The buyer’s journey: How it helps remove your go-to-market obstacles

Most technical founders think the buyer’s journey is just a capricious marketing exercise for large, bloated companies — something fluffy that doesn’t impact their go-to-market strategy. But here’s the truth: If you don’t understand how your customers buy, you’re just throwing sales and marketing efforts into the void and hoping something sticks.

I see a lot of technical founders struggling with attracting and converting buyers, and it’s because they don’t understand how buyers buy or don’t apply it to their go-to-market motion. Even when I’ve worked in a company for years, going back to the buyers’ journey has often helped me unlock an “a-ha” moment of why a certain campaign wasn’t resonating or why the website was not converting.

The buyer’s journey isn’t just a framework. It’s a practical, revenue-generating tool that helps you:

Find more of the right customers
Guide them through the decision process faster
Stop wasting time and money on ineffective channels

Let’s break it down in a way that actually makes sense for a technical founder.

The three stages of the buyer’s journey

Every customer goes through three key phases before making a purchase:

1. Education: “Is this even a problem for us?”

Your buyers don’t start their day thinking, “I need a cybersecurity solution.” Something triggers their search—maybe a new compliance regulation, a costly security incident, or a conversation with a peer at a conference.

Most founders and sales teams fail here because they don’t ask the right questions:

What originally kicked off the project?
Who initiated it, and why?
Was there a compelling event that forced action?

If you don’t know why your best customers started looking, you won’t know how to find more like them. Worse, you won’t know how to create content that seeds the market with the same problem.

2. Consideration: “How should we solve this?”

Once a buyer realizes they have a problem, they start exploring their options. But here’s the mistake founders make: They assume that if a buyer is talking to them, they’ve already decided to buy a product like theirs.

At this stage, buyers are asking:

Should we buy a product, outsource, or handle this in-house?
What’s the best approach for our business?
How do different solutions compare?

If you’re not actively helping them answer these questions, they may never even make it to vendor selection.

3. Decision: “Who should we solve this with?”

Now that the buyer has decided on an approach, they need to pick the right vendor. But they’re not just comparing features; they’re evaluating:

Can we trust this vendor?
Will it integrate with our existing stack?
Will this company still be around in five years?

If your marketing and sales efforts don’t address these concerns, you’re losing deals without even realizing it.

Where buyers get their information (Hint: It’s not just your website)

Most founders think that if they create great content, buyers will find it. But your buyers aren’t just listening to you. They’re influenced by:

Peer review sites (G2, Gartner Peer Insights)
Industry analysts (if relevant to your space)
Private Slack groups & online communities
Consultants & resellers
Conferences & podcasts

If you don’t know where buyers are actually looking for answers, you could be wasting time and money on the wrong channels.

Bonus: Knowing where NOT to focus

Not all markets care about analysts. Not all buyers check peer review sites. If you understand where your buyers go for information, you also know where not to waste effort.

Align your pipeline stages with the buyer’s journey

Too many companies structure their sales pipeline around what their sales team wants, rather than how buyers actually make decisions.

If your CRM pipeline is just a series of sales actions (Demo Completed, Proposal Sent), you’re missing the point. Your pipeline should align with the real decision gates buyers need to pass through. That way, you can spot bottlenecks, troubleshoot deal stalls, and refine your strategy. That said, make sure that exit criteria for your pipeline stages remain sales-observable - if sales can’t tell if they fulfilled an exit criteria, they cannot update the stage accordingly.