The steps buyers must go through are clear, and in no-way locked to antiquated sales-stages. Buyers are the only ones that can move to the next stage, and each participant or 'stakeholder' will remain in their own specific place along that journey until they're confident enough to move on. Don't forget there are 4.8 stakeholders on average per deal, and you could have up to 16 different people to coach through these stages (data from the 2022 Sales Engineering Compensation & Workload report).
What's rather scary, is seldom do you get to meet all these stakeholders; some have massive hidden influence and addressing their needs is hard. Really hard.