Cut Through the Gordian Knot that Is B2B Buying
Updated: Oct 9
You can have the best offering, the best marketing, and the best sales team in your market, and still lose. Not to a competitor. To a tangled knot of stakeholders, second-guessing, and internal back-and-forth that never quite resolves into a yes. Call it the Gordian knot of buying: the nonlinear, looping, hard-to-pin-down way a real buying group actually moves toward a decision. Most commercial teams are still selling as if buyers walk a straight line. They don't, and pulling harder on a knot only tightens it.
Buyer enablement is how you cut through it instead. It's the intentional commercial strategy of enabling your buyers to do two things: gain alignment internally toward a buying decision, and avoid regretting that decision after it's implemented. Both halves matter. Getting to yes isn't the finish line if the buyer regrets it six months into implementation, and regret-proofing a purchase does nothing if the buying group never aligns enough to make the purchase at all.
This isn't a term I made up. Gartner coined it, and defines it simply as the information and tools provided to buyers to help them complete critical buying tasks faster and more easily. That's the whole job in one sentence.
Your Customer Is Rarely the Only Decision Maker
Here's the part that trips up a lot of good commercial teams: the person you're selling to is almost never the only person deciding. Gartner's research on the B2B buying journey puts the typical buying group for a complex purchase at 6 to 10 people, each one independently gathering their own information before the group ever sits down together. That's six to 10 separate strands already tangled together before you even show up.
More people doesn't just mean more meetings, it means more friction. In the HBR piece "Making the Consensus Sale," CEB researchers (the group acquired by Gartner) found that the bigger and more diverse a buying group gets, the harder genuine agreement becomes, and the group often settles for the lowest common denominator: study the problem a little longer, pick the cheapest option, or just table the decision entirely. That lowest common denominator is very often doing nothing. Staying with what you already have will always be the easiest decision in the room, because it's the one decision that requires no one to agree on anything new. Leaving a knot alone is always easier than taking it on.
This is exactly why buyer enablement matters more as the implementation grows bigger and more complex. Picture a company replacing a Human Performance Management system they've used for the past 10 years. IT has to sign off, finance has to justify the cost, department heads have to believe their teams won't lose productivity during the switch, and somebody has to be willing to own the risk if it goes sideways. That's a lot of internal alignment to build, against a very real and very comfortable alternative: keep doing what they've always done.
B2B Buying is a Gordian Knot
Most of us were taught to think about buying as a funnel: awareness, consideration, decision, done. Real buying groups don't move that way. They loop, double back, and tangle up around the same few core questions. Gartner's own visualization of a real buying journey shows it: a tangle of loops instead of a straight line.
The visual shows buyers constantly circling back instead of marching forward in a straight line. Look at that graphic once and you'll never think of a buying "funnel" the same way again.
That tangle isn't a sign something's broken. It's just what happens when a group of people, each with their own priorities and their own gaps in understanding, try to get aligned on something new. Every stakeholder is pulling a different strand, and pulling harder on any one of them, whether that's a bigger discount or a stronger follow-up, usually tightens the whole thing.
The ancient Greeks had a name for a knot like this: the Gordian knot. According to legend, an ox cart was tied with a knot so intricate that no one could undo it, and whoever managed to would rule Asia. Challenger after challenger pulled and picked at the strands and failed. Then Alexander the Great drew his sword and cut straight through it.
The lesson isn't that you need a sharper pitch. It's that a knot like this doesn't yield to more of the same effort; it yields to a different tool. Buyer enablement is that tool. It cuts through the confusion, the conflicting priorities, and the missing information strand by strand, so that no matter which strand a buyer is on, or which stakeholder just grabbed a new one, they can find what they need to keep moving.
Build Buyer Enablement Around the Buying Jobs
Building an enablement plan starts with a straightforward question: what are the four to six essential jobs a buyer needs to complete before they'll move forward with a purchase? These can shift slightly by industry, but Gartner's own research on the B2B buying journey identifies six that show up again and again, six strands that every buying group has to work through, in whatever order they happen to grab them:
Problem identification. Recognizing and learning about the business problem, and beginning to consider budget.
Solution exploration. Exploring different ways to solve the problem and learning what peers in the industry use.
Requirements building. Setting requirements for a solution and building out an RFP to evaluate and compare options.
Supplier selection. Evaluating implementation challenges and reviewing proposals from potential suppliers.
Validation. Checking vendor claims against third parties and peers, and confirming what the buyer has learned independently.
Consensus creation. Building a shared understanding of the problem inside the organization, surfacing and resolving disagreements, educating stakeholders outside the core buying group, and securing budget.
A buyer only moves forward once they feel like all six strands have been handled well. Miss one, and the deal doesn't die, it just loops back and tangles up there again.
Map Your Resources, Find Your Gaps, Build for Them
Once you have your buying jobs defined, the real work starts: map your current content and resources against each one. Be honest, and do it from the buyer's point of view, not yours. A page that feels like thorough solution exploration to your own team might do nothing to help a buyer with consensus creation, which is a completely different job with a completely different audience.
Once that map exists, look at it plainly and find where you're weakest. I've run workshops with my teams and the below is an example of what this can look like.
This gap is more common than most teams realize. One review of 500 supplier content assets found that only 20% actually qualified as real buyer enablement content, built to help a buyer finish a job rather than to make the seller look good. The same analysis makes a point worth sitting with: a lot of what does qualify works best in a salesperson's hands, used together with the buyer, not dropped into a resource library and left alone.
That's exactly why not all of what you find or build will be marketing content. Closing a gap is a sales and marketing job together, not a deliverable marketing builds and hands off. Some of what a buyer needs lives in your sales team itself, like training reps to actually run a validation conversation instead of winging it. Some of it is a resource sales and the buyer use together in the room, like a shared business case template for consensus creation. And some of it has to work with no salesperson in the room at all, like a comparison guide or an ROI calculator a buyer pulls up while researching independently at their own desk, which matters more than ever now that 61% of B2B buyers say they'd prefer a completely rep-free buying experience. Map all three. A gap in one of your buying jobs isn't automatically a content gap, sometimes it's a gap in what your sales team knows how to do, or in what a buyer can access entirely on their own.
Within each of those three delivery modes, Gartner sorts what you actually build into two buckets: prescriptive advice, where you tell a buyer what to do next, and practical tools, like calculators, benchmarks, or diagnostics that let them work it out for themselves. A strong enablement plan usually needs both, not just more of whichever one your team already knows how to make.
Wherever you're weakest, that's where you build. Develop the tools, resources, or processes that help a buyer complete that specific job, whether that's a peer reference program for validation, an internal business case template for consensus creation, or a comparison guide for solution exploration. Build something for every strand, and you take the burden off the buyer, get to yes faster, and finally defeat the one competitor that's been quietly winning most of your stalled deals: doing nothing.
If you want to go deeper on why buying groups land on doing nothing even when they genuinely intend to move forward, The JOLT Effect by Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna is worth the read. It's built on an analysis of 2.5 million recorded sales conversations, and it treats indecision as its own distinct force, separate from losing to a competitor, which is exactly the kind of stall buyer enablement is built to prevent.
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