Today’s B2B purchases rarely sit with a single decision-maker. They involve buying groups that span the entire organization. In fact, Forrester found the average buying group includes 13 stakeholders across departments and functions. And the expectations of these buying groups are only rising, with 81% of buyers wanting to form longer-term connections that transcend individual departments. Marketers are responsible for forming these lasting relationships across the entire customer lifecycle. Just as we expect for ourselves as consumers, these relationships should be personal, with each interaction building on the last.
Marketers can build these connections with opportunity-based marketing (OBM), a strategy in which marketing and sales teams work together to identify, prioritize and capitalize on existing opportunities (deals in progress) and their associated buying groups, with the ultimate goal of pushing opportunities to closed-won.
Opportunity-based marketing takes account-based marketing efforts a step further by narrowing in on the buying group within an account. Instead of broad, account-level messaging, you personalize at the individual level based on each buyer’s role within the buying group and broader organization (decision-maker, influencer, business user, etc). You’re also considering where they are in the sales funnel to target based on opportunity status (for example, discovery, evaluation, or negotiation).
When is opportunity-based marketing most helpful?
Here are a few scenarios where OBM makes sense to use:
- If your company sells multiple products and opens multiple opportunities for those products, it makes sense to tailor your outreach based on the opportunity and the product the buying group is most likely to purchase.
- You might target an account with multiple buying groups. For example, if you’re a marketer for a college textbook publisher, you could have one opportunity for the chemistry department and another for the history department within the same account.
- You might also have opportunities that include stakeholders across multiple accounts. This is more common in manufacturing, where you may need to involve a contractor, manufacturer, and distributor in a single opportunity.
By evaluating all of your data to understand each buyer’s interests, engagement history, role, and intent, you can tailor your marketing to be more relevant to where they are in the buying cycle. A more focused strategy allows you to work more efficiently by allocating time and budget toward the opportunities most likely to close.
How to use Salesforce to build opportunity-based marketing strategies
1. Start with a unified data source to better understand your audience.
With Agentforce Sales and Agentforce Marketing on one unified platform, you start with a connected, AI-powered system for all your customer data. This enables you to create a single view of each customer and account across sales and marketing, so you can understand how customers and key buyer personas engage with your products and content.
By harmonizing data across CRM, ERP systems, data lakes and warehouses, marketing automation tools, and websites, you gain a true single view of every customer and account. You can use these insights to orchestrate more relevant, timely engagement.
For example, Relationship Maps in Agentforce Sales show which stakeholders you currently know, who reports to whom, and what their sentiment is toward the brand. Relationship Maps also help you understand stakeholder roles, such as Executive Sponsor, Champion, Detractor, Decision-Maker, and more.
Using shared data, sales and marketing teams can both view customer engagement, AI-driven propensity-to-buy scores, and buyer group heatmaps in the same dashboard. This helps marketers focus resources on the opportunities most likely to close, while enabling Sales to personalize the timing and content of their outreach to deepen relationships and earn buyer trust.
2. Engage key buying group members with the most relevant content
With Agentforce Marketing, marketers can use agents to help create targeted campaigns, segments and assets. This saves time and helps the business reach required buyer group stakeholders who may be lacking engagement. Because Agentforce Marketing has Data 360 built in, marketers can act on data from across the business to curate highly targeted segments and personalized campaigns for every buyer persona.
They can also create tailored omnichannel experiences with personalized ads and unique web experiences for each buyer persona based on past and real-time engagement. Buyers can chat directly with Agentforce on the company website, while the site dynamically renders personalized content relevant to the buyer’s real-time intent and role within their organization.
Once a lead reaches a point of readiness, a notification is sent to the sales rep. Because all data lives within the record, Sales can have a contextualized and relevant conversation with the prospect. Sales also has access to AI-driven scores that indicate the buyer’s likelihood to convert and purchase, based on their Buyer Group Persona fit and marketing engagement to date.
3. Use advanced analytics to refine strategy
With the Marketing Cloud Spring ’26 Release, marketers get access to multi-touch attribution to clearly prove marketing’s impact on pipeline and revenue across today’s complex B2B buying journeys.
These journeys often include multiple stakeholders, 60+ touchpoints, and an average of 3.7 channels, so having all marketing and CRM data on one platform means teams don’t have to stitch together external systems to understand influence and ROI. Out-of-the-box attribution models make it easy to see which channels and campaigs drive results, helping teams double down on what’s working and pull back where performance lags.
Teams can apply flexible attribution models to clearly see how campaigns shape pipeline, revenue, and overall performance. An AI agent also surfaces insights in natural language, spotlighting the signals that matter most without hours spent digging through dashboards. And with paid media optimization, Agentforce can autonomously identify and pause low-performing ads, helping teams save time while reinvesting budget into high-performing channels.
B2B marketing is entering its next phase. As buying decisions spread across larger, more diverse groups, marketers can no longer rely on targeting accounts alone – their strategies need to adapt to how people collectively influence decisions over time. Businesses that stand out won’t be the ones that simply push more content, but the ones that build coordinated experiences across roles, functions, and stages of the buying process.
Opportunity-Based Marketing helps marketers make this shift. And as data, AI, and automation continue to mature, the marketers who lead will be those who use technology not just to scale activity, but to build relevance and trust– the things that actually move buying groups toward closed-won.
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