The Evolution of the Buyer’s Journey
If you wondering why should you use develop and use a Buyer’s Journey, take a look at our article Five Reasons Why the Buyer’s Journey is Still Vital. This provides five compelling reasons why constructing and using a buyer’s journey still makes sense.
In this article we are going to take a look at how the structure of the buyer’s journey has changed over time. We will also review the model we use based on this evolution.
The Traditional Buyer’s Journey
Many marketing teams have been using the traditional buyer’s journey of awareness, consideration and decision for years. It is very simple.
| Awareness | Consideration | Decision |
| The buyer becomes aware that they have a problem | The buyer defines their problem and considers options to solve it | The buyer evaluates and decides on the right provider to administer the solution |
More Focus on Buying Behaviour and Buying Tasks
In 2016 SiriusDecisions (now Forrester) introduced a version with three equivalent stages that could be broken down into more specific stages. These six more detailed stages placed more emphasis on buying behaviour. Examples of this include such ‘loosen the status quo’ and ‘commit to change’. The model also introduced key buying tasks such as ‘justifying the decision’ and ‘making the selection’.
| Education | Solution | Selection | |||
| Loosen Status Quo | Commit to Change | Explore Possible Solutions | Commit to a Solution | Justify the Decision | Make a Selection |
A Full Buying Task Based Approach
In 2020 Gartner published the ‘Big Book of Buyer Behavior’ which takes a buying task focused approach. It was accompanied by research that encourages selling to the enterprise, rather than the individual. The report concluded that the buyer’s journey is “less of a journey than a set of buying jobs that need to be completed”. It also stated that vendors need to “appeal to the buying team, not the individuals on it”.
Figure 3: Gartner’s buying tasks – Source: Gartner’s ‘Big Book of Buyer Behavior’
A Further Evolution
Gartner’s model is the most buyer centric approach to date. To accomplish this it breaks with the stage based approach that most buyer’s journeys use. This is understandable as the journey is rarely a linear progression. However, we have found keeping a minimal number of stages does increase the utility of the model. Accordingly we keep the stages to just three – effectively beginning, middle and end.
The approach we use is to utilize a buyer’s journey that has simple stages but also describes buying tasks. This is shown below. SiriusDecision’s critical inflection point of breaking the status quo has been preserved as a point that can be shifted left or right according to need.
Figure 4: A hybrid model
A helpful tool
We’ve continue to track the evolution of the buyer’s journey and have found it a useful tool in B2B in gaining an understanding of the audience. In particular determining who is involved in each task and gaining an understanding what the buying team need to do to complete the tasks is very helpful in gaining a better understanding of the world of the buyer.