Good marketing and sales can still add up to a difficult B2B buying experience. Here’s why.
Marketing can be doing a good job. The website is clear. The content is useful. Campaigns generate interest. Leads are coming in.
Sales can be doing a good job too. Discovery calls are thoughtful. The demo goes well. The proposal answers the questions the customer has asked.
And yet the overall buying experience can still feel difficult.
This is one of the reasons I find customer journeys useful. They make it possible to look beyond individual interactions and ask a different question:
How easy or difficult is it for the customer to actually move forward?
In B2B, much of the customer’s work happens between the interactions a company can see and inside the customer’s own organisation. They are trying to solve a problem, make a decision and get other people comfortable with that decision.
Sometimes the biggest problems are not inside any one interaction.
They are in between them.
Companies tend to see the interactions they own
Marketing sees website visits, campaign engagement, content downloads and leads. Sales sees meetings, opportunities, objections, proposals and pipeline stages. A technical specialist sees the demo or security review.
Each team can look at its own activity and reasonably conclude that things are working. But the customer may be dealing with something quite different.
They may still be deciding whether the problem is important enough to act on, while also trying to convince colleagues who see the situation differently. They may be comparing not only suppliers, but different ways of solving the problem. They may need to understand implementation risk, justify the investment internally or get finance, security, procurement and leadership on board.
Much of this can happen outside the interactions a supplier can see. That creates a gap between what the company sees happening and what the customer still needs to work through.
An opportunity may have moved from discovery to proposal in the CRM, while the customer is still struggling to build internal agreement. A demo may have gone well, but an important stakeholder may still be unconvinced. A proposal may have been sent, but the customer may have no clear picture of what implementation will actually require from their own organisation.
The company sees movement.
The customer may not feel they have moved very far at all.
Good interactions can still add up to a difficult experience
Imagine a company evaluating a new B2B technology platform:
They find a useful article from your company.
> Good marketing.
They speak to a salesperson who understands the problem.
> Good sales.
The demo is relevant and answers their technical questions.
> Another good interaction.
But between those moments, the customer is working out how to explain the investment internally, which colleagues need to be involved, how difficult the change will be and what evidence different stakeholders need before they are comfortable moving forward.
Perhaps marketing has excellent product content, but nothing the internal champion can use with the CFO. Perhaps sales understands the customer’s priorities, but that context does not reach the technical specialist. The customer may be asked the same questions again when a new person joins the process. Or nobody may have made it clear what happens after the contract is signed.
There may be nothing obviously wrong with any individual interaction. The difficulty sits across the experience.
And that is exactly the kind of problem that can be hard to see when each team looks mainly at the part it owns.
Start with what the customer is trying to work through
This is why I would not start by mapping every email, meeting, webpage and call. I would start with the customer.
Ask:
What triggered the need?
What are they trying to change?
What questions need answering?
What are they uncertain about?
Who needs to agree?
What makes the decision feel risky?
Where do they get stuck?
What are they doing when your company is not involved at all?
That gives a different view from looking only at the company’s own stages and activities.
A CRM or sales pipeline can show that an opportunity has moved forward. But it cannot, on its own, tell you everything the customer still needs to resolve before they are ready to move forward themselves.
This is also why understanding customer reality matters before deciding what marketing or sales should change.
Then look back at the company
Once the customer side is clearer, it becomes much easier to look at what the company is doing around it.
Where is marketing helping? What is sales doing at that point? When are technical specialists needed? What information moves from one team to another? Where does ownership change?
And what are we quietly expecting the customer to figure out alone?
This does not need to become a huge service design exercise. Even a simple view of the customer journey, with the roles of marketing, sales and other relevant teams underneath it, can reveal a lot.
You may find that marketing and sales are both doing sensible things, but based on different assumptions about what the buyer needs. Sales may have useful information about the customer’s situation, but it gets lost in the next handoff. The person speaking to sales may understand the value, while the wider buying group includes people with completely different questions.
Or what looked like a weak sales stage may actually be an unresolved customer decision that started much earlier.
This is where looking at the journey becomes more useful than simply looking at individual touchpoints.
What might need to change?
Once you can see where the customer is struggling across the experience, the practical implications often become clearer.
If customers struggle to build internal agreement, marketing might create material that helps an internal champion explain the investment to colleagues, while sales might identify the wider buying group earlier.
Proof might need to appear sooner because customers need more confidence before involving senior stakeholders. Technical expertise might come into the conversation earlier when implementation risk is a major concern. Or a handoff might need to change because customers currently feel they are starting again every time a new team becomes involved.
The right response depends on what the evidence shows.
But seeing where customers struggle is only part of the value. The other part is seeing where the company may need to work differently around them.
Good touchpoints are not enough
In B2B buying, several people on the customer side may be trying to make a decision while several teams on the supplier side are each doing their part.
The individual interactions can all look good. Marketing can be useful. Sales can be thoughtful. The demo can work. The proposal can answer the right questions.
And the customer can still find the overall experience difficult.
Sometimes the answer is not to make every individual interaction dramatically better. It is to understand what the customer is trying to work through across them and where the different parts of the company are not helping them move forward as well as they could.
For me, that is one of the most useful things a customer journey can make visible.
Want to see the buying experience from the customer’s side?
You do not need a complex journey mapping programme to start seeing where customers may be getting stuck.
I use customer interviews and journey thinking to help B2B companies understand what buyers are trying to work through, where the experience breaks across marketing, sales and other parts of the company, and what the company could do differently as a result.
If you want to take a more customer-driven look at your buying experience, get in touch.