In a couple of podcast episodes, we’ve discussed buyers and customer journeys, pulling inspiration from various sources like Gartner, Forrester, McKinsey, and the Pedowitz Group. In this article, we share the greatest hits of these models that we call AMPED.
The understanding of the B2B customer journey has evolved significantly recently, with many traditional models falling out of favor due to their fixed, linear nature and the notion of a sales funnel being questioned.
We are big fans of the research from LinkedIn B2B Institute, the much-quoted 95-5 rule that finds that 95% of our potential buyers are not in a position to buy today. Those figures may vary, of course, depending on your market.
Still, there is a strong argument that we are not mapping a funnel and that the majority of our audience and future revenue is at the top in a HUGE bucket. Only a tiny amount is in what we traditionally consider the funnel. Yet, we as marketers tend to focus on the bit we can measure after the buyer has raised their hand and entered the funnel or an identifiable buyer journey.
So, in the current marketing zeitgeist, we should put much more effort into the big bucket in awareness and brand building. However, we still believe in the value of mapping your buyer’s or customer’s journey. These buying processes are complex and rarely follow a straight line, but it’s still important to understand what our audience needs to help them toward a purchase, which we hope will solve their problem.
Enter the AMPED model: Awareness, Muse, Purchase, Engage, and Develop—a five-step journey inspired by the best practices across industries and frameworks like McKinsey, Gartner, and more.
1. Awareness: Identifying the Problem
The journey begins with awareness—not just of a company or product, but of the problem itself. For B2B buyers, this phase is about recognizing a gap, need, or challenge within their organization.
This is where, as vendors, we need to position ourselves as helpful thought leaders and educators, not flogging our features and functions and we need to keep our messaging in the language of the customer and their problem, not the buzzwords and geek speak of our category.
Content marketing is the pivotal marketing motion here—blog posts, whitepapers, webinars, research we can sponsor or produce from our own data, and other educational resources that can help potential buyers define their problem and understand why it matters.
Key Focus: Build trust by addressing buyer pain points, not pitching products.
2. Muse: Inspiration and Exploration
Once buyers acknowledge their problem, they move into the “Muse” phase, where they are looking for inspiration on how to solve their problem and exploring possible solutions.
This is often a non-linear and collaborative process involving various stakeholders across a buying team. Buyers research solutions, talk to peers, and start forming shortlists—often before engaging with vendors directly.
This makes this stage critical, as according to research from 6Sense “a significant majority of B2B buyers (around 81%) have already selected a preferred vendor and largely decided on their purchase requirements before they even contact a sales representative”.
For marketers, this stage is about creating resources that inspire and guide buyers. Original research, case studies, and expert advice can help buyers envision their ideal solution while subtly positioning your brand as a top contender.
If you are adopting a target account or Account Based Marketing approach, this Muse stage may be a bit more proactive in that we are making an outbound marketing motion to these buyers and getting that same inspirational content in front of them to inspire them to act.
Key Focus: Have accessible and visible content that focuses on credibility and builds trust as a preferred vendor aimed at the buying group and their influencers.
3. Purchase: The Deal
The “Purchase” phase may sound straightforward, but of course, in B2B, this is not just about a single decision-maker hitting the “buy” button.
Our definition of “purchase” is not just the commercial bit; it covers the stages from the buyer forming a loose shortlist, putting their hand up, and contacting vendors to learn more through the commercial process to the contracts being signed. Which often involves legal reviews, budget approvals, and consensus-building among multiple stakeholders.
In most organizations, for this step, we are now going into a sub-process taking an account from lead to customer, which we could describe as the actual buyer’s journey, if we consider the customer journey to be more holistic from awareness to them becoming a repeat customer and advocate.
Of course, sales simply call this “pipeline” – moving someone from lead through to closed business.
While sales will lead this process, marketing provides support with what has been traditionally called mid-funnel and bottom-of-funnel content, providing credibility and proof through references, case studies, and product features and benefits to move the buyer to purchase but also to enable sales for the questions the buyer has as they near a decision.
We also need to recognize that the buyer is not passive in this process, being led by sales, they are still likely to self-serve, seeking helpful content from the vendor and their trusted industry sources. As marketers, we need to compile those frequently asked questions in the sales cycle and create content that answers those questions to help them and the next buyer, which will accelerate the following sales conversation.
At this stage, we need to continue to build trust; a big scary competitor is lurking, and not the other guys on the shortlist, but that of DO NOTHING or make do with the solution they have. Some of which is driven by FOFU or Fear of Fucking Up (that I’ve talked bout in my personal blog), as they imagine their feelings of buyer’s remorse. So, trust is key to overcoming this friction at this stage.
Buyers who trust your brand and believe in your expertise are likelier to finalize the purchase confidently.
Key Focus: Engage the sales team, discover the buyers’ needs, and support them with tailored content and resources to address late-stage objections.
4. Engage: Delivering The Promise
In our model, the journey doesn’t end with the sale.
The “Engage” phase focuses on onboarding and adoption, ensuring the customer realizes the value of their investment at a moment when they might wobble with a bit of buyer’s remorse.
Depending on the organization, marketing may play a supporting role to a customer success team, or maybe this is where marketers must think like customer experience professionals, crafting onboarding plans, creating user guides, and fostering community through user groups or events.
Customer satisfaction is crucial here. Happy customers are not only more likely to renew but also to become advocates for your brand – the important consideration here is that the marketing team needs to have objectives that cover post-purchase and be vested in this.
Key Focus: Marketers need to think beyond the purchase and invest time and resources in the post-sale.
5. Develop: Building Loyalty and Advocacy
The final step, “Develop,” centers around nurturing relationships for long-term loyalty. This involves identifying new opportunities for upselling or cross-selling while deepening that trust as a solver of the business problems through satisfaction in their interactions with you.
This is similar to the Muse step for new customers in that we aim to inspire them as they explore additional business problems we can help solve.
The difference is, of course, that they already know us, and one of the challenges in B2B is not just about the next upsell deal; it’s often adoption, and a lack of user adoption and apathy toward the solution is a key contributor to attrition.
This adoption is both in terms of the product being used more widely in the business and more deeply in the customer using the available features and adopting new functionalities as they are added to the product.
One of the key trends we’ve seen in B2B software is the lack of awareness of the capabilities of their existing stack leads buyers to enter the market to solve perceived gaps and either overbuy and duplicate technologies or replace vendors that were perfectly capable of meeting these new needs.
Marketing efforts should continue to be focused on trust and credibility in that other customers like them are successful, especially in additional use cases that the customer is not using the product for, but also working with the product teams to make sure the customer is informed of new features and the use cases these would apply to.
This is about creating a “loyalty loop” where satisfied customers cycle back into the journey, solving new problems with your solutions. They become advocates for your business, reinforcing trust for future prospects in the Awareness and Muse stages of the journey.
Key Focus: Consider the customer as a buyer persona and craft campaigns dedicated to their needs.
Plugging in AMPED
While I opened this article with thoughts on why the customer’s journey and, specifically, the buyer’s journey cannot be the sole focus of marketing, we need to focus on the relatively dark area where 95% of our future buyers are currently hanging out.
But, using a model like this, especially in coordination with persona development, enables us to develop our marketing motions and a content strategy that focuses on being helpful throughout the journey, not just creating abstract thought leadership at one extreme or focusing on features and functions at the other.
We must consider what would move each of our personas through these stages – what will get them AMPED?
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Fancy a chat about this? Or maybe we can help with our advisory services or get in touch!
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