Understanding the Buying Unit & Contact Roles

2 min. readlast update: 06.26.2025

In complex B2B sales, decisions are rarely made by a single person. Stairoids helps you identify and engage with the full buying unit — the group of people within a company who influence or decide on a purchase.

This article explains what a buying unit is, how Stairoids detects it, and how you can work smarter by understanding contact roles inside each account.


👥 What is a Buying Unit?

A buying unit is the set of individuals within a company who are involved in the purchase decision — either directly or indirectly.

Typical roles include:

  • Decision makers (e.g., Head of Sales, CMO, CEO)

  • Influencers (e.g., Marketing Managers, Business Developers)

  • Users (e.g., SDRs, Marketing Ops)

  • Champions (e.g., someone with previous experience with your solution)

  • Blockers (e.g., someone invested in the status quo)

💡 Stairoids doesn’t just track companies — it tracks people within companies.


🔍 How Stairoids Detects Buying Unit Members

Stairoids combines multiple data sources to identify and map buying units automatically. These include:

  • LinkedIn profile data (job title, role, seniority, department)

  • Engagement behavior (likes, profile views, ad interactions)

  • CRM or marketing activity (email opens, webinar signups, etc.)

  • Your own interactions (connections, messages, meetings)

The system scores each person based on their relevance, engagement, and proximity to decision-making.


❤️ Using “Hearts” to Tag Key Contacts

You can manually tag the most important people in the buying unit using the heart icon (❤️).

Use this when:

  • You’ve identified a key decision maker or influencer

  • You want marketing to warm up this person with campaigns

  • You plan to engage them via LinkedIn or direct outreach

🧠 Smart Learning from Hearts

Stairoids learns from the contacts you heart.
For example:

If you give 100 hearts to contacts across different companies, we can automatically recognize which roles and personas typically belong to your Decision Making Unit (DMU).

As a result, Stairoids becomes smarter at contact-level scoring and can predict which future contacts are likely important to you — even before you mark them.

💡 It's not just company-level learning. Stairoids is self-learning at the contact level, too.


🧠 Why Contact Roles Matter

Understanding the role of each contact helps you:

  • Know who to talk to first

  • Decide who to warm up with marketing

  • Spot gaps in the buying unit (e.g., missing IT stakeholder)

  • Personalize outreach based on seniority and department

And with heart-based training, your buying unit logic scales automatically.

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