How GE Healthcare Used AI to Win Over Buying Groups in Pharma Equipment Sales

B2B manufacturing often involves selling complex, high-ticket products like pharmaceutical processing equipment. It’s anything but simple. The buyer’s decision-making process often involves a web of stakeholders, from engineers and researchers to procurement officers and compliance leads, all weighing in before a deal can move forward.

For GE Healthcare, a global leader in biopharma manufacturing solutions, this complexity was a double-edged sword. While the need for their systems was clear, the traditional lead-based sales approach made it difficult to identify and engage the full buying group early enough in the process. Deals would stall and promising accounts slipped through the cracks.

So how did they solve it?

By turning to AI-powered buying group intelligence.

👥 The Buying Group Challenge

GE Healthcare’s biopharma equipment, ranging from single-use bioreactors to chromatography systems, is sold into an enterprise environment where five to 10 people typically influence or make the final purchasing decision. That buying group might include:

• R&D scientists

• Process engineers

• Quality and compliance officers

• Procurement managers

• IT and data security stakeholders

Yet traditional B2B lead gen focused on individual contacts, often ignoring the broader group dynamic. The result? Missed signals, misaligned messaging, and deals stuck in limbo.

🤖 The AI-Powered Solution

To overcome these challenges, GE Healthcare deployed 6sense, a leading AI-driven ABM (Account-Based Marketing) platform.

The goal was simple: uncover buying group activity, align content to each role, and accelerate sales cycles.

Here’s how it worked:

1. Buying Group Detection

6sense analyzed historic CRM data, web behavior, and external intent signals to build a model of the “ideal buying group” for each product type. When multiple contacts at the same pharmaceutical company showed signs of interest, like downloading technical specs or attending webinars, it triggered an alert: the buying group was forming.

2. Intent Signal Mapping

The platform monitored not just GE’s owned channels, but also third-party sites like Fierce Pharma and BioPharm International. If users from the same account were researching topics like “cGMP compliance” or “single-use manufacturing,” it flagged that activity and scored the account accordingly.

3. Multi-Stakeholder Personalization

AI sorted stakeholders into personas and served role-specific content:

• Engineers got performance data and integration specs.

• Procurement received ROI calculators.

• Compliance officers got documentation for FDA audits.

This dramatically improved engagement and relevance.

4. Predictive Prioritization

AI-powered scoring helped sales teams prioritize accounts where all the right people were active. Deals were no longer dependent on one or two leads. They were built on a full picture of group readiness.

📈 The Results

The shift to AI-driven buying group intelligence paid off fast:

• 🔹 30% increase in account engagement where buying groups were active

• 🔹 60-day reduction in average sales cycle length

• 🔹 $50M+ in pipeline sourced from previously “invisible” accounts

• 🔹 Multi-threaded deals (4+ engaged contacts) closed at 2x the rate of single-threaded ones

🔍 Why This Matters

This isn’t just a story about GE Healthcare. It’s a playbook for any manufacturer selling complex products into regulated, enterprise markets, especially in industries like pharma, life sciences, or industrial tech.

AI can help you:

• Spot buying groups before competitors do

• Map the real decision-making process, not just job titles

• Serve the right content to the right people at the right time

In today’s B2B environment, success no longer hinges on identifying a single decision-maker. It’s about recognizing the entire buying team and earning their collective trust through data-driven, role-specific engagement.

Ready to Activate Buying Group Intelligence in Your Sales Process?

If your sales team is still chasing leads one by one, it might be time to rethink your strategy. AI-powered tools are already transforming how leading manufacturers approach B2B sales by turning scattered signals into a cohesive view of real purchase intent.

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