What is Buyer Journey?
The process a B2B buyer goes through from initial awareness of a problem to selecting and purchasing a solution.
Definition
The buyer journey maps the stages a prospect moves through before becoming a customer. In B2B, it typically follows three phases: awareness (the buyer recognizes a problem or opportunity), consideration (the buyer evaluates different approaches and solutions), and decision (the buyer selects a vendor and negotiates terms). B2B buyer journeys are longer and more complex than B2C, often involving 6-10 stakeholders, 3-6 month sales cycles, and dozens of content touchpoints before a purchase decision.
Why It Matters
Aligning your marketing and sales efforts to the buyer's actual journey is what separates targeted outreach from spam. A prospect in the awareness stage doesn't want a demo. A prospect in the decision stage doesn't want a blog post about industry trends. Understanding where accounts sit in their journey lets you deliver the right content, through the right channel, at the right time. Intent data has made this mapping more precise by revealing which stage a company is in based on their research behavior.
Example
A VP of Sales at a mid-market company reads three blog posts about CRM migration (awareness). She downloads a CRM comparison guide and visits G2 to read reviews (consideration). She requests demos from two vendors and involves her CFO and IT director in evaluation calls (decision). Each stage requires different content and engagement from the selling organization.