How buyer journeys are failing B2B marketers and salespeople

Design thinking gave rise to customer journeys. Yet, many companies wield these methodologies like blunt instruments, structurally flawed in ways that render them far less useful to their end users. The result? Missed opportunities for insights that could drive better sales strategies and sustainable growth.

At its core, a customer journey should map out how a buyer moves from awareness to decision-making. But too often, companies approach this exercise with a predetermined format—a neat, linear process laid out in stages—before conducting any meaningful research. They churn out charts that depict customers taking a series of prescribed steps, as if business purchasing decisions could be boiled down to a paint-by-numbers exercise. This oversimplification is particularly problematic in the B2B space, where no single entity owns the decision-making process.

Procurement decisions in organizations are anything but straightforward. They’re governed by a labyrinth of decision gates, each imposing constraints on future choices. These decisions are rarely made in isolation; they’re shaped by cross-functional teams balancing a host of competing priorities—budget, risk, ROI, and internal politics. Imagine, for instance, a marketing director who wants to implement a new analytics platform. They might face pushback from IT over security concerns, scrutiny from finance about cost overruns, and input from the sales team about usability. Each of these trade-offs can ripple across the decision-making process, altering its trajectory in unexpected ways.

This complexity exposes the limitations of traditional customer journey frameworks. To design a better journey, companies need to shift their starting point. The process should not begin with a predefined format but with in-depth conversations with actual end users. Who are they? Is it the marketing team? Sales leadership? Individual sales reps? Understanding their perspective on the buying process and the specific hurdles they face is critical. These insights provide guideposts for crafting thoughtful, targeted questions during customer interviews, which in turn reveal the underlying mechanics of decision-making.

Gartner’s "choose-your-own-adventure" journey illustrating enterprise purchasing does a good job of highlighting the messy, non-linear reality of B2B buying—a web of interconnected choices, re-evaluations, and dependencies.

A more traditional customer journey might try to impose order on this chaos with an 6x6 grid of stages, actions, and touch-points (see the below Canva template for an example).

But what’s often more accurate—and actionable—is something akin to a decision tree that also highlights key influencers and their impact on the buying process. This approach underscores the importance of fluidity in format, allowing the insights gathered to shape the structure rather than letting a rigid journey map dictate the insights.

By mapping out the messy complexity of procurement processes, companies can uncover pivotal moments in the buying process—the critical gates where decisions constrain or expand future options. Anticipating these junctures enables sellers to tailor their strategies, helping prospective buyers navigate roadblocks and trade-offs with confidence. For example, a company selling collaboration software could preempt IT’s security concerns by proactively addressing compliance requirements, or help finance teams understand cost savings through real-world use cases.

Ultimately, the value of a well-constructed customer journey isn’t in its aesthetic symmetry but in its ability to reflect the reality of how decisions are made. For companies selling to other businesses, understanding and addressing these decision points can mean the difference between languishing in procurement purgatory and closing the deal.