Designing a Self-Service B2B Journey
How to help buyers find their desired solution with digital paths that's tailored to how THEY learn.
This is the first edit of The 100. Thank you for joining me as I share my take on behavioral and market trends we’re studying at Thought Bakery, brand experiences we’re collaborating on with clients, and the lessons learned along the way. If you’re still reading, thanks for taking the time. Be sure to grab your afternoon coffee/tea to make this a more delightful read because there’s no denying, everything is better with a cuppa.
Okay enough intro, let’s get into it.
Because Go-To-Market (GTM) is used in different conversations and can refer to a variation of functions, here’s how I define it:
For enterprises: GTM brings together every team that talks to customers and informs their experience. Specifically marketing, sales, product and customer success. Their shared goal is built on understanding how buyers prefer to learn about, buy and use your product.
For startups (Series A-C): GTM starts simple: Figure out who actually wants your product (typically who you built it for), how they prefer to learn about it, and the clearest path to help them buy. Then test, learn and adjust as you go.
With definitions out of the way, let's look at what's happening right now. These last 30ish business days of 2024 are revealing something interesting in my latest discovery calls: teams are turning Q4 activities into learning opportunities for 2025 in a proactive way. Whether they're making end-of-year pivots or planning ahead, there's a growing appetite for thoughtful experimentation.
That said, the latest data from 6sense tells an interesting story:
B2B buyers are now 70% through their purchase process before ever engaging with sellers.
They initiate contact over 80% of the time, with 85% having largely defined requirements prior to outreach.
Buyers already have a preferred vendor at the time of first contact more than 80% of the time.
As B2B marketers, we feel compelled to obsess over campaign creation, optimization, and tool selection while buyers are quietly making decisions with minimal direct brand engagement. It's creating the belief that maybe (just maybe), our obsession with tactics may be causing us to miss the mark on truly understanding our buyers and how to connect with them meaningfully. So what's next? Let's be aware and proactive about these common missteps 👇🏽
1. Your buyer intelligence stops at surface level—and it's costing you millions
In the pursuit of the perfect customer profile, B2B marketing teams keep missing what matters most. People aren’t perfect so your ICP will hardly ever be.
Look at any ICP presentation right now. Beautiful slides. Detailed personas. Pain points and goals meticulously documented. All presenting an idealized version of who teams think their buyers should be.
But here's what's actually happening:
Product marketing sees one version of the ideal customer.
Demand generation sees another.
Sales has their own view shaped by closed deals.
And your buyers? They're showing you who they really are through their actions—1P data signals most teams ignore.
For early-stage startups, this challenge runs even deeper. You're trying to document an ICP while still discovering who your real customers are, iteration by iteration, win by win.
This isn't just a messaging problem. This misalignment between who we think our buyers are and what their behavior actually tells us creates a fundamental gap in how we:
Build our content experiences
Design and execute our campaigns
Measure success
Allocate resources
Plan for growth
The cost is more than wasted campaign budget. This gap between assumed and actual buyer behavior is quietly blocking your next stage of growth.
Let's fix that.
Recent data from Forrester reveals that B2B buyers consistently choose vendors who demonstrate a deep understanding of their actual research and buying process over those with sophisticated but disconnected marketing programs.
In fact, 90% of B2B decision makers prioritize vendors who can:
Showcase a deep understanding of their industry and market
Clearly prove the return on investment for their solutions
Tell an authentic, relatable story that resonates with their unique challenges
Your ideal customer profile has become a documentation exercise, not a living tool. It's time to build from behavior, not assumptions.
1P data = Reality signals worth paying attention to
Take your last five enterprise wins. Listen to the discovery calls. Upload the call transcripts into your most trusted LLM tool and build a library of exact phrases customers used to describe their top use cases and decision criteria. Document your customer languages.
How are they verbalizing where they need the most value from the use cases they’re citing?
What’s moving the needle for them to make a decision e.g. budget, competitor comparisons, potentially misaligned to their current stack etc. ?
What are the resources that stood out to them as the most helpful early in their journey? e.g. videos, guides, webinars etc.
Cross-reference this pattern across both your sales analytics (Gong, Chorus) and marketing stack (6sense, Drift) to validate if you're speaking your buyers' language about problems they actually care about solving. This is one of the most overlooked ways to leverage your first-party data for meaningful buyer understanding—and most teams already have the tools to do it. Adobe Creative Cloud’s FAQ page and AirTable’s Community are great examples of what these pages and forums can look like.
2. Your content strategy ignores how buyers actually (re)search
B2B buyers spend 70%+ of their journey researching on their own. Most CMOs and marketing leaders I speak to push against this trend and try to debunk it but while there are exceptions by the nuance of certain industries, the B2B buyer today is becoming more and more autonomous. Generative search is also accelerating that trend with critical reasoning across Perplexity.ai, Google Search and ChatGPT getting better MoM. Yet most enterprise content strategies still assume we control the conversation by producing broad-stroked narratives and use-cases.
Think about the disconnect: We lead with thought leadership when buyers are desperately seeking practical validation. We gate high-level overviews while leaving our most valuable implementation insights hidden in sales presentations. But with buyers being on so many channels at once (10 and more to be exact!), relevance and audience-content fit needs to be high to ensure a seamless buyer experience.
Your buyers don't want broad thought leadership when they’re actively in a buying journey. They want proof you can solve and serve their specific problems in a very palatable way.
How to stop burying the good stuff in your GTM content experiences
Build backwards: Flip the script and start with your technical docs and customer training materials. Ask yourself, "What could we make public to help buyers self-validate?" Building in public is hands-down one of the best ways to show new audiences why they should sit up and take notice. Piquing curiosity should always be the secret sauce in every awareness campaign. When you pull back the curtain and show how and why you build new products and customer experiences, you're giving folks a sneak peek into the support, thoughtfulness, and customer-led approach that sets you apart.
Answer everything: Create an un-gated knowledge base that addresses every common buyer question. In the era of generative search, an extensive FAQ is essential. Make it easier for potential customers to learn from you than from your competitors, and provide major LLMs with accurate information to use when answering queries. This ensures that your brand and product deserve a credible, trusted spot in the audience's research journey.
Show your work(flow): Turn customer implementations into detailed case studies. Not high-level success stories—actual execution playbooks. AI is making easy to spit out anecdotes on the fly so the distrust and skepticism for ambiguous customer success stories will continue grow. You want to really go past the typical ‘ingredient-recipe’ format to showcasing the quality and exclusivity of the ingredients that then informs a multitude of recipes, something for everyone (in your ICP) to be delighted with.
Be thoughtful…about thought leadership: Once you've put the above into action, you'll start to uncover some pretty juicy insights about what parts of your product experience are really striking a chord with your high-intent audiences. And that's when the real magic happens! You can take those insights and run with them, expanding your content horizons to create experiences that not only complement their product needs but also paint a bigger picture of who you are as a brand. Think partnerships, personalized automation, and content that speaks directly to their industry and role.
3. You're still thinking in campaigns instead of ecosystems
I’m going to be presumptive and guess your content calendar is organized by quarters and campaigns. Thing is, SO MUCH has changed, especially in the past five years in how B2B buyers research and make resulting transactional decisions..
COVID happened and we all realized meeting IRL wasn’t as necessary as we thought it to be to close deals. Digital research and decision-making became a natural de facto.
Our relationship with time, where our attention goes and the growing distrust of misinformation (and advertising!) have influenced when we seek direct brand engagement. Buyers have become very mindful of where their attention goes and are completing most of their vetting process before even booking a demo.
The folks at Dimmo.ai caught on to this and built the first-ever demo platform that doesn’t require buyers to enter the sales funnel until they’re ready. Genius and so helpful.
We expect brands (B2B and otherwise) to meet us where we are, specifically where we go for trusted information about that solution. Omni-channel marketing and GTM today goes beyond visuals and copy. Buyers want to learn and get meaningful insights from industry peers and like users. They will toggle back and forth between these channels, creating their own ecosystem of research which means you’ve got to have enough resources and experiences for them to build on, and learn from.
The disconnect that can happen when SaaS companies are slow to act on creating/improving the research journey is costly. While we launch and abandon campaigns, buyers are methodically building their understanding through consistent engagement across channels. With the average B2B customer journey taking 192 days from first anonymous touch to won deal, it's all about giving them personalized, curated touch points that make them feel like you really get them, especially when they're vetting you against your competitors.
When you nail that research journey by developing a constantly growing bank of value-added interactions, that's when your target audiences will be itching to hit that "Request a Demo" button.
Stop launching and disappearing. Start building, stacking and compounding permanent value.
Build category resources: Own the foundational content your market needs. Make it evergreen, make it comprehensive, make it vendor-neutral. Get role-specific, use-case specific, and industry-specific. Show people you know you’re just as familiar with their daily challenges as their quarterly ones. Samantha McKenna, Founder of #SamSales created the Show Me You Know Me method to tackle just this in your outreach.
Connect everything: Map how your webinars feed your whitepapers feed your case studies. Build content journeys, not content pieces. An ecosystem thrives when the different areas of the ‘habitat’ work together to create homeostasis. By really digging into product usage data, sales signals and marketing engagement data, you can determine what’s increasing brand curiosity and what’s worth removing from your brand presence. Not to mention 2025 is the year to make your video marketing efforts sing! LinkedIn has a video-only stream, Youtube is becoming the preferred social channel for long-form education and Instagram yields 20X more B2B engagement than LinkedIn. It’s time to get your ‘reels’ on.
Optimize for time: Your best customers took 7+ months to convert. Build content systems and libraries that supports that the depth and breadth of that reality. On top of that, validate what you’re creating by ensuring you’re really ‘listening’ to how peer communities and industry spaces are talking about their planning and challenges. At Thought Bakery we use two AMAZING tools for social listening: IdeaApe (persona-level) and AnswerThePublic (one of Neil Patel’s gems).
Using those insights to inform content creation, leverage trusted communities in your industry for distribution. They can turn out as a great ground to run an acid test on a new product launch or helpful asset. I’ve been a part of the DMA’s (Developer Marketing Association) Slack channel for a few years and while I don’t actively contribute, I read 90% of the assets and event invites they share. The resources and speakers are always extremely pointed and piques curiosity to learn more at the very least.
Planning for 2025 with introspection
So that's a few stats and thoughts to consider as we approach 2025. And now, in true Chae O'Brien style, a story about food.
From age six, I watched my mother thoughtfully select every ingredient at the market for our family dinners. At the table, satisfaction showed in our quiet humming—no conversation needed about the careful preparation or presentation. But there were so many lasting feelings with relief and comfort at the top of the list. Decades later, I realized she used food as a medium to create connection, showing care through precise curation. When I’m super stressed or just in need of a break, her dining table is where I’d always wish I could zap myself to.
That's the degree of care modern B2B research journeys demand. Yes that’s a personal anecdote and there are many who will poke holes on why there’s no relation but B2B marketing should provide relief and comfort. Relief through a helpful, seamless journey and comfort in knowing the support that will be provided once a customer is converted, will be impressive. While AI accelerates SaaS product creation and competition intensifies, the the thing that’ll make all the difference isn't just value creation—it's true understanding how your buyers prefer to learn and validate on their own terms. Success in 2025 won't come from following everyone else's playbook. It'll come from having the courage to challenge assumptions—especially your own.
Doing fewer things better.
Understanding your audience deeper.
And most critically, being honest about what you can and can't achieve with your resources.
Self-directed buyers and their digital journeys will continue to evolve. The question is: will you build for how they actually buy, or keep pushing how you wish they would?
That’s it for this week’s edit of The 100. If you found these insights valuable, please share this edition with another marketing leader head down in planning season. Sometimes the best gift we can give each other is permission to hear and explore new perspectives.
Until next Thursday,
Chae O’Brien
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Want to dig deeper into autonomous B2B research patterns?
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