Meeting the Buyer Where They Are in Their Journey

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Understanding Gartner’s Jobs to Be Done Framework in B2B Sales

There’s a well-worn cliché in sales that buyers are more informed than ever. But the deeper truth is that they’re not just more informed. They’re more overwhelmed.

Faced with a deluge of options, conflicting stakeholder views, internal politics and clunky procurement gates, B2B buyers are no longer just trying to pick the best supplier. They’re trying to make buying decisions that are safe, defensible and forward-moving. And often, they’re stuck.

That’s where Gartner’s Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework for B2B buying provides a much-needed shift in perspective.

Instead of focusing on how sellers sell, it focuses on how buyers buy or more precisely, the jobs they must complete to move from problem to solution. In doing so, it gives sellers a much clearer mandate: meet the buyer where they are in their journey, and help them progress through the buying jobs that matter most.

Let’s unpack this, and consider what it means for modern sales teams.

The Myth of the Linear Journey

For decades, sales organisations have clung to the idea that buyers move through a rational, sequential process. A clean, gravity-fed funnel that starts at awareness and ends with a signed contract and a handshake. CRM stages reinforce it. Pipeline reviews obsess over it. Methodologies map neatly onto it.

And yet, in practice, very few actual buyers behave this way.

The assumption underpinning the linear journey is that buying decisions are made with cool logic and smooth handovers. Marketing warms up the lead. Sales qualifies and demos. The buyer compares options, consults stakeholders, builds consensus and signs off. In theory, it’s all wonderfully efficient. In reality, it’s chaos.

Gartner’s landmark B2B buying study dismantles this myth with clinical precision. After interviewing over 250 B2B buyers involved in complex purchases, they found that the typical buying journey is anything but linear. It’s messy, non-sequential, politically fraught and full of second-guessing.

In truth, most buying journeys look more like a tangled ball of wool than a tidy funnel.

Buyers bounce between tasks. They loop back to earlier stages. They rehash decisions already made because someone new enters the room with a fresh opinion or a political objection. They stall. They revisit solutions they’d already ruled out. They sit in internal alignment purgatory. And they do all of this largely without the seller in the room.

This isn’t just anecdotal. According to Gartner, 77% of B2B buyers say their latest purchase was “very complex or difficult”. And in enterprise contexts, a typical buying group now involves six to ten stakeholders, each armed with conflicting information, competing priorities and a strong sense of their own authority.

The result is what Gartner refers to as the looping journey. A pattern where buyers move between jobs — identifying problems, exploring solutions, defining requirements — not in a straight line but in overlapping, iterative loops. One day they’re deep in technical validation. The next, someone reopens the debate about whether the problem is even worth solving. Forward motion gets repeatedly interrupted by internal misalignment, risk aversion or sheer inertia.

Even worse, the more content they consume, the more uncertain they become. In what Gartner calls the “Spaghetti Bowl Effect”, well-meaning buyers find themselves paralysed by conflicting vendor content, peer reviews, analyst reports and internal opinions. Instead of feeling more confident, they get more confused. They either delay the decision or settle for the status quo.

This is where most sales processes fall apart.

They assume momentum. They rely on next steps. They depend on buyers knowing what they want and when they want it. But when the buyer’s internal journey is fractured, messy and filled with second-guessing, no amount of sales process wizardry will drag them over the line.

The most telling part? According to a separate Gartner study, buyers only spend 17% of their total buying time with all suppliers combined. If you’re in a competitive cycle with two or three others, you might get five percent of their time — and that’s if you’re lucky.

The idea that you’re shepherding them step by step through a neat progression is, at best, hopeful. At worst, dangerously naïve.

And so the role of the seller has to evolve.

Not to push harder. Not to automate outreach further. But to understand where the buyer really is — emotionally, politically, practically — and help them navigate their own internal journey with more clarity and less friction.

That means letting go of the funnel fantasy. Because buying doesn’t behave like that anymore, if it ever did.

The Real Job of the Seller

Ask most salespeople what their job is, and they’ll usually mention persuasion. Influence. Guiding the buyer to a decision. Some talk about educating the customer, building trust or uncovering needs. All valid.

But if we take Gartner’s JTBD framework seriously — and we should — then the real job of the seller is something much more specific:

Help the buyer make progress on the things they are trying to get done inside their organisation.

It sounds deceptively simple, but it reframes everything.

Instead of seeing yourself as the hero of the story, you become the guide. The enabler. The person who helps a messy, uncertain, risk-sensitive buying group move from confusion to clarity.

Matt Dixon, co-author of The Challenger Sale and The JOLT Effect, puts it plainly: “The best sellers don’t just diagnose customer problems — they diagnose the customer’s buying journey.” They don’t just uncover pain. They uncover why progress isn’t happening, and help unblock it.

That’s the shift.

You’re not selling to the buyer. You’re helping them buy.

And that’s a far more demanding job.

Buying today isn’t just about picking a solution. It’s about managing internal politics, placating risk-averse stakeholders, aligning across departments and making decisions that feel politically defensible. Every major B2B purchase is a potential career risk.

So what does that mean for you?

It means learning the internal mechanics of how buying actually happens. Your buyer — even the most engaged one — probably isn’t fully in control. They’re juggling competing agendas, security reviews, compliance friction, shifting budgets and an unseen person in finance who’s quietly vetoing progress with a spreadsheet.

Your job is to reduce that friction. Not by overexplaining your product. But by helping the buyer complete the right buying jobs in a way that feels credible and safe.

That might mean helping them articulate the problem more clearly for others. Or shaping requirements that satisfy both end users and procurement. Or bringing in reference customers to handle internal objections. Or equipping your champion with the tools to get sign-off when you’re not in the room.

The more complex the buying group, the more essential it is to stop trying to drive your process.

Instead, become a facilitator of progress.

That takes a different skill set entirely.

The ability to ask sharper questions. Spot missing pieces. Hear what’s not being said. Abandon rigid stages and meet the buyer where they actually are. And above all, the patience to help them through the loops, tangents and politics of their own decision-making process.

Top sellers don’t wait passively. They orchestrate proactively. They anticipate the next point of friction. They rally stakeholders. They provide tools that enable decisions rather than impressing in presentations.

Gartner found that sellers who help buyers complete their key jobs are three times more likely to close a high-value deal with low regret. Not because they sold harder. Because they helped smarter.

Not always be closing. Always be clarifying.

Always be diagnosing. Helping. Moving the conversation forward without forcing it.

That’s the real job now. And the ones who embrace it are far more trusted, embedded and difficult to dislodge.

Because when buyers are stuck, they don’t need pressure.

They need a partner who helps them move.

Applying the Framework in Practice

Enough theory. What does this look like in a real conversation?

Imagine you’re selling a customer experience analytics platform. A warm inbound comes in from the Head of Ops at a retail chain. They’ve downloaded a white paper and booked a demo. The reflex is to book the call, ask some questions, run the demo and send a proposal.

But the JTBD mindset asks a different set of questions.

Have they completed the right buying jobs?

Have they defined the problem, or are they reacting to a single bad NPS score?

Are they just browsing tools, or has someone actually decided this is a priority?

Have marketing or finance even been looped in?

Are they clear on success, or are they hoping your product shows them what good looks like?

Next — where are they stuck?

If they’ve jumped ahead to exploring solutions without nailing the problem, that’s a red flag. They’re benchmarking tech with no urgency. You’re now in a bake-off that no one’s really committed to. Your job isn’t to pitch. It’s to rewind and help them shape the problem properly.

Maybe they’ve already settled on you but they’re hitting internal resistance. You’ve got one engaged stakeholder, but no momentum behind them. That’s not a buying journey. That’s a single-threaded trap.

In either case, the best sellers intervene. Not with more slides. With more thinking.

You might ask:

“Where are you all internally on this? Have other teams bought into CX as a focus? Sometimes we see Ops teams exploring ideas like this, but then things get blocked when other priorities surface.

That’s not a discovery question. That’s diagnosis. It helps you see where they really are. And it signals that you’re not just trying to sell. You’re trying to help them buy with confidence.

From there, you respond with what they need to complete the job they’re stuck on.

If it’s problem identification — share market benchmarks, peer insight or a cost-of-inaction analysis.

If it’s requirements building — run a co-design session and turn it into a requirements doc they can circulate.

If it’s consensus creation — give your champion the simplest, clearest artefact you can. A “why now, why us, why this” summary beats a 40-slide deck every time.

If it’s validation — skip the glossy testimonial. Set up a straight-talking reference call with someone they’ll actually believe.

The JTBD framework doesn’t replace your methodology. It overlays it with commercial empathy. It reminds you that your buyer’s real journey is messier than your CRM, and your job is to help them make progress inside their business, not yours.

If you’re not helping them do their jobs, someone else will.

Or they’ll do nothing at all.

And indecision is your fiercest competitor.

Why This Matters Now

The data backs it up. Gartner’s research found that buyers who received high-quality, job-focused support from sellers were 2.8 times more likely to experience a high degree of purchase ease. And three times more likely to close a high-value deal with less regret.

If you want to win bigger, faster and with fewer post-sale headaches, help buyers buy better.

This approach also reflects the broader shift in B2B from seller-led to buyer-enabled. As Forrester put it, B2B buying has become a team sport. If you’re not helping the whole team do their jobs, you’re sitting on the bench.

It’s easy to obsess over your process., your targets your next step fields.

But your process only matters if it helps the buyer make sense of theirs.

The JTBD model offers something grounded. It moves you beyond pitching and persuading. It asks you to become someone useful. Someone who can cut through the noise, the politics and the ambiguity, and help a stuck buyer get unstuck.

Selling isn’t about leading the buyer.

It’s about walking with them, and knowing what to help them do next.