Understanding the Customer Journey
by Ryan Janssen
I am usually the grIP data expert. But today, I am diverging to discuss something my team has been focusing on lately: mapping the customer journey.
Your users are the most important part of your business. So understanding how a customer becomes a customer is a great way to invest your time. It is really the first step in building a company that scales, which is why almost all high-growth companies excel at this process.
And it is why you need a Customer Journey. Your entire organization needs to know what potential buyers are thinking as they advance towards becoming customers. What they feel. What their problems are, and what pushes them towards the ultimate decision.
First, some helpful resources:
The Sales Acceleration Formula. Roberge has a great section on how to plan a Customer Journey, and mapping it to your CRM process.
HBR has a good primer on Customer Journeys
A very good template for mapping Customer Journeys on Usertesting
SurveyMonkey has a good version for B2C Customer Journeys
Some general tips on the Customer Journey planning process:
Understand your customer more deeply than you do now. The Customer Journey planning process never ends. Interview customers, analyze data, review industry best practices. Question all of your assumptions and look outward in your planning.
Make sure your Customer Journey is action-oriented. It is tempting to add “sent follow-up email” as a stage in your pipeline. Or “customer shows strong interest”. Every stage in the journey should have an external trigger, and a measurable validation that you have taken the Customer through this stage. This is especially true for marketing, where every stage in the journey should sync up to a bucket in your CRM.
Add loss branches. These are even more important than the sale. Track and understand why customers fall off at each stage of the process. Once you understand the most vulnerable stages in the journey, you know where to focus.
Take the Customer Journey beyond sales. The customer journey should drive product design, customer support, and every other area of your business. This is what it actually means to be a customer-centric organization! I have previously invested in a company because they had the customer journey posted on the wall of the lunch room.
This framework extends far beyond B2B sales - this works for any BD-type process you are working on. Building your personal network? Trying to get a promotion? These should all have Customer Journeys too. Whatever it is, start with a set of discrete states that map out how the customer will get from awareness, to interest, to making a decision.