Wardley Mapping B2B Sales: From Diagnosis to Micro-Framework

What This Article Is About

• Diagnose why “we do great work but don’t win enough new business” using Wardley Maps.
• Based on REAL consulting case.
• Extract a reusable micro‑framework you can deploy across clients.
• See invisible blockers in the buyer journey: risk, consensus, technical validation, economic case, and single‑threading.

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Attribution notice
The B2B sales diagnostic method described here is independent work built on top of Wardley Mapping and is not part of Simon Wardley’s official framework. Wardley Mapping is licensed under Creative Commons. If you reuse or reference this material, please attribute WardleyMaps.com.

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1. Problem Statement: “Clients praise our work, but we aren’t winning enough new business.”

If a company struggles with B2B sales, the first assumption is that it’s not using best practices. That usually points to one of four causes:

• the team is incapable (which doesn’t seem true),
• the company doesn’t invest in people (also not true),
• the product is inferior (not the case), or
• something else is happening.

Most likely, it’s this “something else” — a shift in the market that quietly invalidated practices that used to work. It’s the co‑evolution of practice and environment: the landscape changes, and the old approach no longer fits.

So the real question becomes: what exactly is changing?

We'have got two options:

• the company is aiming at a different group of customers
• the nature of B2B sales check is changing.

Both are true.

Growing Ambitions

As the company grows, it naturally reaches for larger customers. That means moving from mid-market buyers—fast decisions, fewer people involved—to more corporate environments where decisions slow down and the internal machinery is heavier.

Bigger customers come with:

• more layers of decision-making
• formal risk, compliance, and IT/security processes
• stricter budgeting oversight
• longer internal alignment loops
• standards and expectations shaped by enterprise procurement

The company didn’t “get worse.” It simply crossed an invisible line where the old sales playbook no longer fits the scale of customers it now wants to serve.

B2B Sales

At the same time, B2B sales as a whole have shifted. The landscape is more complex than it was even a few years ago.

2024 research shows:

• 6–10 stakeholders now influence a typical B2B decision
• Buying journeys are non-linear, with teams revisiting earlier stages before moving forward
• Sales cycles are 22–34% longer than in 2019 because of tighter:
  • risk controls
  • compliance requirements
  • IT/security scrutiny
  • CFO-level financial oversight (Gartner, Forrester 2024)

What used to be a straightforward path—problem → demo → contract—has turned into a network of checks, validations, and approvals.

If your sales practices were built for the pre-2020 world, they simply don’t match the buying environment of 2024–2025.

Next steps

Armed with the initial understanding of a problem, it is time to dive digger into the actual B2B sales practices.

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2. Process Review

Improving the “B2B sales process” in is hard because it is too vague to diagnose. We need to brea it down to individual steps or even decisions so we can see what’s happening and where friction shows up. If you need a quick refresher on abstraction levels, check Building Abstraction Skills.

2a. Buyer Journey

We're lucky. The literature is rich on the buyer journey.

Diagram: Linear buyer journey from Problem Identification to Deal. In many firms this flow aligns with the annual planning and budgeting cycle (e.g., discovery in Q2–Q3, vendor selection/validation in Q3–Q4, approvals/contracts near year‑end), but that timing context is out of scope for this mapping step.

This diagram lets us hypothesize the key stakeholders and where they influence the process:

However, what is most interesting is many to many relationship, which shows the real complexity.

Diagram: Many‑to‑many influence in the B2B buyer journey. Each stage pulls in different stakeholders whose reviews, approvals, and veto power shape pace and outcome—this is the real complexity you must design for. Note this pesky mermaid does not obey the order of steps on the left.

2b. Building diagnostic framework

After understanding the complexity of the situation, we face a tough nut to crack. There are far too many details to make it useful. We need to make a compromise and create seven (because I like that number) failure categories. You can go with any number you like.

2c. Confirming the challenge

Now, we are getting somewhere. When working with a customer, it might be wise to do an evaluation of past failed deals and verify what really happened.

Uh oh.

This is a brilliant company that found a market niche but certainly is not capable of doing sales in a complex environment.

Armed with the knowledge of what specific area is failing, we proceed to actually create maps.

3. Creating a map for a supplier selection

We need to define a specific problem we want to takle ("battle at hand"). Given the results of the analysis, it is clear that potential customers like the solution but they do not like the analysed company. So the problem statement might be:

we want to pass more vendor comparisons.

Luckily, we know the key stakeholders.

Map 1: A first attempt to chart the landscape. It shows a decent “Product Pitch” and a shaky, immature “Vendor Pitch” — both meant to signal value.

The map looks tidy, but it misrepresents how deals actually move. Nobody buys because of a pitch. Buying decisions form around people, pressure, and internal politics—this map hides that reality.

A few things matter immediately:

• The system is driven by people, their incentives, and how they trade information.
• Losing a vendor comparison usually comes down to one of three forces:
  • Champions and Influencers don’t feel you strengthen their position.
  • Procurement doesn’t trust your predictability or your risk profile.
  • Your advocates don’t have enough evidence or arguments to silence internal critics.

Map 2: Shifting from “pitches” to the real system. Places Influencers, Champions, and Procurement at similar visibility, then maps what they actually need (alliance, references, risk/compliance, KPIs).

Building Map 2 forces you to step into each stakeholder’s head. You need to see the world the way they see it and uncover the needs they won’t say out loud.

And that’s the key lesson here: the people driving change often can’t win over procurement on their own. They don’t speak procurement’s language, and they don’t know what proof procurement actually cares about.

So your pitch must include information your champions will never ask for—because they don’t realize it decides the deal. And sometimes it might be very little things: having a partnership in a right geographical localization, having a proper reference customer or having a proper security certification.

Since nobody in this case had that knowledge, the next move was to go and get it:

• find and consult procurement experts (not salespeople)
• spend time with the buying team to understand their non-obvious requirements

4. Creating a map for dealing with political challenges

The company already has strong advocates—people who genuinely want the change.

But it also has people who don’t. Some raise valid concerns that you can address. Others push back for reasons they’ll never say out loud. The change threatens their status, their bonuses, or simply adds work they don’t want to take on.

There is little point in making a high level map for the valid concerns - they need to be recorded, triagged and addressed as they come. Each of those may deserve a separate map, but the map will be very specific to an organization.

The remaining blockers need to be won (prefereably) or overpowered. This requires custom, per-situation specific approach that requires the following skills:

Map 3: From understanding to intervention. Highlights where reusable friction‑reducers (references, compliance, KPIs) should be standardized, and where human facilitation (alliances, executive preference) drives momentum.

This map shows why political work inside a customer is messy. You can model the skills and dependencies, but the reality is harsher: these activities rely on judgment, timing, emotional intelligence, and a level of patience most people never train for.

Two points stand out.

First, navigating blockers isn’t a process problem. It’s a mindset problem. You need someone who can read motives, sense unspoken fears, and adjust their behaviour on the fly. That mindset is rare. Most teams prefer structure, templates, and predictable workflows. Political work offers none of that. It asks for tact, empathy, negotiation, and stamina all at once—and those qualities don’t come from a playbook.

Second, doing this work for a customer is expensive. You spend time, social capital, and energy to help them solve issues they should be solving themselves. Sometimes it pays off. Often it doesn’t. The return only makes sense when the deal is large enough to justify the political lift. If the opportunity is small, you end up carrying their internal dysfunction at your own cost.

Bringing it all together

Those entire considerations lead us to a Microframework #3 - Rapid Lead Qualification.

Purpose: Decide immediately whether a lead deserves deep engagement, targeted nurturing… or a polite “no”. This maps directly to the failures, stakeholder needs, and political realities above.

The 3-Bucket Outcome

After these seven questions, place the lead in one of three buckets:

1. GREEN — Worth pursuing → Move to full discovery.

Strong sponsor + strong champion + clear blockers + procurement clarity + known proof path + no executive bias + meaningful deal value.

2. AMBER — Nurture, don’t pursue yet → Keep warm, but do not invest energy.

Missing champion, unclear blockers, or vague validation path.

3. RED — Walk away → Say no early. Saves months.

No urgency, no champion, unknown internal politics, executive preference elsewhere, or deal too small for the political cost.

Summary

If you’ve made it this far, you’ve seen why “we do great work but don’t win enough new business” isn’t a sales problem. It’s a systems problem. Bigger customers play a different game: more risk controls, more politics, more stakeholders, more hidden veto points. The old approach simply doesn’t survive that environment.

You learned how to break down the buyer journey into specific decisions, spot where deals actually fail, and see the landscape the way Champions, Influencers, and Procurement see it. You mapped the real needs—alliances, references, executive trust, procurement KPIs, risk protection—and you saw how much of this work lives outside the formal “pitch.”

You also saw the hard truth: helping a customer navigate their internal politics is expensive. It costs tact, empathy, negotiation, and an uncomfortable amount of patience. You only do that work when the size of the prize justifies the lift.

Your next steps are simple:

• use the seven failure modes to review past deals
• map the real stakeholders in your current opportunities
• build a pitch that answers procurement’s questions before they ask
• qualify leads fast using the seven-step filter
• pick your battles and avoid deals that can’t justify the political investment

This is the point of applying Wardley Maps to B2B sales. You stop guessing, you stop blaming, and you see the system for what it is.

Once you understand the landscape, the next actions reveal themselves.

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FAQ

Why aren’t we winning more deals if customers say they love our work?

Because praise and purchasing are two different systems. Customers may like your delivery, but enterprise buying runs on risk controls, politics, and internal alignment — not compliments.

Do we really need a different sales approach for bigger customers?

Yes. Mid‑market buying is fast and informal. Enterprise buying is slow, political, and risk‑driven. If you use the same playbook for both, you lose enterprise deals.

What is the value of using Wardley Maps for sales?

Maps force you to see the system instead of relying on assumptions. You can diagnose where deals die, which stakeholders matter, and what proof they need. No more guessing.

Is “lack of urgency” really that common?

More than you think. If the sponsor doesn’t see a “now” problem, the deal stalls no matter how good your product is.

Why do Champions fail to move deals forward?

Because Champions don’t control procurement, risk, compliance, architecture, or executive politics. They can advocate — they can’t align the whole organization.

How do I know if procurement will block me?

Simple test: ask whether vendors like you have passed procurement before. If the answer is vague, expect delays or a silent veto.

What makes the seven failure categories useful?

They turn “sales feels hard” into something you can measure: urgency, narrative, requirements, comparison, validation, politics, and commercial risk. Once you name the failure, you can fix it.

How political should we get inside the customer’s organization?

Enough to understand how decisions happen, not enough to become part of the company’s internal drama. Do the work only when the deal is big enough to justify it.

Why do we need references, certifications, and compliance documentation even when nobody asks for them?

Because procurement, security, and executives judge vendors through risk signals. If those signals are missing, you lose — often without understanding why.

How do I qualify leads faster?

Use the seven‑step filter: urgency → champion → politics → procurement → validation → executive preference → deal value. If any of the first two steps fail, walk away.

Do we need to map every customer?

No. Map when the environment is unclear or the stakes are high. If the deal is small, use the qualification filter and move on.

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