Understanding the B2B Buyer Journey

You can also quickly identify gaps where you lose customers and provide more content and sales effort to compensate. By grouping customers you encounter according to their intent, you can create multiple buyer journeys that are tailored to resolving specific needs. There are many reasons why a customer might be driven to undergo the journey to purchasing your products, but segmenting your potential leads further can help identify them. You might need to create a group of personas per segment to better reflect the needs you’ll have to fulfil. Remember, though you might have created one persona per segment, B2B customers often have multiple people involved in the decision making process.

• For businesses, purchase decisions are about solving a business challenge, reducing risk, and aligning with internal stakeholders.
• But, saying nothing is also a choice — and it’s one that younger generations simply won’t stand for.
• It’s about nurturing relationships, providing value, and demonstrating authority every step of the way.
• 91% of businesses use video as a marketing tool in 2026, according to Wyzowl's State of Video Marketing report.

Visualizing the B2B customer journey provides detailed insights into each stage of the decision-making process. That’s why mapping out the B2B customer journey is essential to ensuring you stay in step with your audience and their needs along the way. Peer-reviewed journalsGovernment agenciesProfessional bodiesLongitudinal studiesAcademic databases

Over four-fifths have their top product in mind when shortlisting options; even more telling, 70% buy that exact product. Stand out from the crowd by showing you understand their challenges and offering your solution ahead of your competitors. Understanding their needs proves you’re invested long before they seal the deal. To counter the silence, ensure you continue providing value to buyers through benchmark B2B reports, ROI snapshots, or relevant case studies.

B2B vs B2C Buying Journey: Key Differences

Forrester’s research is designed to help providers better understand the obstacles that buyers face and where they can upend outdated go-to-market strategies to help buyers make better, more informed purchasing decisions.” “As buyers reevaluate how they engage with organizations, providers must ignite action and put buyers first to create meaningful experiences. At Forrester’s B2B Summit North America, Forrester analysts will help leaders navigate increased buying complexity and deliver better buyer satisfaction. While buyers rely heavily on self-service and autonomous interactions to make buying decisions, they also rely on providers to understand their challenges, be responsive to their needs, and collaborate on decision-making. Currently, 86% of B2B purchases stall during the buying process and 81% of buyers express dissatisfaction with their chosen providers. Let NinjaPromo create a tailored digital marketing strategy that drives engagement, boosts visibility, and converts leads into loyal customers.

Requirements Building: Determining the specific criteria and features needed.

If you don’t know who you’re targeting, what problems they face, and how they make decisions, your content won’t resonate, let alone convert. B2B content marketing involves creating and sharing content to help businesses attract and sell to other businesses. Leading software and services companies like Salesforce, IBM, SAP, Adobe, and Clay also trust G2 to influence discovery, build brand credibility, reach in-market buyers, and accelerate revenue growth. As buyers increasingly shift from traditional search to AI search platforms, G2 has become the most-cited B2B software source across those AI-first channels where software discovery happens. Generative AI reasoning models were used to define the study’s focus areas, optimize survey design, and analyze results to inspire writing and data visualizations. Qualitative research was conducted through over 39 interviews with B2B software marketers through G2’s AI Custom Research (AICR).

On the flip side, Printful offers order fulfillment and warehousing to businesses. Customers make purchases for long-term solutions, resulting in a longer sales cycle, longer contracts, and longer relationships with companies. B2C marketing targets the needs, interests, and challenges of individual consumers who make purchases on their own behalf, making the individual the customer. B2C marketing targets individuals making purchases for themselves. B2B marketing targets the needs, interests, and challenges of individuals who make purchases on behalf of their organizations, making the organization the customer. With that information, teams can understand which marketing b2b buyer journey strategies will be most effective at each stage.

Before deciding, they also review pricing, implementation processes, contract terms, and customer support. At this stage, B2B buyers have narrowed their options and are comparing specific vendors. This stage involves reading case studies, attending webinars, consulting peers, and analyzing feature comparisons to determine which solutions are worth investing in. Naturally, they’ll begin researching industry trends, reading reports, and consuming educational content to understand their problem more deeply and clearly. For years, this process worked for sales teams; it gave them predictable milestones to follow, making it easier to guide prospects from one stage of the sales cycle to another.

As buyers move into this stage, they are actively researching, comparing, and considering different options. As part of this, you’ll want to gently introduce your product — while keeping the focus on the solution it offers, not the features it includes. As noted above, the buyer’s journey can be summed up in three stages. Don’t assume, however, that every buyer steps through those three stages in order every time. By providing feedback and participating in case studies, customers earn Reward Points in the Blackbaud Champions Hub, which they can redeem from the Champions Rewards.

The B2B software funnel increasingly starts with a chat prompt, not a Google search.

Nearly two-thirds spend 6+ hours a week leveraging AI chatbots for work — notably higher than 7 months ago — and more than 40% self-identify as daily power users. When software buyers reach the evaluation stage of their journey, the recommendations they see from AI increasingly stem from trusted peer proof sourced from platforms like G2. Self-identified Power users leveraging chatbots daily cite review sites as their #1 confidence signal at an even higher rate (50%) than the general B2B software buyer population. Of B2B software buyers say review site citations are the most confidence-inspiring signal in an AI answer.