A B2B empathy trek is a research method that puts your team in the shoes of your business customers. Rather than relying solely on surveys or interviews, this technique involves direct observation of professional users in their real-world work environments. By following along as they go about their day, your team can uncover workflow pain points, unmet needs, and underlying motivations that don't always surface in formal settings.

This approach is a key tool in professional user research and is especially powerful in the B2B space, where purchasing decisions are often complex and involve multiple stakeholders. An empathy trek focuses on understanding the human side of B2B relationships — how people actually experience your product, service, or process while on the job.

What Happens During a B2B Empathy Trek?

During an empathy trek, researchers or team members “shadow” business customers over the course of a typical workday or process. This could mean sitting in on meetings, observing how they interact with tools or platforms, or walking the floor with frontline workers. The goal is to gather contextual insights through customer observation that go beyond what customers might say in a one-time conversation.

For example, a sales enablement tool provider might observe sales representatives as they prepare for client meetings, uncovering manual steps or tech frustrations that delay their workflow. Similarly, a manufacturer might shadow operations managers on the shop floor to see how product packaging impacts efficiency.

B2B Empathy Trek vs. Other Research Methods

Unlike quantitative market research methods that collect broad data sets, or structured interviews that ask specific questions, empathy treks offer a firsthand look at behaviors, habits, and challenges in a natural, unfiltered setting. This method works particularly well when you're trying to:

• Understand the full B2B customer journey across departments and processes
• Identify friction points that impact productivity or satisfaction
• Spot opportunities to improve tools, services, or communication flows

Who Typically Conducts Empathy Treks?

Empathy treks can be carried out by insight teams, product managers, designers, or even sales and customer success teams — anyone who wants a deeper understanding of how solutions are experienced in real-world work settings. Many organizations work with expert partners, like SIVO Insights, to guide them through B2B empathy fieldwork using trained moderators and tailored observation guides.

At its core, a B2B empathy trek is about stepping into your customer’s environment to see the world through their eyes. The insights you gain can reshape strategies, spark innovation, and lead to solutions that feel genuinely helpful to the people who use them.

It’s easy to think of B2B customers solely in terms of contracts, procurement processes, or quarterly budgets. But behind every business transaction is a person — or often, a team of people — making decisions, solving problems, and navigating pressures. That’s why empathy is so essential in B2B customer research.

While data from CRMs and dashboards reveal how customers interact with your solutions, they often don’t explain why those actions are happening. And in B2B settings, where roles are specialized and work contexts vary widely, surfacing these “whys” requires more than just numbers — it requires human understanding.

Seeing the Full Picture: Needs, Challenges, and Workflows

An empathy-based approach allows researchers and decision-makers to look beyond surface-level interactions and uncover:

 
• Hidden pain points – such as manual processes that create friction or inefficiencies in day-to-day tasksUnmet needs – like unsupported use cases or gaps between features offered and how they’re actually used
   
• Emotional triggers – surprise, frustration, or trust-building moments that influence brand loyalty

For example, let’s say you offer a data analytics platform to hospital administrators. Traditional market research might show high usage, but shadowing a hospital team during morning reporting could reveal that users are patching together spreadsheets to pull key metrics — an obvious workflow pain point. This insight can lead to a solution that saves them hours a week and builds stronger alignment between product and user needs.

The Value of Human-Centered B2B Insights

B2B insights gathered through empathy are not just about understanding what users do, but how they think and feel about it. This deeper view leads to more effective customer support strategies, more relevant marketing messages, and better product design decisions.

Here’s why empathy should be part of your B2B innovation toolkit:

 
• It deepens stakeholder relationships by demonstrating that you take their real-world experience seriouslyIt leads to solutions that are rooted in context, not assumptions
   
• It helps teams align more closely with the actual customer journey and roles across an organization

Even in highly technical or regulated industries, empathy doesn’t mean abandoning rigor — it means pairing user observation with structured decision-making frameworks to generate more informed outcomes.

Building Empathy Across Teams

When sales, product, and marketing teams all share a grounded view of how customers experience their day-to-day work, silos break down. Empathy treks make it possible to uncover wildly insightful moments — whether it’s a frontline worker improvising a workaround or a department head navigating legacy systems — and bring those moments back to inspire smarter business decisions.

Simply put, empathy helps humanize your data. And in doing so, it equips you to create more thoughtful, relevant, and impactful solutions, one professional interaction at a time.

Understand Your Goals Upfront

Before embarking on a B2B empathy trek, it’s essential to clarify what you're hoping to learn. Are you trying to understand the challenges facing sales reps, uncover how procurement teams use your platform, or identify bottlenecks in client onboarding? Setting a clear purpose ensures your team focuses on gathering the right kind of insights.

Build the Right Observation Team

Your observation team should include individuals from different parts of the business – product, marketing, sales, and customer support. This cross-functional approach allows a variety of perspectives when observing and interpreting customer behavior.

Choose the Right Business Customers to Shadow

Select customers based on specific criteria aligned with your research goals. For example, if you’re evaluating a new enterprise tool, you might want to observe IT decision-makers or office administrators who use it daily. Consider customers at different stages of the B2B customer journey to spot emerging patterns or unmet needs.

Create a Basic Fieldwork Guide

A B2B empathy trek doesn't require a complex script, but a simple fieldwork guide helps stay focused. Some useful prompts might include:

• What does their typical workday look like?
• What systems and tools do they interact with?
• What tasks seem time-consuming or frustrating?
• What adaptations or workarounds are they using?

This framework supports natural user research conversations while making sure you consistently touch on valuable areas of inquiry.

Align Logistically with the Client

Customer observation requires transparency and cooperation. Explain clearly what the empathy trek involves, how long it will take, and why it benefits them. Getting buy-in ensures you’ll have full access to observe real activities without being disruptive.

Prepare to Listen More Than You Speak

Empathy treks are not product demos or brainstorming sessions. Your role is to watch, listen, and learn. The more genuine the environment, the more likely you are to uncover workflow pain points and B2B customer needs you might otherwise miss.

When prepared properly, empathy treks become a powerful form of b2b customer research, creating a foundation for customer-centric improvements across services, solutions, and support.

Let the Customer Lead the Way

When shadowing professional users at work, resist the urge to control the situation. Begin by introducing yourself and your purpose briefly, then allow them to go about their daily tasks naturally. Authentic observation is the heart of customer observation, offering far more value than a staged demonstration.

Watch for Friction Points

Workflow snags are goldmines for insight. Look for repeated actions, tool switching, manual workarounds, or visible signs of frustration – these are clues to uncover unmet B2B needs. Even small delays can compound into major productivity issues over time.

Capture Behavior, Not Just Words

While comments and explanations from users are helpful, much of the most valuable insight comes from silent observation. Pay attention to:

• Body language and facial expressions
• Time spent on specific tasks
• Tools most frequently used (and avoided)
• Steps taken to complete a process

These subtle details often shed more light than verbal interviews alone.

Ask Questions at the Right Time

When you're conducting a B2B empathy trek, timing is everything. Avoid interrupting someone in the middle of a focused task. Instead, jot down questions and wait for natural breaks in their workflow to ask them gently, such as:

“I noticed you paused at that screen – what were you thinking at that moment?”
“Can you walk me through why you took that approach?”

These types of open-ended, reflective questions elicit far richer responses than yes/no inquiries.

Document Actively, But Stay Discreet

Use notes or digital tools to log your observations in real-time, but avoid distracting customers. If appropriate, take supportive photos or screenshots (with permission) to supplement your field notes. This material becomes especially useful when sharing findings with internal teams later on.

Be Respectful and Non-Judgmental

Remember: you’re a guest in someone’s workplace. Every decision they make has a context, even if it seems inefficient from the outside. Practicing empathy means honoring their reality, not trying to fix it while you're still learning from it.

These best practices for professional user research ensure that you're not just capturing surface-level feedback – you’re gaining a deep appreciation for the customer experience from the inside out.

Debrief as a Team Right Away

Once the B2B empathy fieldwork is complete, gather your team to share fresh observations while they’re still clear and vivid. This collaborative approach helps reinforce key patterns you noticed and allows multiple perspectives to enrich the insights.

Highlight Common Themes and Pain Points

Review your notes and look across customer journeys for repeated challenges – slow approval processes, confusing system interfaces, or outdated tools. Identifying systematic friction helps you target root causes rather than isolated symptoms.

Map the B2B Customer Journey

Visualizing the full b2b customer journey can reveal where drop-offs, delays, or frustrations occur most often. A simple journey map plotted with emotion levels (frustrated, anxious, satisfied) helps teams pinpoint when and why experience gaps arise.

Translate Observations into Opportunity Areas

Knowing how to identify B2B pain points is only the first step. Next, connect those observations to opportunities. For example:

• Observation: Users keep exporting data to Excel for analysis.
  Implication: The reporting tool is limited or unintuitive.
  Opportunity: Improve in-platform analytics with deeper customization options.
• Observation: Customers are manually entering duplicate information.
  Implication: Systems aren’t integrated.
  Opportunity: Create API integrations between platforms to streamline workflows.

This step moves your work from data collection to business impact – a key part of high-value b2b insights work.

Share Insights with Empathy and Clarity

Finally, package the story in a way that’s digestible for your internal stakeholders. Use video clips, quotes, and customer journey highlights to bring the observations to life. Avoid blaming the customer – focus instead on how their challenges create opportunities for improvement and innovation.

Whether you're testing messaging, refining services, or improving experiences, empathy trek insights are a compelling addition to product planning, content strategies, and service design across your organization.

At SIVO, we believe that user research should always lead to action. When done well, B2B empathy treks don’t just surface problems – they open up whole new possibilities for serving your customers with greater clarity and care.