The B2B buyer journey as a hospital waiting room

You are seen, but no one will tell you how long the wait is.

You showed up prepared. Proposal polished, references ready, pricing competitive. You even brought a leave-behind, because you read somewhere that leave-behinds demonstrate commitment. The receptionist accepted it with the enthusiasm of someone processing their fourteenth leave-behind of the morning and told you to take a seat.

So you took a seat. And here you are.

Triage

The first meeting went well. They said it went well. They used the phrase “really aligned” twice, which you have learned to treat as a positive indicator rather than a verbal tic. You were introduced to someone called a “key stakeholder” who asked three questions, nodded at all three answers, and has not been mentioned since.

You have been triaged. You are not an emergency. You are, in the clinical language of enterprise procurement, being monitored.

The waiting room

Week three. Week five. Week eight.

You follow up with the cheerful regularity of someone who has not yet accepted what is happening. Your emails have subject lines like “Checking in!” and “Wanted to share this resource!” and, by week seven, just “Hi.” Your champion responds when they can, which is not often, because your champion is also waiting for something and is starting to look as tired as you feel.

The update, when it comes, is always some variation of: still working through it internally, hope to have clarity soon. You have now received this sentence four times from three different people. It has started to feel like a company policy rather than a status update.

New stakeholders keep appearing

Nobody told you about the head of procurement. Nobody mentioned that legal would need to be involved. The CFO apparently has questions, which is reasonable, except that the CFO’s questions are about things you covered on page four of the original proposal and you are starting to wonder if anyone has actually read page four.

You answer everything again. You do it pleasantly. You do it thoroughly. You send a follow-up email summarising what was discussed so there is a clear record, because you have done this before and you know that a clear record is the only thing standing between you and being asked the same questions a third time.

The false alarm

Week eleven brings an email that uses the word “progressing,” which is the most exciting word you have read in two months. They want to schedule a call to discuss next steps.

The call is forty-five minutes. The next step is a revised proposal with updated scope and refreshed pricing, required by end of week. The updated scope is your original scope with one section reordered. You submit it by Thursday. You do not hear anything until the following month, when your champion emails to say there have been some internal changes and they want to make sure everything still makes sense on your end.

Everything still makes sense on your end. You confirm this. You wait.

The resolution

It goes one of two ways.

The good version: they call you through. You get the deal. Fourteen weeks of follow-ups and resubmissions and stakeholder management collapses into a single signed document and a handshake, and it is genuinely worth it, even if celebrating feels slightly strange given how long you have been mentally preparing for this moment.

The other version: they went with someone else. They appreciated your time and found the process really valuable and hope to stay in touch. The someone else is occasionally a competitor and occasionally an internal hire and occasionally a decision to do nothing at all, which is somehow the most frustrating outcome of the three.

Either way, you update the CRM, you send the appropriate email, and you mean it when you say you hope to work together in the future.

Of course, you always mean it.