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 6 Reasons Why the Buyer’s Journey is Still Vital. This provides six 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, and the model we have devised based on this evolution.
The Traditional Buyer’s Journey
The traditional buyer’s journey of awareness, consideration and decision has been in use for many years.
| Stage 1 | Stage 2 | Stage 3 |
| 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 |
Figure 1: The traditional three stage buyer’s journey. The descriptions of each stage come from a HubSpot article
More Focus on Buying Behavior and Buying Tasks
In 2016 SiriusDecisions (now owned by Forrester) introduced a buyer’s journey that had three equivalent stages at the top level but could be broken down into 6 more specific stages. These more detailed stages placed more emphasis on buying behavior – such as ‘loosen the status quo’ and ‘commit to change’ and included key buying tasks such as ‘justifying the decision’ and ‘making the selection’.
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
| Education | Solution | Selection | |||
| Loosen Status Quo | Commit to Change | Explore Possible Solutions | Commit to a Solution | Justify the Decision | Make a Selection |
Figure 2: The SiriusDecision’s buyer’s journey, showing both 3 and 6 stage versions
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” and that vendors need to “appeal to the buying team, not the individuals on it”.
Figure 3: Gartner’s buying tasks.
A Further Evolution
Gartner’s model is the most buyer centric approach to date, but clearly it breaks with the stage based approach that most buyer’s journeys use. This is understandable as the journey is rarely a linear progress, however keeping stages does increase the utility of the model for the tasks we use it for. We have found that keeping the stages to just three (effectively beginning, middle and end) is perfectly workable.
The approach we use is to utilize a buyer’s journey that has simple stages but also describes buying tasks. This is shown below. You will see that the SiriusDecision’s critical inflection point of breaking the status quo has been preserved, but as a point that can be shifted left or right according to need.
Figure 2: A hybrid model
A helpful tool
We’ve found this evolution useful. A description of how to make use of the buyer’s journey is beyond the scope of this article, but we have found that by defining who is involved in each task and understanding what the buying team need to do to complete them extremely helpful in gaining a better understanding of the world of the buyer.