Exploring the Technology Buyer’s Journey, One Step at a Time

Each stage factors in the psychological state of the buyer, including their needs, behaviors, and decision-making processes. Don’t assume, however, that every buyer steps through those three stages in order every time. The buyer’s journey accounts for all the steps a customer takes to move from discovery for a product to purchase. That’s why it’s so critical to understand the buyer’s journey. Mozhdeh Rastegar-Panah is a seasoned customer experience leader and the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Zendesk.

Distrust in vendor websites is growing — 9% of buyers now see them as unreliable, up from just 3% last year, making it a leading barrier to purchase decisions. Let’s start with the ROI metric that everyone seems to have on the top of their mind when they make any purchase On the other hand, when sales reps assist buyers during the digital purchase journey, the likelihood of regret is cut in half. When buyers experience strong alignment between a supplier’s website and their conversations with sales representatives, they’re 2.8 times more likely to close a high-quality deal. For example, executives who made substantial initial purchases were more likely to double down and commit even more resources by the third decision point — despite earlier setbacks. The biggest problem of sellers is that they struggle to identify this and guide buyers toward a better path.

Once completed, your sales and marketing teams can use your buyer journey map to optimize content, guide behaviors, and increase customer acquisition. Prospects in this stage are at the bottom of the sales funnel and ready to buy a product or service. In this stage, focus on product reviews, consumer polls, and IT buying journey any relevant forums. Analytically, focus on click-through rates and the type of prospects interacting with your targeted content. Make yourself more visible across marketing channels by publishing blog posts, landing pages, ebooks, infographics, guides, and social media posts. You must monitor that content to ensure it’s performing and meeting expectations.

Facilitating Effective Stakeholder Engagement

He told me that he is in charge of making sure buyers don’t feel like they’re being sold to — they should feel like they’re making the choice. This enables prospects to view side-by-side specifications of various Mac models and rental price options. To get started with “targeted content,” you need to answer the questions which are related to specific buying cycle stages. At the awareness stage, I recommend creating the following type of content to present your brand as a possible solution to the problem your leads are facing.

A lead-scoring system helps prioritize prospective buyers based on engagement, behavior, and intent signals. Luckily, there is a way to work with, not fight against, this hard truth (and your customers); it starts with a lead-scoring system. They present data from their research, including cost-benefit analyses and case studies from similar companies, to build a compelling case for adoption. 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.

Today’s buyers do most of their research independently (often using AI) and are typically 50–70% through their decision before speaking to sales. I’ll first walk you through the key findings from those reports (including what they reveal about modern buying behavior) and then share my own takeaways and insights. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of the buyer’s journey, I recommend starting with this quick read. Stick around until the end, where I’ll walk you through a step-by-step guide on how to define your buyer’s journey using HubSpot’s customer journey analytics tool. Copyright © 2026 Trainline.com Limited and its affiliated companies.

Offer convenient information access

• By the time B2B buyers start reaching out to sales representatives, 81% already have a preferred vendor, according to a survey by 6sense.
• Consideration stage content should help prospects weigh the solutions available to them.
• Today’s retail customers don’t just follow a straight line from ad to purchase.
• The buying cycle, also known as a sales cycle, is a process consumers go through before they make a purchase.
• Companies try to reach their target customers in this stage by showing up in the places prospects are searching and providing answers to their questions.

Certain aspects still might not be clear, so it’s a good idea to reverse-engineer closed-won deals in your CRM. 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). You can’t improve the buyer journey if you don’t understand it. A RevOps leader evaluating CPQ tools might compare DealHub, Salesforce CPQ, and PandaDoc based on features, usability, integrations, and customer support. Buyers start Googling, reading blog posts, asking peers, and exploring industry forums. 6sense’s report revealed that the average buying group now has 11 people.

Before content creation and promotion to specific sources, ensure you have a strong and trusted brand identity with your customers and prospects. Brand awareness specifically aids engagement with product reviews (68%), case studies (49%), third-party market research (44%), and technology related-videos (44%). From determining the business need to post sales engagement, a variety of ITDMs play a part in various stages of the technology purchase process and hold different leadership roles in each stage.

How to Use Google Keyword Planner

Additionally, your marketing collateral needs to stand out from millions of online competitors. Therefore, you’ll need to review your current marketing collateral before you can start optimizing the journey. Improving the buyer’s journey requires knowing your customer and understanding the pain points influencing their buying decisions. Depending on the industry, the journey can take many steps, and in some instances, it can take years before reaching the implementation stage. The journey map helps reduce friction points and eliminate problems from the process to better guide your customers and influence their decisions. It involves all functions in your organization, including marketing, sales, technical, and customer relationship management or post-sales support.

Typically, smaller businesses with specific needs can complete the process within a few weeks to a few months. Additionally, we touch on the typical duration of the buying process and offer practical tips for choosing the right tech vendors, ensuring successful partnerships that drive innovation and growth. We discuss aligning business goals with the tech-buying process, outline key steps to establish an effective approach, and identify vital stakeholders to involve. In this article, we navigate the tech buying process, providing business and IT decision-makers with an essential guide for informing technology procurement.

By understanding these specific buyer stages and mapping out your b2b buyer journey, you can create a marketing plan that meets customer expectations at every customer touchpoint. To keep customers engaged, you can use several marketing activities, which include But, you can take additional steps to try and increase the order value. During the awareness stage, you have to try to introduce your brand to the customer.

For Buscemi, this includes requiring everyone on his team to take several marketing courses. This includes regularly attending webinars, participating in online courses, and even shadowing sales calls with my clients (with their permission, of course). Fortunately, Buscemi offers solutions to ensure your sales team can build and maintain trust throughout the buyer’s journey in 2025.

If a FinTech CMO sees the same pitch as a Head of Ops at a logistics startup, they’ll both tune out. A disconnect leads to drop-offs, mixed messages, and frustrated customers. Marketing optimizes for leads, sales pushes for pipeline, and CS handles the post-sale. But too often, your teams act like they’re on three different ones. Your CRM might tell you a lead came from a demo request.

The Marketing and Sales Approach.

These stakeholders may include C-suite executives, procurement teams, department heads and even end users, all of whom need to be convinced of the value your solution offers. Happy customers typically stick around longer and attract more buyers. Things shift quickly and it’s important to keep up with your customers’ expectations. If you don’t get to it quarterly, aim for at least twice a year. I recommend revisiting your customer journey map on a quarterly basis to ensure that you’re prioritizing the right things and that it’s still accurate.

Map all digital and human touchpoints.

To find the right fit, it’s a good idea to interview at least three agents, ideally those recommended by trusted sources or with strong local reviews. When house hunting, it’s easy to overlook key questions—like whether a condo allows pets or if a trendy neighborhood will still meet your needs in a few years. Before you start house hunting, think through your goals for homeownership. To guide you through the process, this Redfin article will provide you with 70 essential questions to ask when buying a house — organized by each stage of the homebuying journey.