A customer journey is the route a buyer travels from the moment they realise they have a problem to the moment they choose someone to solve it. In B2B, that route is not travelled by one person but by a group, it is not linear, and for most of its length it happens without you knowing it is happening.
TL;DR. The five boxes in a row describe an order that does not occur in reality. The data shows a B2B buyer reaches first contact with a salesperson only after 61% of the journey, that thirteen people are involved in the decision on average, and that 86% of processes stall somewhere along the way. In a market whose digitisation sits below the European average, an extra layer appears, because part of the journey moves back offline. The useful map is not the one describing stages, it is the one showing where the route breaks.
What is a customer journey and where does the diagram come from?
The modern model starts from McKinsey’s Consumer Decision Journey, published in June 2009, which replaced the classic funnel with a circuit, precisely because the authors had observed that people add and remove options along the way instead of steadily narrowing a list. The central idea was that the route closes into a loyalty loop rather than into a sale.
The problem appears when that model, designed for consumers, gets copied onto B2B without adjustment. Gartner describes the B2B buying process as six jobs the buyer has to complete, meaning problem identification, solution exploration, requirements building, supplier selection, validation and consensus creation, and states explicitly that these do not unfold in a predictable or linear order. Buyers return to jobs they believed were finished, repeatedly, and Gartner calls that movement “looping”.
The difference between the two pictures is not academic. A linear diagram makes you believe you can move someone from one box to the next with an email, whereas reality asks you to be present and useful when the person comes back, for the third time, to a question you thought they had moved past.
What does the real route look like, in numbers?
The figures below come from studies on large samples, and together they describe a process that barely resembles what most companies assume.
| What gets assumed | What the data shows |
|---|---|
| The buyer contacts us early, to learn what we do | First contact with a salesperson comes after 61% of the journey (6sense, 2025) |
| One person decides, maybe two | Thirteen people enter the decision on average, and 89% of purchases cross at least two departments (Forrester, 2024) |
| The process advances until a choice is made | 86% of buying processes stall somewhere along the way (Forrester, 2024) |
| People inform themselves from our website | A decision maker uses ten channels on average during a purchase (McKinsey, 2026) |
| Being first gives us an advantage | In 84% of cases, the first conversation was with the vendor that won the contract (6sense) |
The 6sense study from 2025, built on roughly 4,000 responses from North America, Asia-Pacific and Europe, also shows that the average buying cycle has shortened to 10.1 months, from 11.3 months in the previous edition. The same source carries the figure that should change how a company builds its presence, because Kerry Cunningham, who leads research at 6sense, says that “in 78% of cases buyers told us they had fully or nearly fully established their requirements by the time of their first conversation with a salesperson”.
The practical consequence is harsh. If the requirements are written before you enter the conversation, then the fight for the contract does not happen at negotiation, it happens far earlier, during the period when the person is reading about the category and forming their criteria. Whoever gets to define the criteria wins before the competition starts, and we wrote about that mechanism at length in the article on cognitive ownership.
Why can you not see most of the journey?
Because it happens in places you cannot measure. SparkToro’s analysis of data from the first four months of 2026 shows that 68.01% of Google searches end without any click to a website, up from 60.45% in 2024. The person takes their answer from the results page or from a conversational assistant, and you appear in no traffic statistic at all.
Added to that are private conversations, industry groups, questions put to a colleague at another company and recommendations asked for at an event. 6sense calls this area the “dark funnel”, and the term describes exactly the anonymous research happening on territory you do not own.
The conclusion that matters for a founder is not that measurement fails, but that it cannot be the only guide. A company building its decisions exclusively on what it sees in analytics is optimising the last 39% of a journey while ignoring the first 61%.
What changes in a less digitised market?
It has to be said honestly that no cross-country quantitative study of B2B buying behaviour segmented by digital maturity exists that I could cite here. What does exist are the digitisation figures, which do not describe directly how people buy, but say something real about the environment in which buying happens.
The spread inside Europe is wide. Eurostat data for 2025 puts the European average for small and medium companies reaching at least the basic level of the digital intensity index at 71.4%, while the countries at the bottom of the range sit closer to 44%. In the same period, AI use among companies averages 20% across the European Union while the laggards sit around 5%, advanced cloud purchasing averages 47% against roughly 22% at the bottom, and basic digital skills reach 60% of the population aged 16 to 74 on average against roughly a third in the weakest markets.
What that means for the buying journey, in practice. In the less digitised markets a significant share of research happens by phone, by direct recommendation and at industry events, meaning through channels you cannot instrument. The decision maker at an industrial company searches on Google, but verifies through people, and that verification often weighs more than everything they read beforehand.
From this comes an allocation rule we apply with our clients. Digital presence has to exist and has to be coherent, because it is what someone finds when they look you up after hearing about you, but the budget is not allowed to ignore the offline channel, where validation actually happens. The two do not compete with each other, they work in sequence, and the sequence matters.
What has to exist at each buying job?
If the route is not linear, then material does not get produced by stage either, it gets produced by job. The table below connects the six jobs Gartner describes to what the person has to find, in practice, at each of them.
| The buyer’s job | What they are looking for | What has to exist on your side |
|---|---|---|
| Problem identification | a name for what feels wrong | content describing the symptom, not the solution |
| Solution exploration | which approaches exist and how they differ | an honest comparison of approaches, including the ones you do not offer |
| Requirements building | what they should ask a supplier for | selection criteria, written explicitly |
| Supplier selection | who does this credibly | proof, meaning results with figures and context |
| Validation | whether they might be making a mistake | answers to the real objections, not the comfortable ones |
| Consensus creation | how to convince the others internally | a short piece they can forward |
The most neglected line in the table is the last one, and it explains a good share of the 86% of stalled processes Forrester measured. The person you convinced ends up in front of a colleague who has never spoken to you and has no time to read everything, and if that colleague has nothing to carry the discussion with, the process stops without anyone telling you why.
The second neglected line is the third one, the requirements. The company that helps the buyer write their criteria usually ends up being measured on exactly those criteria, which is the largest advantage obtainable without selling anything.
How do you build a map that actually helps?
Not by drawing the stages, because everyone already knows the stages. A useful map gets built from the questions the person asks themselves, in the order life puts them, and from the place where they look for the answer.
The first step is to write the real questions, in their words, taken from conversations and emails rather than from assumptions. The second time you hear the same question from two different people, it becomes a stage on the map.
The second step is to identify, for each question, who answers it today. Sometimes a competitor answers, sometimes a consultant, sometimes a forum, and most often nobody answers at all, which is the largest opportunity of them all.
The third step is to identify the blockages, meaning the points where the process stops. Forrester’s data says 86% of processes stall, and in our experience the blockage appears almost always in the same place, when the person who is convinced has to convince someone else inside the company and has nothing to do it with. The material that helps them sell internally is worth more, at that moment, than another campaign.
The fourth step is to connect the map to the sales system, otherwise it stays a nice document. We wrote separately about what that connection looks like, from campaign to predictability, in the article on marketing architecture.
The four mistakes that show up most often
The first is the map drawn in a meeting room. Five people from the company gather and describe what they believe the client does. The result describes the internal process rather than the client’s route, and the difference becomes visible the moment somebody tries to use the map to decide what material to produce.
The second is confusing the stage with the channel. A company splits its map by channel, meaning website, ads, email and events, then finds it cannot answer a single useful question. A stage is a question the person asks themselves, while a channel is merely where they look for the answer, and the same answer has to exist in several places.
The third is optimising the visible end. Because the last steps are measurable, all the effort goes there, even though the decision forms much earlier. A company that raises its form conversion rate without touching how it is perceived earlier gains a few percentage points and loses the competition on criteria.
The fourth is the map that ends in nothing. The document gets made, presented and archived. A useful map produces a short list of things to write or build, with an owner for each, otherwise it stays an exercise.
The final test is simple. If the map does not tell you which material is missing and who makes it by when, it is not a map, it is a drawing.
Frequently asked questions
How does a customer journey differ from a sales funnel? The funnel describes the process from your perspective, meaning the steps you move a lead through. The customer journey describes the same road from the person’s perspective, with their questions and their blockages. Companies that confuse the two end up optimising what they see while ignoring what the buyer experiences.
How many personas do I need to build the map? Fewer than you think. A decision group of thirteen people does not require thirteen maps, it requires one that shows who enters the conversation at each stage and what each of them needs in order to say yes.
How often does it get updated? When the questions change, not at fixed intervals. In practice one review a year is enough for most industrial companies, and a regulatory or technology shift can trigger one at any time.
Is it worth the investment if we sell through relationships and referrals? Especially then. A company growing through referral has a very short and very fragile route, dependent on a handful of people. The map shows exactly what is missing for someone who does not know you personally to reach the same level of trust.
Where do I start if I have no data? From the last ten deals you lost and the last ten you won. The real reasons sit there, and they are worth more than any general study, because they belong to your market.
If you want to see where the route breaks in your company’s case, meaning which question goes unanswered right before the decision, you can request a positioning analysis. It starts from what the market finds about you now, not from what you believe it should find.
