I've been running pipeline motions for eight years. In most of that time, the "sales funnel" I was taught to model looked nothing like the way my actual deals moved. Buyers stalled at odd places. Champions went dark right when procurement was supposed to be a formality. Deals I thought were closed came back for another security review.
None of that made sense inside the linear AIDA-shaped funnel that most sales orgs still run their forecasts on.
Then I read Brent Adamson, Nick Toman, and Cristina Gomez's 2018 work on the "six buying jobs" for the first time (Gartner, https://www.gartner.com/en/sales/insights/b2b-buying-journey). It reframed everything. Deals don't move through a funnel. Buying groups work through six jobs — most of them in parallel, most of them repeatedly — until either a purchase closes or the whole exercise collapses into no-decision.
This is the pillar of Gartner's modern buying research, and it's the single most useful mental model I've found for building pipeline that actually converts. Below is the definitive explainer: what the six jobs are, what buying groups do inside each one, and — the part Gartner doesn't publish — what a seller has to bring to each job to move it forward.
The 6 buying jobs, at a glance
Gartner defines the six buying jobs as the discrete tasks every B2B buying group has to complete, in some order, before a purchase can happen:
- Problem identification. "We have a problem worth solving."
- Solution exploration. "What's out there to solve it?"
- Requirements building. "What do we need it to do?"
- Supplier selection. "Does this vendor do what we need?"
- Validation. "Are we sure we're right?"
- Consensus creation. "Can we get everyone on board?"
Two things about this list are counterintuitive and worth internalizing.
First, the jobs are not sequential. A buying group can be in the middle of validation and get pulled back into requirements building because a new stakeholder joined and had different views. They can be halfway through consensus creation and re-open supplier selection because a new vendor got introduced late.
Second, the jobs are collective. A modern B2B purchase is made by a buying group of 6 to 10 people spanning about four functions (Gartner, https://www.gartner.com/en/sales/insights/b2b-buying-journey), each armed with 4–5 pieces of information they gathered on their own. Any one of those people can drag the whole group back into a job the rest thought was closed.
That's the framework. Now, the jobs.
Job 1: Problem identification
Someone in the buying org has decided the status quo isn't working. Maybe it's a VP of Sales looking at a slipping close rate, or a Head of Security whose team can't keep up with alerts. Whatever it is, this is where the deal starts — and the majority of it happens before the seller ever hears about it.
What buying groups do: They diagnose. They ask internal peers whether the problem is real. They read blogs, listen to podcasts, and quietly benchmark themselves against competitors.
What sellers should bring: Category education, not product pitches. This is where thought leadership and trusted analyst content (Forrester, Gartner, IDC) get consumed. Sellers who arrive at Problem Identification with anecdotes from peer companies — "Company X saw the same slip and did Y about it" — become useful.
The intro that matters: A peer who's been through the same problem. Not a demo. Not a product tour. A 20-minute call with someone at a lookalike company. This is a job Boomerang customers routinely hand to their champions from prior roles — "Would you spend 20 minutes with the CRO at Acme? He's diagnosing the same thing you fixed."
Job 2: Solution exploration
Once the buying group agrees the problem is worth solving, they start scanning for solutions. This is the job where Sales Navigator, G2, Reddit, and analyst reports all get pulled up in the same browser session.
What buying groups do: They build a longlist of vendors, categories, and internal options (build vs. buy). About 77% of B2B buyers describe their most recent purchase as "very complex or difficult" (Gartner, https://www.gartner.com/en/sales/insights/b2b-buying-journey), and Solution Exploration is where a lot of that complexity gets front-loaded.
What sellers should bring: A honest framing of the category. Not "we're the leader" — the buying group already discounted that. Instead: "Here are the three real approaches to this problem. Here's what each is good at. Here's where we fit." Sellers who arrive as informed narrators of the market are the ones who get invited to the next job.
The intro that matters: A customer who evaluated the same three vendors the buying group is now considering. That reference call is worth more than every deck the seller can send.
Job 3: Requirements building
This is where the buying group figures out what it actually needs. Feature lists. Integrations. Compliance controls. Contract terms. Buyer-side pushback usually intensifies here, because different stakeholders want incompatible things.
What buying groups do: They circulate spreadsheets. They argue. They add and remove requirements as new stakeholders join. About 74% of B2B buyer teams demonstrate "unhealthy conflict" during the decision process (Gartner, https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-05-07-gartner-sales-survey-finds-74-percent-of-b2b-buyer-teams-demonstrate-unhealthy-conflict-during-the-decision-process). Most of that conflict starts here.
What sellers should bring: Templates. Comparison frameworks. Reference architectures from customers in the same industry. Sellers who show up with a pre-filled requirements matrix — "Here's what the last three customers in your vertical used as their baseline" — become the vendor the buying group builds around.
The intro that matters: A customer who wrote a similar requirements doc. This is where a well-timed champion intro shortens the job by weeks. It's also where 40–55% more deals get multithreaded in stages 2–3 for Boomerang customers, because the requirements job is where the buying group naturally splinters into workstreams.
Job 4: Supplier selection
The buying group has requirements. Now they're comparing you specifically against the alternatives. Demos, POCs, security reviews, procurement scoring.
What buying groups do: They evaluate. They ask hard questions. They test the seller against the requirements built in Job 3. They also, and this is under-appreciated, look sideways — at what peer companies chose in the same situation.
What sellers should bring: Proof. Not slides. Case studies with numbers a buying group can verify. Reference customers a buyer can call without asking permission. Live data from a lookalike deployment.
The intro that matters: A backchannel. Buyers do 4-5 pieces of independent information gathering per person (Gartner). They will call other customers whether the seller sanctions it or not. Sellers who proactively arrange those backchannels shape the story that gets told inside the deal. Sellers who don't are surprised by what shows up in procurement.
Job 5: Validation
The buying group has picked a supplier. Now they're double-checking. Second-guessing. Looking for reasons to be wrong.
This is where most deals silently die. And it's the job Gartner keeps producing new stats on. Sixty percent of technology buyers involved in renewal decisions regret nearly every purchase they make (Gartner, https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-06-14-gartner-survey-reveals-60-percent-of-technology-buyers-involved-in-renewal-decisions-regret-nearly-every-purchase-they-make). Regret is 1.65× higher for self-service digital buyers. Every stat Gartner publishes about regret starts here — in Validation.
What buying groups do: They talk to people. Peers, industry contacts, ex-employees at the vendor, existing customers, LinkedIn connections. Sixty-nine percent of B2B buyers turn to sales reps to validate AI-generated insights (Gartner, https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-05-20-gartner-survey-finds-sixty-nine-percent-of-b-two-b-buyers-turn-to-sales-reps-to-validate-ai-generated-insights), and about the same share turn to peers to validate anything a vendor has told them.
What sellers should bring: Access. To customers. To engineers. To the CEO on a short call. To an actual product implementation the buyer can log into.
The intro that matters: A validated peer. This is the job that decides whether the deal closes clean or drags for another six weeks. Ninety-five percent of your target buyers likely know at least one of your customer champions from a prior role, from school, or from the industry community. Any of those relationships, activated in the Validation job, collapses the drag. See our writeup on warm intros in the champion economy for the mechanics.
Job 6: Consensus creation
The last job. Everyone agrees. Or they don't, and the deal dies.
What buying groups do: They align. This job involves the fewest new questions and the most internal politics. Buying groups that reach consensus are 2.5× more likely to close high-quality deals (Gartner, https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-05-07-gartner-sales-survey-finds-74-percent-of-b2b-buyer-teams-demonstrate-unhealthy-conflict-during-the-decision-process). The 2.5× gap is a consensus gap, not a product gap.
What sellers should bring: A champion who can sell for you internally. Materials the champion can circulate — one-pagers, TCO models, a summary of security answers. And, quietly, air cover: an executive from your side willing to spend 30 minutes with the buyer's exec.
The intro that matters: The exec-to-exec air cover call. This is what pushes deals from "we're mostly aligned" to "let's sign." It's also the intro that reps consistently underuse because they feel weird asking their own CRO to run one. Boomerang customers built a workflow that removes the friction and now book 3–5× higher meeting conversion vs. cold on this specific ask.
Why the funnel breaks: looping
Here's the part every operator I know has to unlearn from CRM-shaped thinking. Buying groups don't move through the six jobs in a straight line. They loop.
Ninety-five percent of buying groups revisit at least one job as new information emerges (Gartner). Requirements get rebuilt because a new stakeholder joins. Solution exploration reopens because a competitor launches something. Consensus falls apart because procurement finds a cheaper alternative during Validation.
This is why "stage" in a CRM is a lie. A deal marked "stage 5 — validation" is actually a buying group cycling through jobs 3, 5, and 6 in the same week. The seller who forecasts off the stage will get the forecast wrong. The seller who forecasts off which jobs are still open — and how much friction each job is generating — will not.
Our writeup on buying group behavior covers the multithreading discipline that makes looping visible.
What sellers get wrong across all six jobs
If I zoom out on every deal I've won and lost, the same three failure modes show up across all six jobs.
Failure mode 1: assuming the seller controls the pace. Buyers spend only 17% of total purchase time with any potential supplier; when comparing multiple vendors, roughly 5% per vendor (Gartner, https://www.gartner.com/en/sales/insights/b2b-buying-journey). The other 95% is happening without you. The best sellers accept this and design their motion to be useful in the 95% — through content, references, and trusted intros.
Failure mode 2: bringing product where the job asks for context. The most common mistake is answering a "problem identification" question with a product demo. The buying group is asking to be helped through a job. The seller answers with a pitch. The buying group disengages.
Failure mode 3: treating validation as a formality. Sellers assume that once they've won on paper, the deal is done. Validation is where 60% of purchase regret gets seeded, and it's where the loop most often reopens. The sellers who close clean design an active validation motion — references, backchannel intros, exec air cover — instead of waiting for procurement to finish.
How this changes what "pipeline generation" means
If deals move through six jobs, not five stages, then "pipeline generation" isn't about how many demos you booked. It's about how many buying groups have a seller present, useful, and trusted across all six jobs.
That's the metric to build a modern pipe-gen motion around. Not meetings booked. Not opportunities created. Buying groups where the seller shows up as an information connector across all six jobs — which, functionally, means the seller has a relationship with more than one person in the buying group, is being pinged for context on the questions the buying group is actually asking, and has a warm channel to bring in outside voices when the buyer asks for them.
Our thesis on the pipeline generation motion Boomerang customers run walks through what this looks like at deployment. Armis's playbook (10× ROI, 26,000 warm-intro paths in year one) is one of the clearest public examples.
Frequently asked questions
What are the 6 buying jobs in Gartner's B2B buying journey framework? The six buying jobs are problem identification, solution exploration, requirements building, supplier selection, validation, and consensus creation. Gartner (originally through work by Brent Adamson, Nick Toman, and Cristina Gomez) introduced the framework in 2018 to describe what B2B buying groups actually do — as opposed to the seller-centric funnel most CRMs still model.
Are the six buying jobs sequential? No. Buying groups work on multiple jobs in parallel and loop back through earlier jobs as new information or stakeholders arrive. Gartner's own research found that 95% of buying groups revisit at least one of the six jobs before a decision is made.
How many people are in a modern B2B buying group? Gartner puts the buying group at 6–10 stakeholders across roughly four functions, sometimes as many as 11 active members. Each member typically brings 4–5 pieces of independently gathered information into the group's discussions.
Which of the six buying jobs is the hardest to complete? Empirically, consensus creation. Gartner's May 2025 survey found that 74% of B2B buyer teams demonstrate "unhealthy conflict" during the decision process, and buying groups that reach consensus are 2.5× more likely to close high-quality deals. Validation is a close second because it's where regret gets seeded.
How should sellers change what they do based on the six buying jobs framework? Design your engagement around what each job needs. Problem identification needs peer context and category education. Requirements building needs templates and reference architectures. Validation needs trusted third-party voices and executive access. Sellers who show up as information connectors, not product pitchers, close cleaner deals.
What's the difference between the "6 buying jobs" and a sales funnel? The funnel is seller-side and linear. The six buying jobs are buyer-side and non-linear. The funnel models stages you move a deal through. The six buying jobs model tasks the buying group has to complete — which they'll do in whatever order they choose, revisiting earlier jobs whenever new information appears.
