Forresters 2026 B2B Marketing, Sales, And Product Predictions

But, as I’ve already shared, how B2B buyers approach purchasing decisions has evolved substantially over the last few years. Before I discuss all the ways in which the B2B buyer’s journey has been completely flipped on its head, I think it’s fitting to start with explaining the foundational stages that have traditionally defined it. Making this adjustment begins with completely dissecting the B2B buying journey you know (and may love) to explore how it’s functioning in today’s digital-first world. The B2B buyer’s journey is the process a business goes through to make a purchase decision that aligns with its needs, goals, and budget.

Doing so creates a well-oiled machine that turns prospects into customers time after time. Successful businesses know the first purchase is merely the beginning of the relationship, so this process prioritizes retention. The driving force behind these purchases is emotion, so B2C marketers should appeal to the desires and interests of these consumers. The B2C buyer’s journey involves consumers purchasing a product or service for themselves or individuals they know well.

A custom API integration is a bespoke connection between software, enabling them to communicate and share data to meet unique business requirements. 91% of businesses use video as a marketing tool in 2026, according to Wyzowl's State of Video Marketing report. With 25 years+ experience in corporate, community & grassroots marketing, Liza's passion lies in helping businesses connect with their audience in meaningful ways. Each data point includes its source and publication year so you can verify and cite independently. The 30-second to 2-minute window represents the sweet spot for B2B engagement across platforms and use cases.

What used to take days now takes a few hours, though I still validate key decisions manually. I typically ask AI to compare vendors side by side, break down pricing models, highlight pros and cons, and sometimes simulate use cases. Claude's strongest showing is in the small business (SMB) sector (7.3%), which tracks with its reputation among technical early adopters. They deliberately choose these slower, more thorough output options when the decision matters. Buyers are using AI chatbots to draft requests for proposals (RFP), work through pricing and packaging options.

Businesses should continue to provide helpful content to educate prospects and highlight how their solution is different or better than the competition. At this point, they are researching their options with more intent for a resolution or purchase. The buyer journey is important because it enables you to examine your prospects’ choices at each stage, thereby improving your customer acquisition process.

Ability to Identify and Address Pain Points

Buyer personas are in-depth descriptions of your target customers and typically include information like age, gender, location, likes, and dislikes. Over the next few days, he does more research, looking at AudioCrab and other options on the market. Z&D enrolls in a free demo of Rainstorm’s platform, and after buyers journey multiple interactions with qualified and knowledgeable sales reps, the accounting firm purchases from Rainstorm. The accounting business now knows it needs online file storage and organization software.

Educate Your Prospects

I’ve seen companies match each other move for move because they’re all drawing from the same small pool of insights. And they’ve got smart people and solid data just like you do. You can use this data to verify the success of a new product, help your team iterate on an existing product, or understand brand perception.

Identify all potential touchpoints.

Despite the drop in direct purchase influence, consumers still use AI to model these decisions. Today, 39% of consumers state AI has influenced a retail or consumer goods purchase. AI is driving real purchases across every category, but its influence scales directly with risk and consideration level. 47% of respondents use AI to narrow down their options, but then turn to Google for reviews or pricing. Because of this hesitation, 86% of respondents say they verify AI brand recommendations at least sometimes, including 20% who always do so.

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We design strategies based on your business needs, audience insights, and market trends. Finding the “why” behind the numbers is what collecting customer data is all about. You need to know a lot about your customers’ working settings, how they make decisions, and their pain points in order to create a B2B customer journey map that is truly useful. Here’s how to create a journey map that can be a strategic asset for growth. When done right, B2B customer journey maps reveal what your customers truly need and where your business can better meet those needs. Keeping consumers pleased and engaged increases the likelihood that they will return and suggest you to others.

• It’s standard practice for buyers to create a shortlist when evaluating purchase options.
• Once completed, your sales and marketing teams can use your buyer journey map to optimize content, guide behaviors, and increase customer acquisition.
• The most effective teams use data signals and automation to respond quickly, tailor outreach, and guide the next step while interest is high.
• As a result, buyers are tightening budgets and closely examining both new purchases and renewals.

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At the ToFu stage, people typically look for general information. In other words, use relevant keywords to rank on Google (or other search engines). Use the information to create buyer personas—profiles describing your main customers.

What kinds of people have already purchased your product or service? To properly address leads at the ToFu stage, define your target customers and increase brand awareness. The ToFu stage is also called the awareness, attention, discovery, or engagement stage. This is the ideal time to introduce your business, service, or product as the solution they want. It helps you see how people move from just hearing about you to becoming paying customers. Marketing funnels vary by industry and target audience.

Guiding the buyer journey stages can present some key challenges, but with the right strategies, you can overcome them effectively. By understanding these specific buyer stages and mapping out your b2b buyer journey, you can create a marketing plan that meets customer expectations at every customer touchpoint. The Retention Stage is where you start focusing on keeping your customers engaged and satisfied with their purchases. So, this stage starts when a customer clicks on a CTA button to visit the page where he can purchase the product, and includes the cart viewing, checkout, and post-purchase offers. So he will explore all the available options to find out which one best suits him.

HubSpot’s Customer Journey Analytics tool is specifically made to understand how prospects and customers interact with your business. Whether it’s building a custom feature they’ve asked for or including a small, thoughtful gift with your product. It’s standard practice for buyers to create a shortlist when evaluating purchase options.

What Is the Buyer’s Journey?

Research indicated that B2B buyers are 3x more likely to trust content created by industry associations (Gartner) Interactive content (quizzes, assessments) increases engagement by 300% compared to static content (Marketo) 80% of B2B decision-makers trust industry blogs as a primary source of research (HubSpot) 72% of B2B decision-makers in consideration research competitors before selecting a vendor

Run persona analysis monthly as you gather more customer data. I know successful small businesses that haven’t lifted a finger to develop their ICP. A less expensive way to unearth product frustrations is when a company sends product samples directly to consumers and asks them to record videos from unboxing to use. It helped our product team to reveal the gap between what users say they do and what they actually do. I used this method to observe how people actually used our product, Serpstat.

Cannot be used on previous purchases, upgrades, in combination with other offers, or payments through In-App Pay. Outline the key stages from when a customer first finds your store to when they purchase a product. You might run an A/B test on a new landing page to see if it engages awareness-stage visitors better. Continually gather data; heat maps, conversion metrics, and customer feedback can all be useful. Are people spending longer on the site or clicking through more?

From Product Demos to Peer Reviews and Community Proof

You must monitor that content to ensure it’s performing and meeting expectations. It’s important to create accurate buyer personas because if you can identify customers who get the most value from your offering, you can serve them the right messaging at the right time. One of his connections suggests AudioCrab, and Tom spends a few minutes browsing the company’s website.

• When they spot you in search results after hearing about you from peers, you’ve become a stronger option they’re already mentally prepared to consider.
• You don’t need to be an expert salesperson or have a whole dedicated sales team to generate more sales for your online business — especially if you’re running things on your own.
• Publish educational content, such as blog posts, guides, and checklists, that help them frame and name the problem.

Ritual received immediate insights on where customers were confused about pricing, what they liked, and what worried them. The AI tool ran all interviews, analyzed responses, and synthesized findings in real-time. I also recommend that you include comprehensive details and supporting documents about your market research data, sources, methodologies, and so on. Use the insights to refine financial forecasts, pricing strategies, and resource allocation.

Here, you need to be sure your product or service messaging is crystal clear in terms of benefit, features, and price – especially as to how it compares to your competitors. Understanding that it’s a journey – and that you can be there at each step with something useful and relevant – is the key to success. So it stands to reason that businesses can massively benefit by broadening their marketing and outreach efforts to include material that caters to people not yet at the decision-making part of the process. While they’re all slightly different depending on things like industry, target audience, and product type, some commonalities run through every single buying process. In practice, that means adopting a focus on things like customer support and customer experience, as well as using existing customer data to create content marketing strategies that influence repeat decisions, recommendations, and customer loyalty. 91% of businesses use video as a marketing tool in 2026, according to Wyzowl's State of Video Marketing report.

The customer’s journey, however, represents the entire experience a customer has with a brand after making a purchase, including onboarding, support, retention, and advocacy. It focuses on awareness, consideration, and decision-making prior to becoming a paying customer. However, in the B2C buyer’s journey, there’s a reliance on brand awareness through ads, social media, influencer marketing, and promotional strategy. It ranges from instant (i.e., e-commerce purchases) to a few days or weeks (i.e., renting an apartment). As I previously mentioned, the B2B buyer’s journey involves multiple people from start to finish. While some B2C products (i.e., cars or real estate) require research and additional time, most B2C decisions involve fewer people and less deliberation.

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Link each key insight directly to the relevant section of your business plan. Then, consider your research goals and organize your data into relevant lists, tables, charts, and graphs. “Review my raw market research dataset for duplicate entries, missing values, and inconsistencies. If you have big budgets, you can use Voxco or Quantilope to automate survey data cleaning.

Identify Triggers

But if you believe you need a go-to-market plan that is unique and has been built and bought into by a dozen senior contributors, then our workshop-driven approach would be more attractive. The difference between this gap and the need is key. For a seller, it doesn’t make sense to offer a solution until there’s agreed clarity about the need. Maybe they lack something less human, like data or systems. Once they’re clear about what they need, they can view and judge solutions well. For a buyer, gaining clarity about what they need – whether from you or someone else – is a key stage in their buyer’s journey journey.

Get To Know Your Customers On a Personal (and Data-Driven) Level

If the LLM hallucinates your pricing or core feature, prioritize updating your main landing page schema formatting immediately. In fact, 11% of buyers report being much less likely to visit a website after an AI interaction, suggesting that poorly formatted AI summaries or hallucinated “slop” actively deter brand engagement. Data shows 37% of U.S. consumers rely on AI most for mid-range purchases like electronics and subscriptions, while an impressive 28% use it for high-cost or high-risk decisions. Routine purchasing behaviors are highly susceptible to dynamic pricing algorithms that adjust based on demand, pushing conversions.

This buyer journey map prioritizes mapping out the goals and touchpoints that accompany each stage. Because a buyer journey map is a visual tool, you’re free to format it however you’d like. Your map should be an honest portrayal of a customer’s experience through their eyes rather than from your company’s perspective. Using your customer data, pair them up accordingly so you start to paint a picture of where the touchpoints fit along the buyer journey.

As a result, those people might enter your marketing and sales funnel, thus starting the customer life cycle. When you have information for people at any stage of the buying journey, you're able to provide a positive experience. How each organization approaches these leads is different.

It gets around 7.3K unpaid visits from Google each month, according to Semrush’s Organic Rankings tool. Awareness stage content should help prospects to recognize and understand their pain point. Then, follow the advice in this guide to fill out each section. Use our free buyer’s journey template to record key information about your buyer journeys. Once you’ve identified the keywords you want to target, you can create SEO-friendly content and/or paid search ads. This gives a good indication of what buyer journey stage the keyword corresponds to.