Map your Buying Groups and Stakeholder Committees in your CRM

What do you do after you identify your ICP? How can you best map in your Stakeholder Committees and Buying Groups?

Now that you have have nailed your ICP

An Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is a detailed description of the company, organization, or individual that would benefit the most from your product or service—and, in return, provide the most value to your business. while an ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) defines the company-level characteristics, it doesn’t inherently specify individual people or contacts. However, once you've identified ICP accounts, the next logical step is to find the right contacts within those accounts.

Before diving into the CRM, document the attributes that make up your ICP. These might include:

• Firmographics: Industry, company size, revenue, geography

• Technographics: Tools or platforms used

• Behavioral Indicators: Engagement level, product usage, sales stage

• Deal Attributes: Average deal size, lifetime value, renewal/expansion potential

Benefits of Defining an ICP

• Efficient Resource Allocation: Focus your sales and marketing efforts on the most promising leads.

• Improved Product Development: Build features aligned with your ideal customers’ needs.

• Stronger Retention and Loyalty: Better-fit customers tend to stay longer and be more satisfied.

• Increased Sales Effectiveness: Higher conversion rates and shorter sales cycles.

Once you've identified an ICP-fit account, you need to find key stakeholders within that company.

Time to identify your Stakeholder Committees

The Stakeholder Committee refers to the group of internal decision-makers (and sometimes external advisors) who formally evaluate and approve large or strategic purchases. These Stakeholder Committees are identified at the account level in Salesforce. This will help the team align at a strategic level on the account to identify key personas, stakeholders, and gaps in your overall account strategy

Identifying who is actively involved in the buying process at a target account is critical for B2B sales success—especially in multi-threaded, complex deals. Start with a hypothesis like certain key personas, common titles, or target departments.

Example - for a sales enablement tool, your hypothesis might be:

• Enablement Manager (Champion)

• VP of Sales (Decision Maker)

• RevOps (Technical Evaluator)

• CFO (Economic Buyer)

In Salesforce you can utilize the account roles, departments, seniority levels, recent activities, key titles to map your Stakeholder Committees (Account Level)

Find your Buying Groups

A Buying Group is the collection of individuals within a target account who are involved in the purchasing decision. These groups are usually Stakeholder Committees are identified at the opportunity level in Salesforce. This helps you identify the key buyers and buying groups on every deal

What is the process a company goes through to buy a solution like ours? Salesforce will give you opportunity contact roles to map your buying groups. From there it is interesting to align your activities to your contacts with a role on your opportunity. This helps determine what stakeholder roles need to be involved. Some example roles could be standard or custom such as:

• Decision Maker

• Economic Buyer

• Champion

• User Influencer

• Technical Evaluator

• Procurement/Legal

In Salesforce you can utilize the opportunity contact roles, departments, seniority levels, key titles, latest activities or a combination of all these to map your Buying Groups (Opportunity Level).

Focus

• Buying groups can be made of a single individual to large groups depending on the size, complexity, and strategic importance of the deal

• According to Gartner, the average size of a buying committee or buying group, in the US for B2B software purchases is around five (5) members. This number can fluctuate depending on the complexity of the purchase and the size of the organization. Some research suggests that for larger deals or more complex situations, buying groups can range from 6 to 10, or even more than 10 people. 

• These may overlap with the buying groups often includes senior leaders and cross-functional teams

• People in the groups might represent many facets including business value, risk management, compliance or governance, procurement, legal, security, or other

Pro Tips

Once you’ve built trust with your champion:

“Who else is typically involved in a decision like this on your team?”
“What does the internal approval process look like?”
“Who else do we need to bring into this conversation to make sure we’re aligned?”

Don’t be afraid to co-create the stakeholder map with your champion.

• Keep your stakeholder map updated dynamically—it will evolve.

• Run deal reviews with your team using stakeholder insights.

• Align stakeholders to deal stages: who appears when often signals intent and priority.

  ICP - Account characteristics that will lead you to groups of people in the accounts ideal company to target

  Stakeholder Committee - Group of contacts who are the formal decision authority group impact the formal decision authority group

  Buying Group - Individual or contact based, target roles, key personas, and other contacts that influence the buying journey

Aligning on ICP, Buying Groups, and Stakeholder Committees is essential because it ensures your entire go-to-market team targets the right accounts, engages the right people, and navigates the right decision processes efficiently.

Your ICP focuses your efforts on companies most likely to convert and succeed with your product; the Buying Group helps you understand who truly influences the deal; and the Stakeholder Committee reveals who ultimately approves it. Without clear alignment on all three, deals slow down, resources get wasted, and win rates drop. With alignment, sales cycles are shorter, messaging is sharper, and every touchpoint drives value toward a close.