B2B Buyer Journey: Gartner’s 6-Stage Framework Explained

As these folks move into buying roles at companies, they’ll bring that value-alignment goal to their buying processes. In this list, we could have easily shared specific marketing tasks you can do, such as creating online content or publishing short videos. Customers make purchases for long-term solutions, resulting in a longer sales cycle, longer contracts, and longer relationships with companies.

In the awareness stage, focus on providing educational content that helps build knowledge and establishes your company as a thought leader. Using a CRM system to track buyer stages and engagement levels can help sales teams provide the right information at the right time. To effectively tailor your sales process to the buyer’s journey, it’s essential to keep track of where each buyer is in their journey. In contrast, B2C buyers tend to be more emotional and impulse-driven, often making purchases based on personal preferences and immediate needs. Understanding the B2B buyer’s journey allows marketers and sales teams to tailor their messaging and content to meet the needs of buyers at each stage. The B2B buyer’s journey is the process that business buyers go through when making a purchase decision.

However, in the B2C buyer’s journey, there’s a reliance on brand awareness through ads, social media, influencer marketing, and promotional strategy. It ranges from instant (i.e., e-commerce purchases) to a few days or weeks (i.e., renting an apartment). Because the B2C buyer’s journey operates more quickly, its sales cycle is shorter.

How the B2B Buying Journey Compares to Other Frameworks

But too often, your teams act like they’re on three different ones. Modern B2B buyers are unpredictable, independent, and skeptical, so some businesses struggle to keep up. On top of that, Deeto’s AI-powered smart-matching and dynamic display algorithms allow you to dynamically serve social proof by industry, company size, or buyer role. 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). Every B2B purchase follows a general path from first recognizing their problem to becoming a loyal advocate. Anyone can now research anonymously, and you may not even realize they’ve engaged with you until they’re ready to talk.

Review sites remain a critical trust signal throughout the buyer journey, along with AI chatbots.

• To make a lasting impression, you need to meet buyers early online with valuable, relevant content that answers questions and builds trust long before a sales call.
• Millennials in leadership roles are spreading things up, literally.
• At B2B Summit North America, taking place in Phoenix from April 26–29, 2026, Forrester’s analysts will share how AI-driven buyer autonomy is collapsing traditional go-to-market models, what this inflection point means for businesses, and how to thrive in a world where buyers control the journey.
• Build a video marketing strategy around your buyer’s specific pain points rather than producing volume for its own sake.
• Sprout Social helps you understand and reach your audience, engage your community and measure performance with the only all-in-one social media management platform built for connection.
• By providing feedback and participating in case studies, customers earn Reward Points in the Blackbaud Champions Hub, which they can redeem from the Champions Rewards.

See how Levitate produces testimonial videos for B2B brands. For video specifically, this means LinkedIn should be treated as a primary distribution channel, not a secondary one. 51% of video marketers have primarily created live-action video, followed by animated video (23%) and screen-recorded video (19%). For B2B companies, this traffic tends to be higher-intent than what comes through most other channels. More people are watching, and more brands are posting, making quality and relevance more important than ever. For B2B brands, live Q&As, product launches, and expert panels offer outsized engagement relative to production effort.

Map core journey stages.

With 25 years+ experience in corporate, community & grassroots marketing, Liza's passion lies in helping businesses connect with their audience in meaningful ways. But the brands seeing b2b buyer’s journey the best results are those using AI to produce more high-quality content, not to cut corners on production value. Both platforms reward native uploads, captions, and content designed for their specific user behavior patterns.

Both consumers and businesses can see a clear connection between using Adobe’s products and success on TikTok, making this a great example of B2B marketing. Take the following example, which has over 370K views and highlights how user @emilesam used Adobe After Effects to create a fight sequence against himself. Adobe succeeds on the app because it creates engaging content specifically catered to TikTok’s audience.

78% of consumers say watching a short video is their preferred way to learn about a product or service. This is consistent with LinkedIn's broader role as the dominant social channel for B2B lead generation. LinkedIn remains the primary distribution channel for B2B video, and nearly two-thirds of companies report acquiring new customers through the platform.