Good marketing and sales can still add up to a difficult B2B buying experience. Here’s why.
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 be comparing different ways of solving the problem, building internal agreement, understanding implementation risk or working out what different stakeholders need before they are ready to support a decision.
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.
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 at least:
What are they trying to change?
What do they still need to understand or decide?
Who needs to agree?
What makes moving forward difficult or risky?
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.
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 do not need a sophisticated journey map to start. Take one important buying situation and put the customer’s questions, decisions and barriers on one line. Underneath, add what marketing, sales and other teams are doing at those points.
The gaps between the two are often where the interesting questions start.
The point is not simply to document the journey. It is to see where the customer’s needs and the company’s activities stop lining up and where that might require the company to work differently.
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.
Seeing where customers struggle is useful. Seeing what the company should do differently because of it is where the journey starts to become actionable.
Good touchpoints are not enough
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 the experience 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.
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If you want to take a more customer-driven look at your buying experience, get in touch.