The 2027 Demand Planning Playbook

About this playbook

Most buying decisions form outside the marketer’s view. Buyers research independently, buying groups evolve, and AI shapes shortlists before sellers hear anything. This playbook builds a 2027 demand plan around buying progress rather than raw volume.

The planning system

Goals
Signals + Context
Buying Group
Channels + Context
Sales
Measure

Introduction

Plan around buying progress, not just buyer activity

Few teams establish a formal process to evaluate and purchase a new solution. Buyers research independently, buying groups evolve, AI and other sources influence decisions, and much of buying progress stays outside the marketer’s view.

In 2027, the goal is not simply to collect more signals. It is to identify which signals – and which patterns – reveal meaningful buying progress.

51%

of B2B buyers

begin their vendor research in AI tools

Source: G2, 2026 Buyer Behavior Report

Definition

Buying progress is observable evidence that a buying group is becoming more informed, more involved, or more aligned around a problem and potential path forward.

Planning principle

A simple principle for the plan ahead

As you evaluate your 2027 demand plan, ask two questions:

How does this help us better understand buying progress?

Tip: Look for the signals, context, and buying-group activity that reveal what is actually developing.

Does this help the buyer make progress?

Tip: Create experiences that answer questions, reduce uncertainty, and help the buying group move forward.

The strongest demand plans do both.

The rest of this playbook applies those two questions to goals, context, buying groups, channels, content, sales, and measurement.

Let’s dive in.

Set goals around buying progress

Goals shape the audiences, activities, and measures that follow, so precision matters. If the goal is lead volume, the plan will naturally optimize for more responses, but that does not tell you whether you are reaching the right buyers, expanding engagement across the buying group, or learning what matters to them.

Setting a goal around progress does not mean abandoning volume. It means adding context to the number, with evidence of what that activity produced inside the account. That connection may be harder to measure, but it creates a stronger case for performance and budget.

94%

of buyers

in groups of six or more report clear benefits from deciding together

Source: Forrester, 2026

1.Drive business outcomes

Frame your goals around outcomes that matter to buyers and the people approving spend.

2.Detect buying progress

Look beyond lead volume for evidence that engagement is deepening, expanding across relevant roles, and signaling greater priority.

3.Generate actionable learning

Use each program to learn which problems, roles, messages, and patterns of engagement matter, then apply those insights to improve what comes next.

Are your demand campaigns designed to address these key considerations?

Goal types, example 2027 goals and evidence to watch
Goal type	Example 2027 goal	Evidence to watch
Business outcomes	Increase engagement within priority accounts and audiences	Account penetration, ICP engagement, priority-role engagement
Buying progress	Increase the depth and breadth of engagement within target accounts	Buying-group coverage, engaged roles, repeat engagement, priority signals
Actionable learning	Generate buyer insight that improves future programs	Pain-point and role patterns, content/message engagement

What does your current activity tell you about whether buying is actually progressing?

Distinguish activity from progress

Demand generation creates plenty of activity: downloads, registrations, visits, and intent signals. These individual actions are buying signals. They show where engagement is happening, but on their own, they do not prove progress.

Progress becomes visible when those signals begin to form a broader pattern across the account or buying group.

For example: One IT leader downloading a cloud migration guide is activity. If infrastructure, finance, and security stakeholders from the same account also engage around migration, cost, and risk, a broader pattern of progress is developing.

Neither guarantees a purchase. But the second gives you more to learn from and act on.

Activity vs. progress

Activity captures an action at a point in time. Progress appears as patterns develop across people, interactions, and time.

The table below shows the difference. The measures on the right do not prove someone will buy. They provide stronger evidence that engagement is developing.

Activity versus progress
Activity A point-in-time signal	Progress A pattern developing across roles, signals, and time
Downloads	Additional buying-group members engage
Clicks	Engagement continues across additional content or topics
Visits	Relevant buying roles begin to diversify
Registrations	Pain, role, or priority information adds context
Intent signals	Multiple signals emerge across people, topics, or time

Ask yourself:

Do your current success metrics capture evidence of progress, or just activity?

Add context to buyer signals

Marketing teams have access to more buyer signals than ever. Those signals – intent data, web analytics, content activity, and first-party behavior – can show who is active and where interest may be forming. But more data does not necessarily create more understanding.

Your 2027 plan should account for the context you want to capture alongside those signals, including:

1. Challenge

What problem appears to matter?

2. Involvement

Who is involved, and what do they own or influence?

3. Urgency

How important is the issue right now?

4. Buying Group

Who else is involved, and is participation expanding?

Together, signals and context provide a clearer picture of what may be developing. They don’t predict a purchase. They help you understand what matters, identify patterns across the buying group, and determine what could help buyers continue.

At DEMAND.com, we call this the DEMAND Context Layer: Adding buyer context to the signals you already see.

For example, a content download shows activity. Knowing an infrastructure leader is researching data center consolidation because rising costs have made it a priority provides context you can use to inform what comes next.

Build context into your plan

Consider:

What buyer context are you capturing today?
What are you missing?
Can you connect activity to challenges, roles, and urgency?
Can you see participation across the buying group?
How will what you learn influence what you do next?

Choose one type of missing context to capture in your next program, and decide where it will be recorded.

Plan for the buying group, not the individual lead

When multiple decision-makers interact with your content and your business, that is a strong signal.

Each member of the buying group has distinct questions, success metrics, and risk tolerances that must be addressed before the group reaches consensus.

Buying group members don’t consume identical content, so treating them as a single audience means that you will not meet their individual needs. Many deals lose traction when a key stakeholder’s concerns go unaddressed, or their priorities aren’t understood.

people

involved in the typical B2B buying decision

Source: Forrester, State of Business Buying 2026

For each account you intend to reach, identify:

Who is in the buying group, and who are you not reaching?
What does each role need to resolve to reach consensus?
Where is the collective alignment most likely to stall, and why?
Which channel, piece of content, and messaging aligns with each buying group member?

Checklist

Is every buying role covered?

Identify the most important buying roles and their likely priorities, questions, and information needs. Can you answer “yes” to every question below? If not, your plan may be missing crucial information or buying roles.

Have we named every buying role we intend to reach? Do we know the priority each role brings to the decision? Do we know which question each role needs answered before they can agree? Have we identified the role most likely to hinder the decision? Have we named the stakeholders missing from our current engagement? Can we show which content each role engages with, based on evidence rather than assumption? Do our landing pages and messaging change by role, not only by stage? Does sales receive a summary of who engaged and what they said? Is every tactic in the plan relevant to the role it targets?

Make every channel do two jobs

Buyer confidence forms across multiple channels, in a sequence no single plan can fully control. McKinsey’s 2026 Global B2B Pulse found that nearly every buyer now engages across in-person, remote, and digital channels, using an average of ten touchpoints throughout the purchasing journey.

Effective channel mixes therefore need complementary sources of reach and insight that work together to build a more complete picture of buyer behavior.

In other words, choose channels not only for what they deliver, but for what they reveal.

Help the buyer progress

Reach buyers in the channels they prefer
Match content format to the job the buyer is trying to do
Reduce uncertainty and build confidence

Help you learn

Reveal recurring questions and topics
Show which roles and messages generate response
Add evidence about buying-group participation

Planning callout

Put content where it performs best

Match content to the channel carrying it. The most effective campaigns reach buyers in their preferred channels, with content formats that help them build confidence and address pain points.

No single channel needs to do everything. As you evaluate your mix, consider the role each channel plays in helping buyers progress, and in helping you better understand that progress.

Source: McKinsey & Company, 2026 Global B2B Pulse

Choose channels for buyer value and insight

Buyers use different channels to answer different questions and make progress in different ways. Use this table to consider how each channel helps the buyer and what their activity can help you learn or capture.

Channels: how each helps the buyer and what you can learn
Channel	How this helps the buyer	What you can learn or capture
Search	Find answers, diagnose problems, and explore potential solutions on their own terms	Search language, recurring questions, high-interest topics, and page-level behavior
Organic social	Discover new ideas, perspectives, and useful information in an easy-to-consume format	Themes and formats that attract engagement from priority audiences
Paid media	Discover relevant solutions and resources tied to their role, needs, or current challenges	Which audiences, roles, messages, and offers generate responses
Content syndication and demand generation	Access deeper educational resources that help them understand challenges, evaluate approaches, and build knowledge	Known contacts, roles, content interests, and declared challenges or priorities
Communities and peer forums	Learn from peers, ask questions, and get practical guidance based on real-world experience	Common objections, peer concerns, comparison criteria, and language buyers use
Analyst channels	Understand the category, evaluate options, and validate potential vendors or approaches	The criteria analysts and buyers use to define and assess the category
AI discovery	Quickly research questions, understand unfamiliar topics, and compare products or approaches	How accurately your company, products, and category appear in AI-generated answers
LinkedIn	Learn from peers and experts, follow relevant topics, and discover perspectives tied to their role	Engagement by company, role, topic, and – where identifiable – multiple contacts within an account
Customer advocacy	See how similar organizations have solved problems and what outcomes they achieved	The outcomes, use cases, and proof points that build buyer confidence
Partners and ecosystems	Understand how solutions work together and fit within their existing technology or business environment	Engagement from shared accounts and interest in joint use cases or integrations

Align content with the uncertainty it resolves

Buyers use content to answer questions, evaluate options, build internal agreement, and reduce uncertainty. Funnel stages can help marketers organize activity, but they don’t reveal what an individual buyer needs to understand or believe before they can move forward.

That matters across a buying group. A technical leader may be evaluating feasibility, finance may be questioning economic impact, and an executive may be weighing business risk. They’re part of the same decision, but they need different things from your content.

That doesn’t necessarily require more assets. Often, the opportunity is to better align existing content with the role, question, and uncertainty it can help resolve. The surrounding message, landing page, and follow-up can make the same strong asset relevant to different members of the buying group.

Plan content around the questions buyers need to resolve, not simply where they sit in a funnel. Confidence grows as uncertainty decreases across the buying group.

The approach in action

Imagine a company evaluating a major technology modernization initiative. Different members of the buying group may be resolving different questions at the same time:

Who might be asking, what they need to resolve, and content that can help
Who might be asking	What they need to resolve	Example buyer question	Content that can help
Operations / IT leader	PROBLEM	Is the current environment creating enough cost, risk, or limitation to justify change?	Benchmarks, research, diagnostics, problem-framing content
Technical / functional leader	APPROACH	Which path best addresses the problem without creating new complexity?	Frameworks, comparison guides, implementation guidance
Finance / executive / procurement	PROOF	What evidence gives us enough confidence to move forward?	Customer evidence, analyst validation, business case, security and support information

Don’t hand sales a lead.
Hand them context.

When sales receives only a name, company, and asset title, valuable context gathered during qualification gets lost. Passing along what marketing learned about the buyer’s needs, priorities, and reasons for engaging helps sales tailor outreach and continue the conversation with context.

As you build your 2027 demand generation plan, consider what information should accompany each lead:

Business challenge: What problem appears to matter?
Role and responsibility: What does this person own or influence?
Reason for responding: What prompted their activity?
Importance or urgency: How important does the issue appear to be?
Buying-group activity: Are others from the account showing relevant activity?

Marketing and sales should also align on where this information lives and how it can be accessed. Some insights belong to the individual, while others become more meaningful across the broader buying group.

The goal is not to treat these signals as proof of readiness. It is to preserve useful buyer context so sales has a clearer picture of what may be happening within the account and what to do next.

What to look for in your plan

Consider how well your current plan accounts for the information provided with each lead.

Choose one option per row. Select it again to clear your answer.

Rate the information provided with each lead
Information provided with the lead	Strong	Could be stronger	Needs improvement
Business challenge	Business challenge: Strong	Business challenge: Could be stronger	Business challenge: Needs improvement
Role and responsibility	Role and responsibility: Strong	Role and responsibility: Could be stronger	Role and responsibility: Needs improvement
Reason for responding	Reason for responding: Strong	Reason for responding: Could be stronger	Reason for responding: Needs improvement
Importance or urgency	Importance or urgency: Strong	Importance or urgency: Could be stronger	Importance or urgency: Needs improvement
Buying-group activity	Buying-group activity: Strong	Buying-group activity: Could be stronger	Buying-group activity: Needs improvement

See how DEMAND.com adds buyer context to every lead

Measure quality alongside performance

Volume still matters. You need to know whether your programs are reaching the right audiences and generating enough activity to support your goals.

But volume alone does not tell you who is responding, what you are learning about them, or whether engagement is expanding across the buying group.

What did it generate?

What did we learn?

What we want to know, practical measures and learnings
What we want to know	Practical measures	Learnings
Are we reaching the right audience?	Priority-account penetration; ICP coverage	Are we reaching the accounts and audiences the plan was built around?
Are the right people responding?	Priority-role participation; role diversity by account	Are relevant roles represented, and is participation broadening?
Are we capturing useful buyer context?	% with business challenge, role/responsibility, and urgency identified	Do we understand more about what matters, who is involved, and how important the issue appears to be?
Is activity broader than one person?	Buying-group coverage; active contacts per account	Is relevant activity appearing across more of the buying group?
Is a meaningful pattern developing?	Repeat activity; multiple signals across people, topics, or time	Are we seeing more than a single, isolated response?

Turn reporting into optimization

Use what you learn to improve what happens next. If priority accounts are responding but the right roles are missing, adjust targeting. If certain business challenges generate activity across multiple roles, apply that learning to messaging and content. If activity remains isolated to one person, consider how the program can reach more of the buying group.

These measures are not meant to predict who will buy. They help you understand what is happening so you can make better decisions.

Practical rule:

Measure what you can observe, learn from what changes, and use those insights to improve what comes next.

Assess your 2027 demand plan

Together, the areas discussed in the earlier pages show where your 2027 demand plan is strong and where it needs attention.

Rate each area as Strong, Average, or Needs Improvement. Start with the area that needs the most attention.

Choose one option per row. Select it again to clear your answer.

Rate each area of your 2027 demand plan
Section	Area	What good looks like	Strong	Average	Needs impr.
Who	Audience and buying group	Buying roles are identified, and missing stakeholders are named.	Who — Audience and buying group: Strong	Who — Audience and buying group: Average	Who — Audience and buying group: Needs impr.
Who	Buyer problems	Identify each role’s problem, key questions, and unresolved concerns.	Who — Buyer problems: Strong	Who — Buyer problems: Average	Who — Buyer problems: Needs impr.
How	Content	Every asset answers a stated buyer question. Problem, approach, and confidence are all covered, and key assets are personalized by role.	How — Content: Strong	How — Content: Average	How — Content: Needs impr.
How	Channels	The mix covers discovery, education, engagement, and buyer signals; blind spots and over-reliance are identified.	How — Channels: Strong	How — Channels: Average	How — Channels: Needs impr.
What you know	Signals and context	Problem, People, and Urgency are captured; activity is separated from buying progress.	What you know — Signals and context: Strong	What you know — Signals and context: Average	What you know — Signals and context: Needs impr.
What you know	Sales handoff	Problem, person, role, trigger, priority, and buying-group activity all travel with the lead.	What you know — Sales handoff: Strong	What you know — Sales handoff: Average	What you know — Sales handoff: Needs impr.
What you do with it	Measurement	Report program output alongside what it revealed about demand.	What you do with it — Measurement: Strong	What you do with it — Measurement: Average	What you do with it — Measurement: Needs impr.
What you do with it	Optimization	Adapt the program based on what signals reveal, and review performance and quality throughout the campaign.	What you do with it — Optimization: Strong	What you do with it — Optimization: Average	What you do with it — Optimization: Needs impr.

Final pressure test

Where does it help you better understand buying progress?
Where does it help buyers make progress?

If either answer is unclear, you’ve identified an area of the plan worth revisiting.

Plan 2027 with greater context

Much of the B2B buying journey will continue to happen outside the marketer’s direct view. Buyers research independently, use AI and peer sources, and involve stakeholders with different priorities and concerns.

Your next step

Put buyer context to work in your 2027 plan

Your next demand program should help you understand who is engaging, what matters to them, and what sales needs to continue the conversation.

As you plan for 2027, ask two questions:

Does this program help us understand buying progress?

Does it help the buyer move forward?

Are you unsure how your current programs measure up? Review your 2027 demand plan with DEMAND.com and identify where stronger buyer context could help you understand and support the buying progress.

Review your 2027 plan with DEMAND.com