests it is speeding up execution without automatically improving growth. Greg’s diagnosis is blunt: “If you are wildly accelerating, scaling and automating things based on misleading assumptions, you’re going to have even more underperforming things going out there in the world.” It’s the old marketing automation problem, he says, “on steroids”. Concern about how AI represents a brand was near universal among interviewees, and Greg’s response is methodical rather than alarmed: establish what you want the market to think of you, audit how you currently show up, then monitor and improve. When an AI answer is often a buyer’s first impression, accurate representation is a trust issue, not just a visibility one.

One commercial team

Jeff brought the view from the client side, and from the data. The three practices with the most impact in the Index (connected data, a single integrated marketing and sales plan, and tracking buyer groups in CRM) are all system-level, and all three are among the weakest. Connected data carries the most weight of all 28 practices yet scores just 55.0. That lands squarely on the CMO. “Now I need to really get my head around data and systems and technology architecture,” Jeff said. “That traditionally hasn’t been the purview of a chief marketing officer.”

He goes further on the old divide between sales and marketing. With 15 to 25 people in a buyer group, each at a different stage, who owns the orchestration? “Is that sales or marketing? Yes, is the answer.” Jeff calls separate teams “an outdated concept”, and at SMART Technologies he acted on it, combining marketing and sales into a single team organised around customer jobs to be done, which he called the Unified Commercial Engine. He’s realistic that most organisations can’t do the same. But the next step is within reach for most: no more separate budgets, no more separate metrics. Buyers trust a vendor that speaks with one voice, and that starts with sales and marketing trusting the same view of the customer.

What the leaders do differently

The gap between the best and the rest is wide. The 26% of organisations scoring 75 or above report 70% higher pipeline velocity and 59% faster time to market than the lowest-scoring group.

According to Jeff, they do four things well. They understand the whole buyer group, including “those hidden buyers behind the scenes”. They vary their content, timing and format by persona. They have genuinely aligned sales and marketing. And they are building a single version of the truth about the customer. “They’re not talking about martech stacks,” he said. “They’re talking about buyer group stacks.” Because so much sales and marketing technology was built around the lead, re-engineering it around the buyer group is, in his words, “really profound”.

Knowing where you stand

The honest first step across this gap is knowing which side of it you’re on. Pretzl’s Buyer Group Index assessment is free and ungated, takes around 15 minutes and returns five strengths and five areas for improvement. The most useful idea Jeff shared, though, works with any benchmark: ask your CMO and your CSO to complete it separately, then compare the answers.

The differences start the real conversations, he said, along the lines of: “You think we know who the hidden influencers are? I didn’t think we knew that at all.” Moving from MQL to BGM is less about buying new technology than about whether your own teams trust the same picture of the buyer, and whether the buyer, in turn, has reason to trust you.

What to do with this

None of this requires a reorganisation to get started, just a willingness to replace comfortable assumptions with an honest view of where you stand.

• Stop rebadging. If your “buyer group marketing” is a persona nurture programme with a new name, call it what it is, and treat it as the starting point rather than the destination.
• Map the buyer group on one live deal. Pick a few in-flight opportunities or a single priority segment, identify every role involved, including the hidden influencers, and note what each person needs in order to trust you.
• Arm your champions. Give the people who advocate for you internally the material they need to build consensus with colleagues you will never meet.
• Audit how you show up, including in AI. Compare what you want the market to think of you with what buyers and AI tools actually find, then improve and monitor it over time.
• Agree shared budgets and metrics for sales and marketing. Full integration may be some way off, but one view of the customer and one definition of success is a realistic next step.
• Benchmark consistently. Use a single framework to assess where you stand, whether that is an established maturity model, your own internal scorecard or the free Buyer Group Index assessment, and have marketing and sales complete it separately so the differences in their answers become part of the diagnosis.