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We can all agree that sales are the lifeblood of every business, right? It’s true that sales are important, but you can’t make sales if you don’t know your current or aspirational customer base. You can’t have a happy customer base without a good B2B customer experience.
Your business has nearly complete control over the customer experience. There are always outliers, but most of your customer base can be influenced using the process known as customer journey mapping.
Customer journey mapping designs the lifecycle of a customer from their first encounter to closing and continued experience, helping you to curate a delivery method designed to please them.
Though it sounds intricate, we plan to break it down for you. In this blog, you’ll learn about the customer journey mapping process, the stages of customer journey maps and their significance to your business.
You’ll also explore:
- Examples of B2B customer journey maps
- What a B2B customer journey map entails
- How an understanding of the customer journey can improve your business
Your customers, current and potential, are your greatest assets. Understanding what they experience can help you adapt to their needs. Ideally, this will improve customer attraction, engagement, and retention over time. It’s an exciting prospect that just takes a little bit of understanding.
If you need help understanding your customer journey map, we’re happy to help you out. Contact us today to receive a free customer journey map consultation with one of our expert strategists.
Explaining Customer Journey Mapping
So, just what is customer journey mapping? A customer journey map is a chart of your customer’s experience with your brand. The map will act as an outline of your customer’s touchpoints during the buying process.
As a business, customer journey mapping can show potential and current customers experience your business at every step of their buying process. What do they see? How do they interact with you? How are they treated? There's a lot to creating, examining, and changing B2B customer journey mapping and B2C customer journey mapping.
Customer journey mapping can also improve the overall B2B customer experience. For customer retention and longevity, you need to develop a customized experience that serves the needs of the customers you’re trying to attract and then keep.
Overall, this will promote customer engagement, trust, and loyalty. As such, your customers become brand ambassadors themselves, promoting your business and all you do for them to attract like-minded customers.
Every part of the business that is a customer touchpoint is part of the journey map. Any part of your business accessed by potential or current customers is a touchpoint.
Talk with the leads in the sales, marketing and support departments as well as the people who are in the trenches who work directly with active and potential customers. More likely, they have valuable information that could help you improve the customer journey based on vital feedback and data.
The Importance of Having a Customer Journey Map
Going through the customer journey mapping exercise is crucial because of the businesses that use it take a strategic approach by paying attention to the expectations of their customers. It gives them a better understanding of the wants, needs, and pain points of customers.
This understanding allows businesses to tweak their marketing, customer service, and advertising to better serve each current and potential customer. Most importantly, you can create a timeline, such as quarterly or annually, to go through this process to ensure that their customers continue to get the best customer service based on new information.
Examples of B2B Customer Journey Mapping Processes
It’s never easy to get started on something new. We’ve developed these B2B customer journey mapping examples to give you something to work off. Chances are you’ll see something that inspires you to design your own set of journey stages for your customers.
Each type of customer journey relies on creating a buyer persona. A buyer or customer persona is crucial so that you’re able to truly flesh out what your B2B customers and potential customers experience at each touchpoint during the mapping process. Keep this in mind as you read through the following B2B customer journey mapping options. By knowing the buyer most likely to respond to your touchpoints, you can better maintain engagement and consistency.
The Traditional B2B Customer Journey Map
This customer journey map covers the traditional stages of the B2B customer experience and the customer touchpoints. It addresses all of the customer touchpoints within the journey stages.
The stages of a traditional customer journey map include:
- The Awareness Stage: Your business uses various methods to make potential customers aware of who you are, what you do, and how they can benefit.
- The Decision Stage: Your business can offer several things (like a coupon, free consultation or quote, demo, or work with a sales rep) so that they can decide whether you’re right for their business.
- Service Delivery and Feedback Stage: Your customer receives the services they were promised. Did you meet the customer’s expectations? Ask for feedback if they don’t voluntarily provide it to you.
- Relationship Maintenance Stage: Your business works to strengthen and maintain your relationship with the customer.
Tactical B2B Customer Journey Map
This process is used when there are only one or two specific areas to improve the customer experience process. For example, maybe the biggest area that needs to improve is in the relationship maintenance or the decision stage.
Despite being a tactical map that addresses only one or two areas, the map itself can look much bigger. That is because it analyzes the microstates within the stages mentioned above, ensuring that everything that occurs within is a customer touchpoint in itself. Let’s take a look at relationship building to analyze customers’ decision-making regarding making a purchase.
The journey stages of a tactical map are:
- Awareness: This becomes a presales stage for an additional purchase. They become more aware of the services you provide for their business.
- Information Seeking: Your clients seek the right information to help solve their problems. As B2B customers, they are looking at multiple businesses that may be able to meet their needs. So, how can you improve how you present this information to your customers, so they choose you?
- Supplier Short List: Your customers then create a short list of suppliers who can meet their needs.
- Pricing: B2B customers find out the costs of the services they need. They may also look to negotiate. If you get past this stage, the presales stage itself is complete, and you enter into the repurchasing stage.
- Ordering: The customer orders the services they need. This is the first part of the repurchasing stage.
- Delivery: The customer receives their new services.
- Sales Rep Support: During this stage, the B2B customer receives support from your sales team. This is the most crucial part of relationship building to graduate to customer loyalty. They need easy access to information regarding your services, along with a great relationship with your business's customer service and sales reps.
Similarities & Differences of B2B Customer Journey Maps
The core similarity in these maps is the emphasis placed on the customer’s overall experience. Understanding and improving the customer experience should be the main goal for any business because happy customers are the most loyal. Each stage has a role, impacting the others like a series of dominoes. Simply by understanding each of these stages, you’ve come a long way toward designing your own customer experience.
The differences between these customer journey map methods are found in the goals of the customer journey maps themselves. You can see the various touchpoints involved in each one, the questions asked and answered, and the objectives of each one. These things are unique to your business and will help you determine which one will be right for you.
Deciding which to use or deciding to develop your own style depends on your goals. You can create a customer journey map in many ways:
- A map that outlines the current state as it exists today provides a foundation.
- A map that outlines your business’s ideal state to establish goals.
- A map that outlines a strategic situation provides a wider view of your objectives with a mind toward completing them.
- A map that outlines the tactical experience which shows a day-in-the-life-of view of your customer.
- A map that outlines levels based on buyer personas and demonstrates the breakdown within customer touchpoints.
Each can act as a solution for your business and allow you to get more in touch with your customer and their experience with your business.
Customer Journey Maps: A Great RevOps Tool
Regardless of the size of your business, a B2B customer journey map can help improve your customers’ experience. Now that you have a better understanding of the various customer journey maps, their stages, and how they’re used, you can start working on one for your business.
While you’re here, check out these other resources to help you improve your business processes:
