What is the Buyers Journey? + My Tips for Applying it to Your Sales Cycle

They place social proof exactly where prospects need reassurance during their research journey. Testimonials work best when they’re everywhere, not buried on a dedicated “testimonials” page that nobody visits. Not only that, but sharing testimonials can also have a big impact on potential consumers in the consideration and decision stages. This social proof lets prospects know that the brand has a track record of reliability and have delighted previous customers beyond expectation. They just deliver consistent value and trust that when listeners are ready to build an online store, Shopify will be top of mind.

The average view time for demos across companies and industries is 5 minutes and 14 seconds, down 5.5% from 2025. Discover key insights from the 2026 B2B Buyer Behavior Report to optimize your sales strategy and understand real buyer engagement patterns. When optimizing the customer journey, B2B brands should also ensure that they are using a variety of traditional and dynamic channels. Your map won’t be perfect on day one; you must continuously analyze the customer journey and refine your map to create more engaging experiences. Sometimes, they may simply be comparing solutions, but in other stages, stakeholders may be trying to get other decision-makers on board. It’s also worth remembering that buyers rarely move through these stages in a tidy, linear order — they often loop back, pause, and revisit earlier stages before committing.

More than 9 in 10 B2B marketers prefer short articles/posts, while 76% use videos as their go-to, followed by three-quarters (75%) who opt for case studies/customer stories. Around a third of companies report slower deal timelines, while over 1 in 5 businesses now have six or more people in their decision-making unit (DMU). Looking at the latest B2B buyer statistics, we shed light on how your target market makes decisions, what drives purchases, and how you can better connect with your prospects. Forrester’s B2B Buying Group Journey Map shows how different roles engage at each stage — from discovery through decision — helping teams understand who influences, decides, and validates purchases over time. Blackbaud offered VIP experiences, event passes, and perks that matter specifically to their nonprofit and education customers. Even as marketing budgets remain in flux after a significant budget downturn in 2024, teams are finding resources for content-related roles in 2026.

This is the stage where SEO and organic content play an outsized role – buyers searching for information about a problem, not yet a solution. Problem Identification is where marketing can have significant impact through thought leadership, content that reframes a business challenge, and demand generation that helps buyers articulate a problem they may not have fully recognised. Their research, based on thousands of B2B purchase decisions, breaks the journey into six distinct stages and provides some of the most actionable data available on how modern buyers actually behave. The companies that get the most value from journey mapping treat it as an ongoing practice rather than a one-time project. For teams serious about journey mapping, I recommend checking out our comprehensive customer journey map template, which provides a structured framework that you can customize to your specific needs. This level of detail helps you create highly targeted content and interactions that directly address buyer needs.

Time to update what sellers say, how they lead discovery, and how you coach deals—so your approach matches the buying reality prospects and customers are living in right now. And they’re rewarding vendors who make solutions easy to implement, integrate, adopt, and expand, while punishing vendors who create friction—even if the feature set is strong. Buyers are treating the pitch as a preview of the operating reality they’re signing up for. Buyers are still initiating most contact, still building and ranking shortlists before sales gets involved, and increasingly prefer rep-free buying experiences whenever possible.

When AI makes a mistake at the brand level, peer reviews are a buyer's gut-check.

Get the free 2026 State of Creative in Tech report, built on benchmarks from 230+ SaaS and tech brands. Take the steps we suggested to make your B2B customer journey maps useful, insightful, and a key component of your business strategy. With B2B customer journey mapping, B2B companies can find hidden pain spots, connect their internal teams, and provide bespoke solutions that resonate with their target customer. To make personalized communication plans, use what you learn from journey mapping. To enhance the B2B customer journey, focus on addressing specific challenges and leveraging opportunities to create a seamless experience. By proactively identifying barriers and refining key customer actions, you pave the way for smoother journeys and more satisfied customers.

Contract or freelance talent will play an essential role in this content-led future. Smaller influencers have lower market-entry costs and are perceived as more trustworthy by followers. As companies return to brand-led strategies, marketers want to build trust and loyalty with buyers. Research shows that 94% of marketers believe influencer marketing plays a vital role in B2B marketing, yet only 24% have invested in a genuine influencer strategy. She continues, “At FiveFour, we use customer-centric visuals — like infographics and case studies — to turn challenges into solutions and wins into trust.

Do B2B buyers watch video before making purchase decisions?

The key to realizing these benefits is integration—your social strategy should be a seamless part of your overall business plan, not an afterthought. Most B2B companies use b2b buyer’s journey social as a top-of-the-funnel marketing channel, disconnected from the rest of the business strategy. This means your social media strategy needs to provide value at every stage of the buyer’s journey, from creating awareness to nurturing leads. Engaging with these decision-makers is key because their buy-in is what will ultimately lead to the purchase of your products and services.

• We help companies implement a systematic approach to grow leads and revenue.
• Content that helps in this stage includes product comparison guides, case studies, ROI calculators, and expert reviews.
• Case studies, customer stories, peer validation, and employee advocacy content help buyers confirm their shortlist.
• Marketing to businesses differs from marketing to consumers, which is why B2B marketing requires distinct strategies.
• Employee advocacy helps technical B2B brands build authority and visibility.

The B2B buying process typically unfolds across three distinct stages, each requiring different marketing approaches and content strategies. For new marketers in the B2B space or a small B2B business owner learning the ropes, B2B marketing can seem tricky at first. HubSpot’s customers are other businesses, not individual consumers. B2B marketing is the process of promoting and selling products or services to other businesses rather than individual consumers. Marketing to businesses differs from marketing to consumers, which is why B2B marketing requires distinct strategies.

Stop Guessing What Matters in B2B Marketing

How top brands are shifting from platform inflation to real revenue impact. B2B marketers are increasingly turning to creators on LinkedIn to humanize their brands, build trust, and close deals. “Content that is authentic, specific, and quotable is more likely to be cited in AI-generated responses,” Forrester notes. Marketers must move beyond keyword stuffing to craft messaging that is bold, direct, and aligned with actual buyer questions. Their queries are also more complex — averaging 15 to 23 words — and demand clear, trustworthy, and contextual responses. Our comprehensive research delivers the strategic insights marketing leaders need, plus interactive resources to deepen your understanding.

Sales leaders should be focused on revaming roles for an AI-driven environment, aligning those roles to AI-augmented workflows, and preparing future roles to orchestrate AI agents. AI-enabled growth depends not only on technology adoption but on redesigning sales roles around how work gets done, according to a separate Gartner survey of chief sales officers (CSOs). “B2B buyers are more comfortable using digital channels and GenAI to navigate the purchase process on their own, but that does not eliminate the role of the seller,” said Robert Blaisdell, VP Analyst, Chief of Research in the Gartner Sales practice. This AI shift has major implications for sales organizations, leading Gartner officials to advocate for the redesigning roles around AI-augmented workflows and allow sellers to focus on empathy, judgment, and value realization. 91% of businesses use video as a marketing tool in 2026, according to Wyzowl's State of Video Marketing report.

Review sites remain a critical trust signal throughout the buyer journey, along with AI chatbots.

Competitive advantage is shifting toward digital experience, data quality and the ability to deliver timely, context-specific information without requiring direct sales engagement. Nearly seven in 10 B2B buyers prefer to complete purchases without interacting with a sales representative, underscoring a shift toward rep-free, self-directed, digital buying behavior, according to a survey released by Gartner. The Enterprise is a leading online platform focused on delivering in-depth coverage of marketing, technology, AI, and business trends worldwide. Reddit’s message to brands is not to treat the platform like a traditional advertising channel.