The Gartner B2B Buying Journey Is Not a Funnel

The Gartner B2B buying experience research reframes how complex purchases actually happen. Rather than a clean funnel from awareness to decision, B2B buyers cycle through six distinct buying jobs simultaneously, often revisiting earlier stages multiple times before committing. Understanding this changes what sales enablement materials you build, when you deploy them, and who you target with them.

Most B2B marketing teams are still building content and campaigns around a linear model that does not reflect how their buyers behave. That gap is where pipeline stalls, deals go quiet, and marketing gets blamed for leads that were never going to close.

What Is the Gartner B2B Buying experience?

Gartner’s research into B2B purchasing behaviour produced a model that describes how complex buying decisions actually unfold inside organisations. The model identifies six buying jobs that groups of stakeholders work through, not in sequence but in parallel: problem identification, solution exploration, requirements building, supplier selection, validation, and consensus creation.

The word “jobs” is deliberate. These are not stages a buyer passes through. They are tasks that need to get done, and at any point in a purchase process, a buying group might be doing several of them at once. They might be validating a shortlisted supplier while simultaneously revisiting their requirements because one stakeholder has raised a new concern. They might be building consensus internally while still exploring alternative solutions.

This is not a new idea dressed up in research language. Anyone who has worked on the agency side managing complex client pitches, or watched a large enterprise procurement process unfold from the inside, knows that buying decisions rarely move in a straight line. What Gartner did was make the messiness legible and give it a structure that marketing and sales teams can actually work with.

If you want more context on how this connects to the broader challenge of aligning marketing and sales around buyer behaviour, the Sales Enablement and Alignment hub covers the strategic and operational dimensions in depth.

Why the Traditional Funnel Fails B2B Buyers

The funnel model made sense when buying was simpler and sellers controlled more of the information flow. A prospect would become aware of a solution, express interest, evaluate options, and make a decision. Marketing owned the top, sales owned the bottom, and the handoff happened somewhere in the middle.

That model has been under pressure for years, and it is now genuinely inadequate for most B2B contexts. Buyers arrive at sales conversations already deeply informed. They have read comparison articles, watched demos, spoken to peers, and formed strong opinions before a sales rep enters the picture. The funnel assumes a buyer who is waiting to be educated. The reality is a buyer who is already mid-process and does not necessarily want your input yet.

I spent several years running performance marketing for clients across financial services, technology, and professional services. The recurring tension was always the same: marketing was optimising for lead volume, sales was complaining about lead quality, and nobody was asking whether the content and touchpoints we were creating actually matched what buyers needed at the moment they needed it. We were generating activity and calling it demand generation. It was not the same thing.

The funnel also assumes a single buyer. B2B purchasing involves groups, often large ones with competing priorities. A CFO evaluating a software investment is not asking the same questions as the IT director who will implement it or the department head who will use it daily. Content designed for a single persona at a single stage cannot serve a buying group that is fragmented across different jobs and different concerns simultaneously.

The Six Buying Jobs and What They Mean for Marketers

Breaking down each of the six buying jobs is useful because it forces you to think about what a buyer actually needs from you at each point, not what you want to tell them.

Problem identification is where buyers are trying to articulate what is wrong and whether it is worth fixing. Content that helps them frame and quantify the problem is far more valuable here than product content. Case evidence suggestsing the cost of inaction, diagnostic tools, or frameworks for assessing operational gaps all serve this job well.

Solution exploration is where buyers are scanning the landscape of possible approaches. This is not yet a supplier shortlist exercise. They are asking whether they should build, buy, outsource, or do nothing. Thought leadership that helps them think through the options, without pushing them toward a specific vendor, builds more credibility here than a product pitch.

Requirements building is where the buying group tries to agree on what they actually need. This is often where internal politics surface. Different stakeholders have different priorities, and the buying group needs to reach some kind of shared specification. Content that helps them structure their thinking, articulate requirements, or facilitate internal alignment is genuinely useful here.

Supplier selection is the stage most marketing and sales content is built for, and it is only one of six jobs. Comparison content, demos, pricing information, and proof points all belong here. But if this is all you have, you are only relevant to buyers who have already done the other five jobs without your help.

Validation is where buyers seek reassurance that they are making the right call. References, case studies, analyst reports, and peer recommendations all serve this job. Buyers at this stage are not looking for new information. They are looking for confirmation that the decision they are leaning toward is defensible.

Consensus creation is the buying job that kills the most deals. Even when most of the group is aligned, one or two stakeholders can block or delay a decision. Content that helps champions build the internal case, address objections from sceptics, or present the ROI argument to a CFO is often the difference between a deal that closes and one that goes quiet.

How Many People Are Actually in a B2B Buying Group?

Gartner’s research consistently points to buying groups of six to ten people for complex B2B purchases. In practice, I have seen this play out across client engagements in ways that are both predictable and frustrating. You think you are talking to the decision maker. You are actually talking to one voice in a group of eight, and three of those people have never heard of you.

When I was at iProspect, we grew from around 20 people to over 100 during a period of significant new business activity. One of the things that became very clear as we pitched larger enterprise clients was that the person who called us in was rarely the person who signed the contract. There was always a broader group involved, and if we had not addressed the concerns of the finance director, the legal team, or the internal IT function, the deal would stall regardless of how well the pitch went.

This has direct implications for how you structure sales enablement content. You need materials that serve different roles within a buying group, not just the marketing or procurement contact you are speaking to directly. A CFO needs a business case. A technical evaluator needs an integration guide. A department head needs evidence of adoption and outcomes. Building one piece of content and hoping it does all three jobs is wishful thinking.

Designing for buying groups also means thinking about how information travels inside an organisation. Your champion is going to share your content with colleagues who have never interacted with your brand. That content needs to stand on its own, make a coherent case, and be credible to someone encountering it cold. The design and digital strategy thinking from organisations like BCG on digital organisation design is relevant here: the way information flows through complex organisations is rarely straightforward, and content that assumes a single reader with full context will fail in a multi-stakeholder environment.

The Confidence Problem: Why Information Alone Does Not Close Deals

One of the most practically useful insights from Gartner’s buying experience research is that the obstacle to closing most B2B deals is not a lack of information. It is a lack of confidence. Buying groups have access to more information than ever. What they struggle with is making sense of it, reaching agreement, and feeling certain enough to commit.

This is a meaningful shift in how you should think about content. The instinct in most marketing teams is to produce more content: more case studies, more white papers, more comparison guides. But if buyers are already overwhelmed by information, adding more does not help. What helps is content that synthesises, simplifies, and gives buying groups a clear way to think about their decision.

I judged the Effie Awards for several years, and the work that consistently impressed me was not the work that shouted loudest or packed in the most messages. It was the work that made a complex idea feel simple and a difficult decision feel manageable. That principle applies directly to B2B sales enablement content. If your content makes the buying decision feel harder, you are working against yourself.

Confidence also has a social dimension in B2B buying. Stakeholders are not just asking “is this the right solution?” They are asking “can I defend this decision internally if it goes wrong?” That is a different question, and it requires different content. Reference customers who are recognisable to the buyer’s industry, third-party validation from analysts or publications, and clear articulation of risk mitigation all serve the confidence job more effectively than product feature lists.

What This Means for Sales and Marketing Alignment

The Gartner buying experience model has a direct implication for how sales and marketing teams should be structured and how they should collaborate. If buying is non-linear and involves multiple stakeholders doing multiple jobs simultaneously, the handoff model between marketing and sales is not fit for purpose.

Marketing cannot simply generate leads and pass them to sales. Sales cannot simply work the bottom of the funnel. The buying group needs relevant, useful content and interactions at every stage of every buying job, and the responsibility for delivering that has to be shared.

In practical terms, this means marketing needs to build content that serves the full range of buying jobs, not just awareness and consideration. It means sales needs to understand what content is available and when to use it, rather than defaulting to a standard pitch deck. And it means both functions need to share data about where buying groups are in their process, what questions they are asking, and what objections are surfacing.

The conversation about how to get this alignment right is one I come back to regularly in the Sales Enablement and Alignment hub, because it is one of the areas where the gap between what organisations know they should do and what they actually do is widest. Getting the structure right matters as much as getting the content right.

There is also a geographic and segmentation dimension worth noting. Buying group composition and behaviour can vary significantly by market, sector, and organisation size. The frameworks that apply to a mid-market technology buyer in the UK may not apply in the same way to an enterprise buyer in Southeast Asia or a growth-stage company in a different vertical. Thinking about how segmentation affects buyer behaviour, similar to how geographical segmentation shapes campaign strategy, is worth building into your planning process rather than treating the Gartner model as universally prescriptive.

Practical Steps for Aligning Content to the Buying experience

Knowing the model is one thing. Doing something useful with it is another. Here is how to start translating the Gartner buying experience into a content and enablement strategy that actually works.

Audit your existing content against the six buying jobs. Most teams find that the majority of their content serves supplier selection and validation, and almost nothing serves problem identification, solution exploration, or consensus creation. That audit alone is usually enough to redirect a content planning conversation.

Map content to roles, not just stages. For each buying job, identify which stakeholders are most active and what their specific concerns are. Build content that speaks to those concerns directly, not to a generic “decision maker” persona.

Build champion enablement materials. The person who is advocating for your solution internally needs tools to make the case to colleagues who are sceptical or disengaged. One-page summaries, business case templates, and objection-handling guides are often more valuable than polished marketing collateral.

Reduce information load, do not add to it. If your content strategy is producing more assets, ask whether you are helping buyers or overwhelming them. Synthesis, clarity, and simplicity are competitive advantages in a market where everyone is publishing more.

Track buying group engagement, not just individual lead behaviour. A single contact downloading a white paper tells you very little. Multiple contacts from the same account engaging with different content tells you a buying group is active. Account-level engagement data is more useful than individual lead scores for understanding where a group is in their process.

The content marketing discipline has been grappling with similar questions about audience complexity and information overload for years. Organisations like the Content Marketing Institute have done substantial work on how to build content programmes that serve complex audiences rather than just generate volume. The underlying challenge is the same: producing content that is genuinely useful to a specific person at a specific moment, rather than content that exists to fill a calendar.

The broader market context also matters. As middle-market segments grow and buying behaviour becomes more sophisticated across sectors and geographies, the pressure to serve complex buying groups with relevant, timely content only increases. The BCG analysis of upper-middle-class market growth points to how rapidly buyer sophistication is evolving in emerging markets, and B2B buying behaviour is following a similar trajectory globally.

The Mistake Most Teams Make With This Model

The most common mistake I see when teams encounter the Gartner buying experience model is treating it as a new funnel. They map the six buying jobs onto a linear sequence, assign content to each stage, and call it a strategy. They have replaced one linear model with another, slightly more complicated linear model, and missed the point entirely.

The model is useful because it forces you to think about what buyers need, not what you want to tell them. It forces you to think about groups, not individuals. And it forces you to acknowledge that buying is messy, iterative, and often irrational, in the sense that it is driven by internal politics and confidence as much as by rational evaluation of options.

If you take one thing from this framework, make it this: the job of B2B marketing is not to generate leads and hand them to sales. It is to make the buying decision feel manageable for a group of people with different priorities, different concerns, and limited time. Everything else follows from that.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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