75% of B2B customers are researching solutions, validating prices, and shortlisting throughout the B2B customer journey without any sales rep, according to Gartner.
But they easily get overwhelmed and confused due to information exposure, and that’s what opens the door for marketers.
Your job isn’t to become a salesperson; rather, become their trusted guide, finding their right solution. According to Gartner, this works like a charm.
This article is your playbook to understand the B2B client journey. You will know how to create a B2B journey map and how to plan marketing strategies surrounding touchpoints to trigger prospects and convert them.
What is the B2B Customer Journey?
A B2B (business-to-business) client journey is the complete path a business takes when buying from another company. It starts the moment they first hear about your brand and continues through the entire sales process. It also includes their experience as a long-term customer.
Any B2B purchase has to go through several touchpoints or steps. From product awareness, comparing vendors, approvals from higher authority, purchase, and purchase steps, all come under the B2B client journey.
So, basically, it’s the interactions and touchpoints a buyer has to go through with the vendor.
B2C journey ends with the purchase in most cases. With B2B, post-purchasing steps like setup, customer support, case study, referrals to other businesses, etc., matter.
So, the agency selling B2B also needs to acknowledge all these touchpoints for maximum client retention and getting new ones through referrals.
B2B Client Journey Stages
From the very beginning of the B2B sales journey, every deal has to go through the following 5 steps. If you are to make sure your product or services are properly aligned with the B2B customer journey, you need to understand the mechanism of these steps.
1. Awareness
This is where it all begins. Customers face a challenge or issue, then seek potential solutions.
It can be conducted through several mediums – friends, colleagues, search engines, videos, podcasts, blog posts, ebooks, webinars, etc. Then they become aware of the solution they need.
As a business, you need to penetrate every possible medium to drive traffic to your problem-solving page, where you can promote your product as a solution to their problems.
- Keyword Research: Do keyword research and find what terms they use for searching
- Blog Posts: Target those keywords and meet the intent by creating blog posts
- Videos: If search intent requires video content, prepare a YouTube video
- Podcasts: Video content strategy will be rock solid if you make podcasts on it
- Ebooks: If you can’t create ebooks, at least find ebooks and give them away through your website
- Webinars: Arrange webinars with experts to discuss how to address their problem
2. Considerations
So, after reading your blog posts, watching YouTube videos, or from any other sources, buyers now know about products or services to solve their problems.
Obviously, there will be multiple options to choose from. In this case, buyers would compare products from different vendors. They will compare features, prices, and the benefits they will get.
You can prepare comparison guides and show them case studies where they will know firsthand experience how your product solves problems, what unique USP it comes with.
Your offerings should be ahead of what competitors are providing. If not from all angles, there should be some selling points to attract customers.
3. Decision
By this stage, customers might have a shortlist and be ready to make the purchase. So far, they are aware of the products, have gone through case studies of specific industries, and have received testimonials from real buyers.
- Free Trials: To influence B2B purchase decisions, you can offer potential clients product demos and free trials.
- Smooth Onboarding: Make their onboarding journey as smooth as possible to make first impressions stand out.
4. Retention
Post-purchase experience is no less important than pre-purchase. Customer retention has a lot to do with the early client journey stages.
The more customers you can retain, the chances you have of publishing successful case studies and testimonials. All together, these will help you onboard new clients.
- Ensure flexible payment options.
- Faster customer support
- Easy onboarding experience
5. Advocacy
Then comes the advocacy part. The better you can retain customers, the more customers will be willing to become brand advocates.
They will leave positive reviews, recommend your products to others, and talk about your product on social media.
Altogether, these will signal a positive advocacy for your product or service.
Understanding B2B Journey Map
Even though both the B2B customer journey and the customer journey map sound similar, there’s a slight difference.
The journey involves the steps a customer takes to complete the purchase. Whereas the journey map is all about small details regarding triggers, feelings, touchpoints, and insights throughout the journey.
Once you have an idea of customer mapping, you can come up with a solid marketing strategy to attract buyers throughout their journey.
Let’s say you’re looking at just one stage of the journey, like “Consideration.” The map forces you to get specific and see it from your client’s point of view. For that one stage, you’d break down what they’re actually going through:
Actions & Touchpoints
This is what the client is physically doing. Are they searching on Google, clicking through your case studies, sitting through a webinar you’re hosting, or reading the proposal you sent over?
You’re mapping out every single place they come into contact with your agency.
Thoughts & Feelings
Okay, this is where you get inside their head. What’s their internal monologue? Are they feeling overwhelmed by all the options out there? Confident that you’re the expert?
Maybe they’re confused by your pricing or just anxious about making the wrong call. This is crucial because even though it’s a big business decision, you’re still dealing with a human being.
Pain Points & Frustrations
This part is gold. You’re actively looking for roadblocks and friction. Where does the process get difficult, or even just annoying, for them?
Maybe your website is a pain to navigate, your proposal took forever to arrive, or after they signed the contract, they had no idea who their main point of contact was.
Opportunities
Every time you find a pain point, you’ve also found an opportunity to fix it.
If clients get confused during onboarding, that’s your chance to create a killer welcome kit. If they seem nervous about results, that’s an opportunity to build a clearer reporting dashboard to put their minds at ease.
Implement Client Journey Map in Your Agency Business
Once you know customer journey mapping examples, it’s much easier to implement on your SaaS product marketing. Below are the important steps you can consider in your B2B customer map –
1. Gather Research Data and Execute
You need to combine insights from real conversations with hard data to get the full picture.
Talk to People (The Qualitative “Why”)
- Talk to recent clients about their experience.
- Interview your sales, marketing, and account management teams.
Dig into the Data (The Quantitative “What”)
Beyond just talking to people, you need to look at the data to see what they’re actually doing when they interact with you online. This is where tools like heatmaps and Google Analytics come in.
- Use Heatmaps to See Behavior
Heatmaps show you exactly where people are clicking, moving their mouse, and how far they scroll down a page. They use colors to show activity: hot spots (red/orange) are where all the action is, and cool spots (blue/green) are being ignored.
So if you see your CTAs are cold (blue), meaning visitors aren’t clicking on buttons. You need more aggressive and catchy CTAs.
If 75% of your visitors never scroll down far enough to see your amazing case studies, it’s a clear sign you need to move that content higher up.
- Use Google Analytics for the Big Picture
This is your go-to for understanding how people find you in the first place and what they do once they’re on your site. You can quickly find out crucial information like:
- Which marketing channels are actually bringing in good leads?
- What are your most popular pages?
- Where in the journey are people abandoning your site?
By combining what people tell you in interviews with what the data shows you they’re doing, you get an incredibly clear and accurate foundation for your journey map.
2. Blog Posts with Right Search Intent
At the awareness and consideration stages, the specific pain points and queries are addressed. Write direct answers meeting search intent, publishing comparison guides, how-to articles, etc.
3. Target Right Channels
Depending on your target industry, identify where they mostly spend time. Is it on Instagram or LinkedIn? Your social media posts should follow specific platform algorithms to reach the right prospects.
4. Tailor Demo or Free Trial
During the consideration stage, you will know what buyers are mostly concerned about. Make sure the demo or free trial version of your SaaS software comes with the features that directly address things they are concerned about.
5. Address Concerns Proactively
During meetings, some prospects would show their concerns with implementation. You can win or lose that prospect during this “decision stage”.
To approach proactively, affirm their concern and say that “A lot of people in your position worry about the setup process, so let me show you exactly how we make it easy.”
This is just one example. There will be issues and you’ll have to proceed proactively.
6. Improve Trial Experience
When a prospect is even willing to give your product a try, you will have to make sure the trial experience is smooth for them.
This is the phrase where they will decide whether your SaaS product will be suitable for them or not. Be sure to create targeted in-app messages or email sequences to guide them through.
7. Prepare Retention Strategies
As B2B customer experience continues after purchasing, being able to retain customers is one of the major concerns from an agency perspective. Point out the pain points customers have to go through the “retention” stage.
Work on solving those issues to retain more customers and onboard new ones from their advocacy.
8. Provide Proactive Support
A few months after signing up, customers will face challenges. You will have to reach out to hear from them what they are facing. Provide tips and do things for them to overcome those issues.
This is how you can make clients get the most value out of their investment. They will willingly advocate for your product, be it a testimonial, case study, or review.
Gartner B2B Customer Journey Research Findings
Gartner research has extremely beneficial takeaways for B2B SaaS customer journeys that want to implement new strategies as per the market demands. This section gives you clear, actionable steps you need to consider.
1. The Funnel Thing Doesn’t Always Work
First, that neat, linear marketing funnel you’ve been using? From a blog post to a trial sign-up, to conversion? You can pretty much throw that out.
Your customers are all over the place. They’re jumping from your pricing page to a G2 review, back to a specific feature page, then into a free trial, all while reading a competitor’s blog.
Your Marketing To-Do
Stop trying to force users down a single path. Your marketing needs to be present and helpful everywhere, all at once. This means your website navigation has to be flawless, and your content needs to answer specific questions at every stage, assuming users will see it in a random order.
2. Guide Your Prospects
The big takeaway here is that your potential customers are overwhelmed. They don’t need another list of 50 features. They need clarity.
Your marketing’s number one job is to be the ultimate sense-making tool. You have to cut through the noise of the market and make the decision easy for them.
Your Marketing To-Do
- Build crystal-clear comparison pages against your main competitors.
- Create ROI calculators that show the tangible value of your software.
- Design use-case-specific landing pages that speak directly to one persona’s pain point, showing them only the features they care about.
3. Hybrid “Human + Product” Approach
Here’s the paradox that affects every SaaS business –
People want to self-serve in your product, but they get better results and feel more confident when a human is involved.
This directly informs your product-led vs. sales-led growth strategy. The answer is you need both, working together seamlessly.
Your Marketing To-Do
- Your free trial or freemium product experience has to be incredible on its own.
- Work with your product team to set up triggers for human outreach.
- When the trial user adds teammates or uses any key feature, that’s when a customer success or sales rep should reach out with a helpful, non-salesy tip.
4. Marketing’s Job Doesn’t End at Sign-Up
The old model, where marketing gets a trial sign-up and then tosses it over the wall to the sales or product team, is gone. In SaaS, that’s where the real marketing begins.
Since the journey is a continuous loop, your marketing team needs to be just as focused on retention and expansion as they are on acquisition.
Your Marketing To-Do
- Develop onboarding email sequences that don’t just sell, but actually help users get value from the product in their first week.
- Use product usage data (what features are popular, where people get stuck) to inform your next marketing campaign.
Conclusion
Now that you’re aware of the B2B client journey, you should be aware that you need to adjust your marketing strategy.
Regardless of what business you are in, once you tap into the touchpoints of B2B clients with the intention of helping them through, rather than just trying to sell, you will discover new ways of onboarding clients.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is B2B client experience?
B2B client experience is what clients experience and feel when interacting with products, services, vendors, enquiry, and other touchpoints. Positive customer experience eventually leads to increased sales and higher customer retention rates.
What do B2B customers really want?
B2B customers want a partner who can help them achieve their specific business goals. Their primary motivations are logic-based, focusing on return on investment (ROI), efficiency, and expertise. Unlike B2C consumers, they are less driven by emotion and more by data that proves a product or service will save them time, reduce costs, or increase their revenue. They also highly value reliability and strong customer support.
What is the difference between B2B and B2C customer journey?
A B2C (Business-to-Consumer) journey is usually short, driven by one person, and based on emotion, brand, or impulse. A B2B (Business-to-Business) journey is long and complex, often lasting months. It involves a “buying committee” of multiple decision-makers (e.g., finance, IT, management) who must all agree. The decision is based on logic, data, and ROI.
Why is B2B better than B2C?
The B2B model is often considered “better” for businesses because it typically leads to a higher customer lifetime value (CLV) and more predictable revenue. B2B sales usually involve larger contracts and long-term service agreements, creating stable, recurring income. While B2C models often rely on high-volume, low-value sales, B2B models succeed by building deep, long-lasting relationships with a smaller number of high-value clients.
What is the main goal of a B2B journey map?
The main goal of a B2B journey map is to understand the client’s experience from their perspective. This allows a business to identify customer pain points, feelings, and touchpoints at every stage. By finding these moments of friction, a company can fix them, improve the sales process, and increase customer loyalty.
