There is a lot of buzz in the B2B sales world right now about the growth of buying groups. I recently commented on a post by Nick Mason regarding this exact topic. Nick pointed out that back in 2017, Kerry Cunningham and Terry Flaherty presented “The Demand Unit Waterfall” at SiriusDecisions, which spotlighted buying groups expanding to at least 10 people

My response? I was selling to buying groups of 10 or more people way back in 1990

While I don't have the hard data to prove it, my decades in the trenches have shown me a clear pattern: buying groups always balloon during times of economic uncertainty or recession. We saw it during the dot-com bust in 2000, the post-9/11 downturn, and right after the Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008. When budgets tighten, more people get involved to de-risk the purchase

And it can go far beyond 10 people. We currently have a client selling enterprise supply chain software who tells us they routinely see up to 100 people involved in a single sales cycle

Granted, back when I started in 1990, if you were selling purely to IT, you might deal with just one person. But the moment you moved into business software, I started in Payroll and HCM before moving to ERP, large buying groups were simply the cost of doing business

Nick made another excellent point in his post, noting that:

"Identifying and aligning buying groups was the sole job of selling pre-internet and the inversion of information availability. When the salesperson used to turn up with their briefcase full of materials... they had to work out who mattered, what they cared about, who really held power... Now the seller isn't in the room from the start of the process (thanks, internet) we no longer have that 'reading of the room' to guide us."

While Nick's historical context is spot on, this is where we respectfully disagree with his conclusion

Yes, the internet took sellers out of the room. But that doesn’t mean we are blind. The modern digital landscape requires a modern digital approach. The proprietary process we defined in our Social Selling methodology, combined with the power of our AI Agent, Azpertilo, is specifically built to solve this exact problem. Even without being physically in the room, sellers can still identify buying groups, align stakeholders, and gain critical visibility and influence early in the cycle

Conclusion

Large buying groups aren't a new phenomenon created by the internet era; they are a historical reality of complex B2B sales that naturally expand during economic downturns. What has changed is our proximity to them. While the days of reading the room with a briefcase in hand are gone, sellers aren't helpless. By combining a robust Social Selling methodology with advanced AI tools like Azpertilo, modern sales teams can map out, influence, and win over complex buying groups, even from behind a screen