Customer Science and the invisible B2B buying group

Timing is Everything: Customer Science and the Buying Group You Can't See

Eighty-one percent of B2B buyers have already established a preferred vendor before their first sales contact. Seventy percent of the purchase process is complete before they ever speak to sales.

These numbers from 6sense are new but the underlying problem is not.

For twenty-five years, B2B has treated sales and marketing misalignment as a broken relationship to repair with shared KPIs, SLAs, or org chart reshuffling. Most fixes haven't worked. 82% of executives believe their teams are aligned, while 65% of practitioners say there's fundamental misalignment. Even the misalignment is misaligned.

Space vs. time

The problem isn't relationships. It's temporality.

Marketing watches for intent signals. Sales steps in when hands go up. Everyone's reacting. But by then, the decision is often already made in a place you couldn't see and weren't invited.

ABM platforms delivered the infrastructure they promised. The data layer didn't hold. Intent signals proved accurate at best, 20% of the time. CRM records decayed faster than teams could enrich them; B2B data rots at over 70% annually.

Kerry Cunningham, the former Forrester/SiriusDecisions analyst and current 6sense thought leader, has documented this gap for years.

The rational response would be to stop. Instead, marketing floods more volume into a broken system. Sales tunes it out. Activity increases. Results don't.

AI now promises to change everything again. But what, specifically? Should teams fix a broken demand engine now, or wait to see whether agents rewrite the rules?

But waiting has a cost. Sales reps spend just two hours per day actively selling. The rest is consumed by admin, bad data, and chasing contacts who left months ago.

As Kerry Cunningham told Matt Heinz on Sales Pipeline Radio, our traditional obsession with "creating" demand through sheer volume is largely an illusion. Cunningham argues that "whether buyers are receiving calls or emails from sellers or not, does not change when or if they engage with you." According to his research, most outreach doesn't actually spark a new buying journey; rather, it simply "catches" a buyer who was already 70% of the way through their process and ready to talk.

If the buyer hasn't already internally budgeted, planned, and set their requirements, no amount of 'challenging the status quo' from a cold caller will move the needle.Kerry Cunningham
Sales Pipeline Radio with Matt Heinz

This suggests that the misalignment we've been trying to fix with better SLAs is actually a fundamental failure to recognize that we are entering the conversation far too late to influence the outcome.

Something has actually changed

The infrastructure finally caught up.

Large language models can now synthesize weak signals at scale.

• Job postings that reveal emerging needs
• Earnings calls that signal strategic shifts
• Executive changes that trigger vendor reviews
• Technographic moves that suggest platform churn

No single signal is definitive. Together, they indicate a buying group forming before intent spikes.

Continuous enrichment is now viable. Data decay matters less when enrichment happens weekly instead of quarterly.

Graph inference fills in the gaps. From one known contact, systems can infer likely buying group roles based on org structure, title patterns, and historical behavior. It's not perfect, but it shifts visibility from unknown to inferred to established.

That shift changes everything. The binary MQL threshold (qualified or not, hand off or don't) becomes a confidence score that evolves as understanding deepens. Marketing and sales stop passing batons. They start collaborating on a shared, developing picture of the buyer group.

Account-level engagement mapping shifts the lens from individuals to domains. Multiple people from the same company engaging across channels shifts from mixed signals to the clear picture of a buying group taking shape.

The capabilities exist. What's missing is the methodology.

Customer science is that methodology.

Not a platform. An operating discipline that connects existing infrastructure to early buying-group visibility and improves with use.

Customer science starts from a different question than traditional ABX. Not "Which accounts are showing intent?" but "Where are buying groups forming, and how early can we see them?"

In practice, this means three things.

1. Signal orchestration, not signal accumulation

Customer science defines which signals matter at which stage of group formation—and how they should be weighted together. A job posting alone doesn't trigger action. Combined with earnings-call language, a new executive hire, and multi-persona content engagement, it does. The methodology specifies those combinations and updates them as patterns emerge.

2. Buying-group mapping before names are known

Rather than waiting for contacts to self-identify, customer science infers likely group composition early. If one stakeholder engages, the model predicts who else typically influences that decision, identifies those roles at the account, and adapts messaging accordingly, even before direct engagement occurs.

3. Coordinated action tied to timing

Customer science aligns marketing and sales activity to where the buying group actually is in time. Early stages emphasize education and problem framing across roles. Later stages shift toward validation, risk reduction, and consensus support. Action changes because timing changes.

Every engagement feeds the system. Signal patterns from historical wins are analyzed to understand what appeared six to twelve months before decisions were made. Those patterns are then applied to current accounts. The model improves over time. Investments compound instead of depreciate.

This reframes alignment entirely.

If misalignment is a relationship problem, you fix communication. If it's a timing problem, you fix visibility, specifically, visibility into buying groups before preferences form.

The infrastructure to do this exists. What's been missing is the discipline to connect it.

The buying group you can't see is forming opinions right now inside accounts you care about, among stakeholders you haven't identified yet. The question is whether you'll see them early enough to make it matter to your bottom line.