Who are your 2025 B2B buyer personas?
Your buyers aren’t just more digital—they’re more independent. Research shows that 80% of B2B buyers complete most of their decision-making before they ever speak to a sales rep.
That means your marketing, content, and digital presence need to do the heavy lifting. Buyer personas are important for understanding your audience, but they're not enough for building strong relationships with multiple stakeholders in an organization.
Here’s where most companies get it wrong
- They flood buyers with generic whitepapers instead of specific, actionable insights.
- They treat every lead the same, when buyers expect customized, relevant recommendations.
- They rely on outdated sales processes that don’t match how most buyers actually research and decide.
To win the B2B buying journey 2025, you need to understand your buyers at a deeper level. What’s slowing them down? What do they already know? What do they actually need to feel confident in a decision?
Knowing your buyers is one thing—understanding how they actually make decisions is another.
The three critical stages of the B2B buyer journey
While no two buyers follow the same path, the B2B buying journey has three key stages. The goal? Make it easier, not harder, for them to move forward.
Awareness: Buyers realize they have a problem
The old playbook says this is where you “capture leads.” Understanding and addressing buyers' pain points is crucial in the awareness stage. Let's get real. Your buyers don’t want to be captured like a wild animal. They want answers when doing their own research.
What you should do
Instead of flooding buyers with content, deliver the most relevant insights upfront. Make information easy to find, easy to consume, and easy to act on.
✅ What works: Educational content, real-world use cases, and clear next steps.
🚫 What doesn’t: Gated PDFs, vague blog posts, and irrelevant nurturing sequences.
Consideration: Buyers evaluate their options
At the consideration stage, buyers know their problem—but they’re overwhelmed by choices. They’re comparing features, pricing, and customer reviews. They’re looking for proof.
🚧 Common roadblocks: Too much content, not enough clarity. Buyers don’t want more data; they want the right data at the right time.
What you should do
Simplify the decision-making process. Instead of making buyers hunt for information, guide them to what they need.
✅ What works: Customer stories, comparison guides, live demos.
🚫 What doesn’t: Endless product specs, hard-to-navigate resource hubs, information overload.
Decision: Buyers need reassurance in their decision-making process
Buyers aren’t just choosing a product. They’re justifying the decision to their team, their boss, or the finance department, or the B2B buying center as this group is also called.
Customer testimonials are super important at this stage. They provide social proof and demonstrate the effectiveness of the solution by building confidence in the purchasing decision.
This is where many deals stall—not because buyers don’t want to move forward, but because they lack internal buy-in.
🚧 Common roadblocks: Too many unanswered questions, internal approval hurdles, last-minute second-guessing.
What you should do
Help your buyer sell the decision internally. Provide ready-to-share resources, clear ROI justification, and a frictionless path to “yes.”
✅ What works: ROI calculators, mutual action plans, tailored business cases.
🚫 What doesn’t: Generic case studies, rushed discount offers, pressure tactics.
Why most B2B sales processes fail
Most companies still optimize for internal efficiency, not buyer experience. That’s why buyers get stuck. They’re expected to follow your sales process instead of a b2b buying process that works for them.
And this is what's happening the entire B2B customer journey from initial awareness to ongoing relationship. That's bad news.
Where your buyers get stuck (and how to fix it)
🔴 Problem #1: Buyers get lost in a maze of content, follow-ups, and unnecessary friction.
Your content isn’t helping them move forward—it’s overwhelming them. They have to dig for the right information, wait for follow-ups, or navigate clunky sales sequences.
🟢 Solution
- Give them a clear, self-serve buying experience (think: Digital Sales Rooms, interactive content hubs).
- Make key information available without asking for it (pricing, case studies, onboarding details).
- Reduce the number of steps needed to engage with sales—speed wins deals.
🔴 Problem #2: Buyers feel like they’re being “sold to” instead of guided
Sales reps are still leading with product features instead of solving problems. Buyers don’t want a demo-first process—they want to see how you solve their specific challenge.
🟢 Solution
- Shift from a sales-first motion to a problem-first motion.
- Lead with relevant use cases, real customer examples, and outcome-driven insights.
- Let buyers test-drive your product or service before they ever talk to sales (interactive demos, self-guided tours).
🔴 Problem #3: Buyers struggle to get internal buy-in
Even when buyers love your product, they often can’t get the green light from finance, IT, or leadership. If you’re not equipping them with the right materials, the deal dies in committee.
🟢 Solution
- Give buyers pre-built business case templates they can use to justify the investment internally.
- Create ROI calculators that map directly to their KPIs—not just generic cost savings.
- Provide procurement and security FAQs upfront to remove last-minute blockers.
The simple shift that changes everything
Instead of asking, “How do we move buyers to the next stage?” ask:
➡ “How do we make the next step obvious, easy, and useful?”
That’s the difference between a high-performing process and one that frustrates and repels potential customers. What we also recommend is creating a B2B customer journey map to help visualize the friction points so you can see where your buyers are getting stuck.
Sometimes, having the right solution and partner can make the difference between your sales reps struggling or winning.
How our customers make the B2B buyer journey seamless with emlen
Most companies are still selling the old way—sending scattered emails, forcing buyers through rigid sales cycles, and hoping something sticks.
You need to be exploiting all the digital channels because many buyers rely on online platforms for information and referrals.
Customer story: Babbel
Babbel’s B2B team struggled with content overload—hundreds of assets across multiple languages, but no way to quickly find and use them in sales conversations. This wasn’t just frustrating; it slowed deals.
By using emlen, they streamlined the buyer experience, ensuring sales teams had the right content at the right time.
👉🏼 Check out Babbel's live emlen Destination
Customer story: Schweitzer Fachinformationen
Schweitzer realized their buyers weren’t reading the PDFs they sent. The issue wasn’t the quality of the content—it was when and how it was delivered.
When they started using emlen, they made it easier for decision-makers to access the right resources in one place, increasing engagement and speeding up the sales and B2B buying process.
👉🏼 Check out Schweitzer Fachinformationen's live emlen Destination
💡 With emlen, you’ll know:
- Which buyers are engaged (or losing interest).
- What content actually helps close deals (and what gets ignored).
- How to remove friction and make buying easy.
You’ve made it this far, which means you’re serious about fixing your buyer journey. Before we wrap up, here are some quick answers to common questions.
B2B Buyer journey: The most frequently asked questions
What are the stages of the B2B buyer journey?
The B2B buyer journey has three stages:
- Awareness: Buyers recognize a problem.
- Consideration: Buyers research and compare solutions.
- Decision: Buyers choose a solution and seek internal approval.
How do B2B buyers make decisions?
They gather information from search engines, industry reports, reviews, and peers, then consult internal stakeholders before finalizing a purchase.
Why do B2B deals take so long?
Multiple decision-makers, internal approvals, and risk assessments slow the process. Unclear pricing, weak ROI justification, or poor sales alignment make it worse.
How can businesses speed up the B2B buyer journey?
Make pricing transparent, reduce friction in content access, offer ROI calculators, and provide pre-built business case templates for internal approvals.
What is the biggest mistake companies make in the B2B buyer journey?
Forcing buyers through a rigid sales process instead of adapting to how they actually research, evaluate, and decide.
Now that we’ve covered the essentials, one thing is clear—fixing the B2B buyer journey isn’t just about small tweaks. It’s about rethinking how you guide buyers to a confident ‘yes.’
Time for you to take action...
Over to you: Own the B2B buyer journey today
The message is clear: You need to take a step back and audit your buyer journey. Where are buyers getting stuck? What’s slowing them down? And most importantly—how can you remove friction so they move forward with confidence?
With the tips in this post, you’ll be on your way to creating a B2B buyer journey that’s faster, smoother, and built for the way buyers actually make decisions today.
Your next steps:
🔎 Explore our product tour – See how emlen makes sales enablement seamless.
📆 Book a demo – Let’s discuss how emlen can help your team drive revenue faster
📬 Contact us - Have a question that didn't get answered in this post? We'd love to help!
