The B2B Buying Journey Assessment

What This Assessment Measures

The B2B Buying Journey Assessment by The Starr Conspiracy scores how well your go-to-market strategy aligns to the way B2B tech buyers actually purchase in 2025. It is built for revenue leaders, CMOs, and demand generation directors at B2B technology companies. You will get a score from 0 to 100 across six dimensions plus a maturity level and three prioritized improvement areas. The current average score across teams who have taken it is 41 out of 100, and 77% of B2B buyers describe their last purchase as very complex or difficult (Gartner, 2024).

How the Assessment Works

You answer 24 questions, four per dimension. Each answer carries a weighted value from 1 to 4 reflecting maturity. The tool sums weighted responses, normalizes to a 0 to 100 scale, and maps your total to one of four maturity levels. Dimension subscores tell you where the bleeding is. The total score tells you whether you are operating on instinct or on infrastructure.

The scoring model draws on Gartner's research into buying groups and journey complexity, LinkedIn's B2B Institute work on brand and demand balance, and The Starr Conspiracy's own benchmark data from B2B HR tech and adjacent enterprise software companies. Sample size for our internal benchmark is 312 revenue teams between Q1 2023 and Q3 2025. Limitations: the benchmark skews toward HR tech, work tech, and enterprise SaaS in the $10M to $250M revenue band. If you sell to procurement-led commodity buyers, the dimensional weighting will be less precise for your context.

The Six Dimensions

Buyer Awareness. Whether you know who is actually in the buying group, what they care about, and what triggers their search. Most teams build personas for one or two roles and ignore the other four to eight humans in the room.

Content Alignment. Whether your content maps to the demand states your buyers move through, not to a funnel diagram drawn in 2014. If your content library is 80% bottom-funnel demos and case studies, this dimension will sting.

Buying Committee Coverage. Whether you reach, influence, and arm every stakeholder in a deal. Gartner puts the average B2B buying group at six to ten people. Most GTM motions touch two.

Sales and Marketing Alignment. Whether handoffs, definitions, and shared accountability exist in practice, not just in a quarterly slide. Misalignment shows up as MQLs that sales ignores and SQLs that marketing never sourced.

Deal Velocity. Whether your buying cycle is shrinking, holding, or stretching, and whether you can name the stalls. Average B2B cycles run 6 to 12 months for enterprise deals, and stalls inside the cycle are the single largest source of pipeline leakage.

Post-Sale Expansion. Whether the buying journey continues into renewal, expansion, and advocacy with the same rigor as net-new. The cheapest pipeline you will ever build is the second deal with an existing client.

Maturity Levels

Ad Hoc (0 to 30). No shared journey model. Content built by request. Sales and marketing operate as separate companies. Buying committee coverage is whoever answered the BDR's call.

Developing (31 to 55). A journey model exists on a slide somewhere. Some content maps to it. One or two roles are covered well. Alignment depends on individual relationships, not systems.

Aligned (56 to 80). Shared demand states drive content, campaigns, and sales plays. Buying group coverage is intentional. Velocity is measured and stalls are diagnosed. Expansion has a motion, not just a CSM.

Optimized (81 to 100). Journey orchestration is AI-native. Every stakeholder gets contextual outreach. Velocity is improving year over year. Post-sale revenue outpaces new logo revenue. You are the company everyone else benchmarks against.

Benchmark Scores by Segment

From The Starr Conspiracy benchmark sample (n=312, 2023 to 2025):

Notice the pattern. Committee Coverage and Post-Sale Expansion are the lowest scores at every segment. That is not a coincidence. Those are the two dimensions modern buyers care most about, and the two that legacy funnel thinking ignores.

What You Get

A scored report with your total, six dimension subscores, your maturity level, the three dimensions where you have the biggest gap versus the benchmark for your segment, and specific improvement priorities for each. No email gate to see your score. We respect your time.

The Bottom Line

If you searched b2b buying journey, you do not need another framework diagram. You need to know where your own go-to-market is broken and what to fix first. Take the assessment, read the diagnostic, and pick one dimension to improve this quarter. The teams that move from Developing to Aligned in 12 months typically see deal velocity improve 18 to 25%. The work is not glamorous. It is just necessary.

Related Questions

How long is the average B2B buying cycle?

Enterprise B2B technology purchases average 6 to 12 months from first signal to closed-won, with deals over $100K typically running 9 months or longer. Cycles have lengthened roughly 30% since 2020 as buying groups have grown and economic scrutiny has intensified, per Gartner's 2024 buyer survey.

How many stakeholders are involved in a B2B purchase?

Gartner's research puts the average B2B buying group at 6 to 10 stakeholders for considered purchases, and complex enterprise deals frequently involve 14 or more. The buying group includes economic buyers, technical evaluators, end users, security and procurement reviewers, and increasingly a CFO sign-off for any deal above the discretionary threshold.

What are the stages of the B2B buying journey?

We map buying behavior to ten demand states rather than linear stages, because real buyers loop, pause, and re-enter. The classic model from sources like Gartner covers problem identification, solution exploration, requirements building, supplier selection, validation, and consensus creation. Read more on demand states and how they replace funnel thinking.

Why does buying committee coverage matter more than persona depth?

Deep personas for one champion will not save a deal that dies in security review or CFO sign-off. Coverage means every stakeholder gets relevant content, proof, and contact. Our demand generation services and GTM strategy guide both lead with committee coverage for this reason.

What is a good score on the B2B Buying Journey Assessment?

The current average is 41. Scoring above 55 puts you in the top third of B2B tech teams. Scoring above 80 puts you in the top 5%. The score that matters most is the one you hit 12 months from now, not the one you start with.