The B2B buyer’s journey isn’t a straight line. It’s a complex, multi-stage process that involves research, collaboration, risk assessment, and (often) a long list of decision-makers.
Unlike in B2C, where a single person can make a spontaneous purchase, B2B buyers move through stages with intent, deliberation, and internal consensus. They’re not just buying a product but investing in a solution that impacts their team, budget, and business outcomes.
If you want to sell to other businesses effectively, you need to understand how your buyers think, what they need at each step, and who’s influencing their decisions behind the scenes.
In today’s guide, we’ll go over all of that and more.
What is the B2B buyer journey?
The B2B buyer journey is the path your B2B customers take from the moment they realize they have a problem to the point where they choose a solution (ideally, yours). It encompasses multiple stages and touchpoints across several decision-makers, and it takes weeks or even months.
Compared to B2C, B2B buying is:
- Collaborative. Unlike a consumer purchase, B2B buying usually involves a team—IT, finance, operations, leadership. Everyone wants different things, and everyone has a say.
- Informed. Business buyers do their homework. By the time they talk to sales, they’ve read whitepapers, compared competitors, watched demos, and spoken with peers.
- High-stakes. A bad decision could cost millions, disrupt operations, or hurt the purchasing company’s reputation. That’s why trust and clarity matter at every step.
For businesses, purchase decisions are about solving a business challenge, reducing risk, and aligning with internal stakeholders. As a vendor or seller, your job is to understand it well enough to support your buyers every step of the way.
What makes the B2B buyer journey different in 2025?
The B2B buyer journey in 2025 looks nothing like it did ten years ago. Today’s buyers are independent, digital-first, and harder to reach through traditional channels.
Buying is more self-directed, digital, and decentralized.
Buyers don’t wait for a sales call to get answers, they go get them themselves.
From start to finish, data from Gartner shows that B2B buyers spend only 17% of their total purchase journey talking to sales reps. That’s split between all vendors, so your company’s individual impact is actually less than 5%.
According to 6sense’s 2024 Buyer Experience Report, the typical buyer is ~70% through the decision-making process by the time they reach out, and 8 in 10 buyers initiate contact with a vendor, not the other way around.
Buying committees are also bigger and more cross-functional. A marketing director might start the search, a procurement officer joins halfway through, and a C-level exec signs off at the end. 6sense’s report revealed that the average buying group now has 11 people.
Buyers use communities, peer advice, and dark social.
Not every step leaves a data trail. Buyers now rely on what we call “shadow channels” — places like Slack groups, LinkedIn DMs, Reddit threads, private WhatsApp chats, and niche professional communities.
You won’t see these interactions in your CRM or website analytics. But they’re powerful.
A buyer may ask for honest feedback about your product in a RevOps Slack community. That word-of-mouth matters more than your website or ad copy, and you’ll never know it happened unless someone tells you.
AI tools and privacy expectations are shifting control to buyers.
AI helps buyers move faster, analyze more options, and customize their research. Tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and buyer-focused comparison engines let users summarize pages of research in minutes.
At the same time, growing privacy regulations and tools like email blockers or cookie restrictions mean less visibility for you, the vendor. Anyone can now research anonymously, and you may not even realize they’ve engaged with you until they’re ready to talk.
For instance, a VP of Sales could generate a vendor comparison table with ChatGPT, read anonymized G2 reviews, and only reach out once they’ve narrowed their list to two options, without ever downloading a whitepaper or filling out a lead form.
Core stages of the B2B buyer journey
To understand how to sell better, you need to think like your buyer. Every B2B purchase follows a general path from first recognizing their problem to becoming a loyal advocate. Each represents real shifts in mindset, behavior, and internal discussions happening behind the scenes.
1. Awareness
The Awareness stage begins when something triggers your buyer to recognize a problem or opportunity.
Maybe their team is wasting hours on manual reporting. Maybe their old vendor just raised prices. Maybe they read about a competitor adopting new tech. Whatever it is, it sparks curiosity, and then research.
Buyers start Googling, reading blog posts, asking peers, and exploring industry forums. They're not looking for you yet, but they are looking to define the problem and understand what’s possible.
2. Consideration
At the Consideration stage, the buyer knows what kind of solution they need. They’ve named the problem and are narrowing their options.
This is when they compare categories (e.g., custom development vs. no-code tools), gather peer input, and begin to understand how different vendors solve their problem in different ways.
This stage is all about education and validation. Buyers here will…
- Download product comparison guides
- Watch explainer videos or attend webinars
- Read reviews and customer stories
- Loop in colleagues for feedback
A RevOps leader evaluating CPQ tools might compare DealHub, Salesforce CPQ, and PandaDoc based on features, usability, integrations, and customer support.
3. Decision
By the time a B2B buyer reaches the Decision stage, they’ve made a shortlist. Internal alignment becomes the priority.
This is where trust, clarity, and support matter most. Buyers will…
- Request a demo or trial
- Conduct ROI or cost-benefit analysis
- Hold internal approval meetings
- Review legal and procurement terms
Even if the primary buyer loves your product, they still need buy-in from finance, IT, legal, and sometimes the C-suite. Expect pricing conversations, security reviews, reference calls, and a lot of back-and-forth.
Successful sales reps use a methodology like MEDDIC to adapt to each buyer’s needs here.
4. Post-purchase
The journey doesn’t end when the contract is signed. Your buyer now becomes a user, and your job is to help them succeed. Onboarding, product adoption, and ongoing support determine whether they’ll renew, upgrade, or churn.
This stage is your best chance to turn customers into long-term advocates. They’re going to measure the product’s impact against expectations. If the value is there, you can get them to recommend your product to others.
How to map the B2B buyer journey, step by step
You can’t improve the buyer journey if you don’t understand it.
Mapping the B2B buyer journey means breaking down how prospects actually experience your brand, from the first moment of awareness to becoming a customer (and beyond). It’s the foundation of effective marketing, better sales alignment, and a smoother customer experience.
Here’s exactly how to do it, step by step:
1. Collect qualitative data.
Start by talking to real buyers. You need their perspective, not just your assumptions.
Set up structured interviews with recent customers, lost deals, and long-term users. Focus on uncovering their actual thought process. What triggered their search? What confused them? What built trust (or broke it)?
Ask open-ended questions like:
- “What was going on in your business when you started looking for a solution?”
- “What other options were you considering?”
- “What made you choose us or someone else?”
- “Who else was involved in the decision, and what were their concerns?”
Track product adoption as well, and survey/interview your customers after they’ve been using your product for about three months. That’ll reveal the real value your product delivers (which is often different from what you market) and what onboarding friction they experienced.
Pro tip: Review transcripts with an AI tool like Grain, Gong, or Fireflies.ai to surface patterns in objections, language, and turning points. You’ll uncover what humans miss, like emotional cues or timing gaps.
2. Map all digital and human touchpoints.
Now, trace every single interaction a buyer has, all the way from when thye’re doing anonymous research to when they sign the deal.
Look at both digital and human touchpoints. Track website visits, ad clicks, downloads, webinar attendance, emails opened, and chatbot conversations, as well as sales calls, Slack intros, LinkedIn DMs, and in-person meetings if there are any.
Plot this out chronologically using a tool like Lucidchart or Miro to visualize the flow.
Make note of:
- What content or channel brought them in
- Where handoffs happen (e.g., from marketing to sales)
- Points of friction (e.g., slow follow-up, unclear pricing, too many approvals)
- Where dark social or shadow research likely took place (even if it’s invisible)
Certain aspects still might not be clear, so it’s a good idea to reverse-engineer closed-won deals in your CRM. Identify which paths are most common for high-LTV and high-CVR customers. You may find your best buyers never click ads, but often attend events or come via referrals.
3. Align journey stages with relevant content and messaging.
This is where most companies fall flat. They have great content, but it's not aligned with where the buyer is mentally.
Each stage of the journey demands different types of messaging:
- Awareness: Educational, pain-aware content. Blog posts, checklists, industry reports. The goal is to help buyers name their problem.
- Consideration: Solution-aware content. Product comparisons, expert webinars, ROI calculators, “Why Us” pages. Here’s where differentiation matters.
- Decision: Trust-building assets. Case studies, demos, security docs, pricing pages, reference calls. Make it easy for buyers to say yes internally.
- Post-Purchase: Customer marketing and adoption-focused collateral. Onboarding guides, video walkthroughs, support resources, a newsletter, and customer communities. You’re shifting from selling to enabling.
Since you probably already have existing content, audit it and tag each asset to a journey stage. You’ll likely find gaps (e.g., lots of top-of-funnel blog posts but no decision-stage material). Fill them strategically with the format and channel your buyers prefer.
4. Use Deeto to insert peer proof and advocacy early.
Forrester data reveals something we’ve known for what feels like forever: most B2B buyers (90%+) trust peers in their industry, while almost none (29%) trust vendor sales reps.
That’s why customer advocacy software is such a game-changer. Deeto lets you bring the Voice of the Customer into the buyer journey earlier through embedded customer stories, testimonial carousels, and even on-demand reference calls.
Use it to:
- Collect, organize, and distribute social proof assets
- Highlight relevant customer use cases within product pages
- Automate warm intros to customer advocates at the consideration stage
- Replace static case studies with dynamic peer-driven conversations
- Build social proof into every surface: emails, demos, even in your onboarding flow
On top of that, Deeto’s AI-powered smart-matching and dynamic display algorithms allow you to dynamically serve social proof by industry, company size, or buyer role. This makes every interaction feel personalized, even before sales gets involved.
Common challenges in the B2B buyer journey
Even if you understand the buyer journey inside and out, executing against it is a different story. Modern B2B buyers are unpredictable, independent, and skeptical, so some businesses struggle to keep up.
Here are four of the most common challenges we see even experienced teams get tripped up by:
Attribution is messy — buyers don’t follow a linear path.
Your CRM might tell you a lead came from a demo request. But the buyer? They first heard about you in a Slack group, Googled you a week later, lurked on your founder’s LinkedIn posts for a month, clicked a retargeting ad, and then filled out the form.
Linear attribution models (like first-touch or last-touch) miss this completely.
Solution: Shift your mindset from precision to pattern recognition. Use blended attribution models and supplement with qualitative inputs.
- Ask "How did you hear about us?" in forms, and make it a required free-text field.
- Use tools like Dreamdata, HockeyStack, or Mutiny to stitch together cross-channel behavior.
- Encourage reps to probe during discovery: “What caught your attention about us?” or “What stood out in your research?”
Internal misalignment between Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success
Your buyer is on one journey. But too often, your teams act like they’re on three different ones.
Marketing optimizes for leads, sales pushes for pipeline, and CS handles the post-sale. A disconnect leads to drop-offs, mixed messages, and frustrated customers.
Solution: Build your buyer journey together, and operate around shared goals.
- Define journey stages collaboratively, with input from every function.
- Align KPIs by stage: e.g., awareness = engagement, consideration = qualified pipeline, decision = conversion rate, post-purchase = NPS or expansion.
- Implement regular syncs between teams to share insights (e.g., common objections, content gaps, onboarding issues).
- Use a unified tool (like HubSpot, Salesforce + Gainsight, or a RevOps platform) to create visibility across handoffs.
- Centralize customer-led marketing content using a customer engagement platform.
Lack of personalization and trust
Today’s buyers expect tailored experiences, with 86% showing preference for 1:1 marketing. But lots B2B interactions still feel generic: same emails, same decks, same pitch.
That’s a trust killer.
If a FinTech CMO sees the same pitch as a Head of Ops at a logistics startup, they’ll both tune out.
Solution: Inject personalization and proof at every stage.
- Use Deeto’s AI-powered widget to dynamically display social proof content across your website, tailored to the user.
- Use our smart-matching algorithm to instantly connect prospects with customer references for their use case or industry.
- Arm your sales team with industry-specific decks, use cases, and customer stories.
- Train sales reps to personalize emails and CTAs based on company size, industry, or buyer role.
- Incorporate peer-led trust signals like testimonials, community quotes, customer video clips early and often.
Overreliance on gated content and vendor-led communication
If every helpful resource is locked behind a form, you're slowing down the journey.
Modern buyers don’t want to talk to sales before they’re ready, and they’re skeptical of anything that looks like a trap (like requiring an email just to read a pricing doc). So, if all your content is gated, you’ll all but guarantee it won’t get read.
Solution: Collect emails for high-intent bottom-of-funnel content (e.g., a “free site audit” offer). Un-gate the rest.
- Make high-value content (case studies, technical guides, calculators) freely accessible.
- Use conversational tools like Drift, Chatbase, or Intercom to answer questions instantly, without a form fill.
- Build product tours or “try before you buy” experiences where possible.
- Create free tools buyers can use to sell themselves (think: Ahrefs’ Keyword Generator).
One of the biggest mistakes we see companies make in B2B sales and marketing is treating the buyer journey as though it only concerns that specific team.
In reality, the buyer journey touches every team: marketing, sales, customer success, product, even finance and support. If each department is using its own version of the journey, the buyer ends up experiencing a fragmented, confusing process.
To fix that, you need tight alignment. That starts with shared visibility and continuous feedback.
Use one unified customer journey map across all departments.
Don’t build five versions of the journey. Build one.
Your single journey map should outline:
- Key buyer stages (awareness → consideration → decision → post-purchase)
- Buyer goals and questions at each stage
- The internal owner of each touchpoint (e.g., marketing owns nurture emails, sales owns demos, CS owns onboarding)
- The content, tools, and metrics tied to each step
This map becomes your company’s shared source of truth. Everyone—from your SDRs to your onboarding specialists—knows where they fit and how their actions impact the buyer experience.
Build feedback loops between departments.
Alignment doesn’t happen through documentation alone. It’s built through ongoing, structured communication around what’s happening with buyers.
Broadly speaking, this is what strong feedback loops look like:
Leveraging customer advocacy to accelerate the B2B buying process
Trust is the biggest barrier in B2B sales, and customer advocacy helps you break through it.
When a buyer comes through a cold channel, they need to verify everything. Is this the right kind of tool? Will it integrate with our stack? Do others like us use it? Can we trust this company to follow through?
But when a prospect enters your funnel via a referral or peer recommendation, they already have those answers. They've skipped the doubt. They've skipped the skepticism. And often, they've skipped the first few micro-stages of the buyer journey altogether.
They already know:
- The problem is real
- Your product solves it
- People like them have used it successfully
That means you can bypass early education and move straight to relevance. You can tailor your content and conversations toward ROI, implementation, and decision-making, because the "should we trust this brand?" conversation is already handled.
Deeto-powered advocacy makes this fast and scalable.
Instead of hoping someone mentions you in a Slack group or refers you over coffee, Deeto turns social proof into a proactive part of your go-to-market strategy.
It helps you:
- Embed persona-specific peer testimonials directly into your website
- Offer on-demand customer references as part of your natural sales flow
- Incentivize referrals and build customer-led lead gen into your post-sale strategy
- Insert real voices early, whether it’s a quote on a pricing page or a quick story inside a nurture email
Want to see it in action? Request a demo and we’ll show you how it fits into your buyer’s journey.
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