This kind of myopic thinking is one of the biggest challenges for IT companies that reap a large share of their revenues from services application development and maintenance, infrastructure management and validation software.

FORBES: IT services are not like baseball caps

While marketing claims to understand the actions and motivations of buyers in each stage, in reality B2B marketers and tools like lead management and marketing automation focus on the solution evaluation and validation stages.

FORBES: Influencing Your Buyer