The B2B Customer Journey, Without the Diagram

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. 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. The firm states explicitly that these jobs do not unfold in a predictable order. Buyers return to ones they believed were finished, 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. 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 are the five stages of the customer journey?

The five stages you will find in almost any textbook are awareness, consideration, decision, retention and advocacy. They describe correctly what a consumer lives through when buying a pair of headphones on their own. There is genuinely one person there, one decision and one press of a button.

Some models split the same road into seven steps, separating evaluation from intent and adding a loyalty phase at the end. The extra boxes change nothing structurally, because the assumption underneath stays identical. One individual advances through an ordered sequence, forward, once.

The trouble starts the moment that list gets moved onto an industrial purchase worth several hundred thousand euro. The five stages do not disappear there. They are simply no longer travelled by a single person, and no longer travelled once.

The technical director goes through consideration while the finance director is still at awareness, and procurement walks straight into decision with a criterion nobody has discussed with them.

The five stages become five stages across thirteen people, spread over ten months, with returns. That is why a map drawn as a single line describes an experience nobody in the buying group actually has.

So the stages are worth knowing, and worth nothing on their own. What they give you is vocabulary. What decides whether your marketing works is the answer to a different question, namely who is at which stage right now, and what that particular person needs in order to move.

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.

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. The share has climbed from 60.45%, which was the figure 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”. 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. They do not describe directly how people buy, yet they 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. The budget is not allowed to ignore the offline channel either, because that is 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 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.

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. That is the largest advantage obtainable without selling anything.

How do you match marketing material to the sales stage?

By tying it to the concrete stage the conversation sits at, rather than to the ending you would like. In the methodology we apply, the picture is called the double funnel. On top of the marketing funnel, which carries a person from suspect to prospect and then to analysis, sits the commercial funnel, meaning negotiation, contract, retention, development and profit.

The two funnels are usually run by different people who rarely read each other’s material. Marketing produces awareness content and hands over a list. Sales opens the conversation from zero, because nothing the person read earlier prepared the specific discussion that follows.

The operable rule is short. Every piece of material has one job, and that job is to answer the question that blocks the next step.

If you are talking to the person who influences the decision, the objective of your material is not to sell. Its role is to get you in front of the person who decides. A piece that tries to close the sale there blocks the route, because it asks someone to make a decision they have no authority to make.

The case where this shows most clearly is the analysis we published for Cablero, a Central European manufacturer of industrial cables. The diagnosis showed the most frequent pattern in the market, meaning a company describing itself through quality, good price and fast delivery. Those three form the minimum definition of the category and differentiate nobody.

The strategic move proposed there was to shift the unit of value. Not the cable, but the economic risk protected by the cable, expressed as a communication territory, “we do not sell the cable, we sell what is not allowed to fail”.

The moment the unit of value moves, every stage of the journey gets a different conversation, because the buyer is no longer comparing metres of copper. We covered the underlying mechanism separately in the article on the price war.

Why can stages not be skipped, even when the buyer looks ready?

Because sequencing is what educates a market gradually, and a market that has not been educated cannot buy. When a company jumps straight to the offer, it is asking for a decision from someone who has not yet accepted that the problem exists in the form the offer solves.

The 6sense figure gives the arithmetic of this. If 78% of buyers have their requirements fully or nearly fully formed before the first conversation with a salesperson, then the offer arrives at the end of a formation process you either took part in or did not. Skipping the earlier steps does not accelerate anything.

It simply moves your entry to a point where the criteria are already someone else’s.

The way we build it, cumulative impact runs in four stages. Visibility comes first, meaning the market knows you exist. Understanding comes second, meaning the market can say what you do differently, in its own words. Credibility comes third, resting on proof rather than on claims. Preference comes fourth and it is the only one that produces revenue predictably.

Each stage rests on the one before it, and none of them can be bought out of order. A company with large budgets and no understanding buys visibility repeatedly and converts it poorly, which looks in the reports like a channel problem. It is a sequence problem.

How much effort are you asking of the reader?

Every piece of material charges the reader a cognitive tax, meaning the effort needed to work out what you do, for whom, and what makes you different from the previous tab they had open. The tax is invisible in any dashboard, and it is paid in full at every touch.

Along the buying journey the charge is levied ten times over, because a decision maker uses ten or more channels. Every channel where they have to decode your position again is one more chance for them to pick somebody else. Sometimes they drop out simply because they got tired of decoding you.

The chain is direct. When the message cascades coherently, the reader’s cognitive load falls, the cost per click falls with it, and the rest of the parameters improve without anything having changed at the auction.

We saw this in the analysis published for Amel, a manufacturer of aluminium and PVC joinery, where the company communicated through its product range while the buyer was trying to answer a much simpler question, namely who is reliable enough to fit windows in a building that has to be finished by autumn.

There is a nuance here that we apply in reverse to how it is usually taught. At zero recognition, friction does not fall through minimalism, it falls through more explanation. Minimalism is a luxury earned by category leaders, who no longer have to introduce themselves.

A company nobody knows and which explains nothing has not achieved elegance, it has achieved silence.

Which layer of the company does the route get repaired on?

A broken journey is a symptom, and the repair belongs to whichever layer actually holds the fault. We work with four, and they stack.

L1, performance. Campaigns, channels, budgets and the numbers the reports show. This is where everyone starts, and it is the only layer that produces figures fast enough to feel like progress.

L2, the commercial process. The sales system, the stages, the material that exists at each of them and the handover between marketing and sales. Most stalled processes live here, not at L1.

L3, orchestration and memory. What the company knows about its own buyers, where that knowledge sits, and whether the next conversation starts from it or from zero. A company whose client context lives in one person’s head restarts every route from the beginning.

L4, positioning and category architecture. What the company is in the buyer’s head, against which alternatives it gets compared, and on which criteria. When the fault is here, no amount of campaign work reaches it.

The order matters, because a company optimising its L1 campaigns while the break sits at L4 pays more and more for the same result.

We wrote separately about the architecture connecting the layers. The client profile everything else rests on gets built by the rules in the article on buyer persona, avatar and ICP, and the connection from campaign to predictability sits in the one on marketing architecture.

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. 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. Every stage on the map has to correspond to a stage in the commercial process, with a named owner and a date, or the map describes an intention rather than a route.

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.

The distinction between the profile of the company and the profile of the individual is worth getting right first, and we set it out in the article on buyer persona, avatar and ICP.

Is the customer journey the same thing as customer experience?

No, and the difference is practical. The journey is the route travelled before the decision, including the long stretch where you are not present. The experience is what the person lives through once they are already working with you. A company with an excellent experience and an invisible journey keeps the clients it has and gains very few new ones.

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. It does not start from what you believe it should find.