Quick Answer: The buyer's journey still runs through awareness, consideration and decision, the same three stages it always has. What has changed by 2026 is where the consideration stage happens. Buyers now do much of that work inside closed groups, chats and AI tools that summarise opinion on their behalf, largely before a seller is ever contacted. A sales process built only around the moment a buyer reaches out is managing the transaction, not the sale.
We wrote about the buyer's journey in detail a few years ago, and the model itself has held up. Needs identification, research, evaluation, commitment, the follow-through afterwards. None of that is wrong.
What's changed is not the shape of the journey. It's where the middle of it actually takes place, and how much of it a seller now never sees at all.
What hasn't changed
Strip the buyer's journey down to its simplest form and you get three stages: awareness, consideration and decision. A need surfaces, options get compared, a choice gets made.
That structure is still accurate, and if you want the fuller breakdown of each stage, our original piece on the buyer's journey covers it properly.
What this piece is about is narrower and more urgent: the consideration stage specifically, because that's where the ground has moved the most.
What has changed by 2026
Consideration used to mean a buyer reading a comparison site, asking a friend, maybe calling two or three suppliers before deciding who to visit. Sellers couldn't see all of it, but they could reasonably assume most of the meaningful research still happened somewhere adjacent to their own channels, a review site, a forum, a recommendation from someone the buyer trusted directly.
That's no longer where the bulk of it happens. Buyers now do a large share of their consideration-stage research inside closed Facebook and community groups, WhatsApp chats, and increasingly, by asking an AI tool to summarise opinion for them before they've read a single page themselves.
None of that activity shows up in a CRM, a website analytics dashboard, or a sales rep's pipeline notes. It happens, it shapes the decision, and then the buyer arrives at a seller already most of the way to a conclusion, often without the seller ever knowing a conversation took place.
This is the part worth sitting with: when a deal closes quickly after first contact, that speed is frequently read as a sign the process worked well. It's just as often a sign that the actual decision was made somewhere else entirely, and what the seller saw was the tail end of it.
Where research now happens, stage by stage
Swipe left or right to see the full table.
| Buyer's journey stage | How research happened, pre-2020 | How it happens by 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Awareness | Noticing a need, doing a general search | Same, but often triggered by something seen in a social feed or group |
| Consideration | Comparison sites, forums, asking a friend directly | Closed groups, chats, and AI-generated summaries of group sentiment |
| Decision | A shortlist of two or three sellers contacted directly | A shortlist largely formed before any seller is contacted at all |
| Post-decision | Word of mouth to people the buyer knows personally | Public comments and reviews other buyers read during their own consideration stage |
The last row matters as much as the middle ones. A buyer's post-purchase experience doesn't stay private anymore. It becomes research material for the next person going through consideration, whether or not the seller was ever aware that exchange took place.
Do you own the sale, or only the transaction?
Here's the distinction worth being honest about. Most organisations manage the transaction well: the quote, the paperwork, the delivery, the follow-up call.
Very few manage the sale itself, meaning the actual decision-making process the buyer goes through before any of that transactional activity begins.
Those are not the same thing. A seller who shows up only once a buyer is ready to transact is present for the easiest, lowest-value part of the journey. The consideration stage, where trust actually gets built or lost, is happening somewhere else.
If a seller has no presence there, they're not really managing a sales process. They're managing whatever's left over once someone else's influence already decided the outcome.
What this means for CRM strategy
This is a People, Process, Technology problem, not a technology problem on its own. The technology buyers use to research has changed considerably. Groups, chats and AI summarisation tools didn't exist in their current form a decade ago.
What hasn't changed at the same pace is the process most organisations run internally, which is still built around the assumption that consideration-stage research happens somewhere a seller can eventually observe or influence directly.
CRM strategy is where that gap either gets closed or gets ignored. It's not solved by adding a field to a form. It's solved by deciding, deliberately, what your organisation is going to do about a stage of the buyer's journey it can no longer fully see.
What to actually do about it
A few things worth doing regardless of industry:
- Publish the answers buyers are already asking elsewhere. If a buyer's first real question is being asked in a closed group instead of on your website, that's a content gap, not a social media problem. Plain, honest answers to the specific questions buyers raise in consideration beat polished promotional content every time.
- Stop measuring the sales process only from first contact. A deal that closes fast is not automatically a process working well. Build in the assumption that meaningful groundwork happened before your team was ever involved, and design follow-up and discovery questions that surface it.
- Align marketing and sales around consideration, not just decision. Marketing usually has the tools to produce consideration-stage content but is rarely tasked with owning that stage specifically. Sales usually owns the decision-stage conversation but rarely has any visibility into what happened before it. Someone needs to own the middle deliberately, rather than leaving it to chance.
- Treat what buyers say publicly, positive or negative, as part of your funnel. It's already functioning as research material for the next buyer, whether your organisation is paying attention to it or not.
Key Takeaways
- The buyer's journey still runs through awareness, consideration and decision. That structure hasn't changed.
- What has changed by 2026 is where consideration-stage research happens: closed groups, chats, and AI-generated summaries, largely invisible to the seller.
- A fast-closing deal is not proof the sales process worked. It's often proof the real decision happened somewhere else first.
- Managing the transaction and managing the sale are different things, and most organisations only do the first one well.
- Closing the gap is a People, Process, Technology problem: the technology buyers use has changed, and the process around it needs to catch up deliberately.
FAQ
What is the buyer's journey?
The buyer's journey is the series of stages a buyer moves through before making a purchase decision, typically grouped as awareness, consideration and decision.
How has the buyer's journey changed by 2026?
The stages themselves haven't changed. What's changed is where the consideration stage happens. Buyers increasingly research inside closed social groups, private chats and AI tools that summarise opinion for them, much of which is invisible to the seller.
Why does a deal that closes quickly not mean the sales process worked well?
A fast close often means the buyer had already done most of their consideration-stage research before contacting a seller. What the seller experienced as a quick decision may have been the final step of a much longer process they had no visibility into.
What's the difference between owning the transaction and owning the sale?
Owning the transaction means handling the paperwork, quote and delivery once a buyer is ready to proceed. Owning the sale means having some presence or influence during the consideration stage, before the buyer has decided. Most organisations do the first well and the second not at all.
CTA
If you want the full breakdown of each stage of the buyer's journey, that's covered in our original piece here.
If you're not sure where your own buyers are actually doing their consideration-stage research, that's usually one of the first things worth mapping properly. Happy to talk it through.
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