Understanding the Buyer’s Journey
Have you ever walked away from a great first meeting wondering what happens next?
That's the question that opened our event last Thursday night at Microsoft's downtown Toronto office, and it's one that hangs over almost every conversation in senior living technology. The room — operators, vendors, and investors who spend their working lives in this space — came together to map something almost nobody publishes, which is what the buyer's journey actually looks like once the pleasantries are over and the real work of getting a deal done begins.
What made the night work was the way the panel built on itself. Adam Wiener opened with the pure operator view from Fieldgate Retirement Living, drawing on a career that has moved him through many of the roles a vendor eventually has to win over, and he was candid about what it actually takes to move a decision through a senior living organization and where good intentions tend to run aground. Jason Horne picked up that thread with a perspective shaped by both sides of the procurement table — his operator experience inside Extendicare's long-term care world layered with what he sees now at SGP Purchasing Partner Network, where the structures and incentives of group purchasing quietly shape what gets bought and what gets set aside. Maria Aquino broadened the lens further, bringing her deep implementation expertise from the hospital world into a senior living conversation that has plenty to learn from how complex healthcare environments actually absorb new technology. And Nigel Vanderlinden closed the arc as the night's only pure vendor voice, sharing how Welbi has built one of the more effective and genuinely supportive implementation processes in the space — and how much of their success has come from treating implementation as the product rather than the afterthought.
Together they filled in a picture no single vantage point could have produced on its own. The invisible committee turned out to be the place where the most was hiding in plain sight — the group of people who quietly shape a decision are bigger than most vendors realize, and they rarely all sit in the meeting where the pitch actually happens. From there, the pilot ask emerged as where alignment most often breaks down, with both sides walking away convinced they've agreed on what success looks like, only to discover months later that they were holding two different definitions all along. And pilot purgatory followed naturally from that — the long, ambiguous middle where good pilots lose their momentum and the conversation about expansion never quite arrives.
When people registered, we asked them where things most often stall or go sideways, and the answers we got back ahead of time tracked closely with the conversation that unfolded in the room. The invisible committee, the pilot ask, and pilot purgatory came up again and again, which suggests we were circling something real.
We've cleaning up the buyer's journey map as a shareable takeaway, as a resource to the community, see below.
Thank you to Adam, Jason, Maria, and Nigel for showing up with real candour, and to Beatriz, Ehsan, Robert, and Jermaine at Microsoft for opening their doors to our community. Most of all, thank you to everyone who came out and made it the conversation it was.
The next one's planned for June, more on that soon.
