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On the road to revenue-driven customer success: How to map out and attribute value to every B2B customer journey stage🏎️
Written By Jeremy Sacramento
What you’ll take away from this article:
Part 1: Why B2B customer journey mapping is valuable and how it helps you differentiate yourself from your competitors. 🏆
Part 2: How to efficiently create your own B2B customer journey map without wasting time and money by drawing from the knowledge and material that already exists within your business. 🛣️
Part 3: How to fully digitize your B2B customer journey map with the help of customer journey tools, templates, and attribution platforms. 🏁
Jump Straight to your B2B Customer Journey Map 👇
All roads (should) lead to revenue
Let’s face it: there can be a lot of bumps in the road when it comes to converting a prospect into a customer. Especially in the world of B2B, where the customer journey can be overly complex and frustrating to navigate.
Most of the roadblocks prospects hit along the customer journey can be parked in the following three categories:
Too many stakeholders representing a single company’s purchase
Unlike B2C, the “customer” in B2B is not a single person, but rather a group of people representing the company (also known as an account). Multiple persons (and their opinions) need to align and agree on buying into your company’s product or service.
2. Too many overlapping channels and touchpoints that create a non-linear buyer journey
A customer on the B2B buyer journey frequently interacts with a minimum of six channels throughout the journey, making it difficult to find out which paths actually led to a sale and how you can repeat that success.
3. Long Sales Cycles
The buyer journey is a lot longer than most SaaS companies realize (more than 12 months on average!). It’s essential to track this metric, so you know the true length of your B2B buyer journey and what drives your success.
According to McKinsey’s research, close to 65% of your customers won’t convert because of the inconsistent experiences created by these three above factors.
The most common mistake companies make when it comes to customer journeys is making the assumption that customers move through your marketing and sales touch points exactly the way you want and expect them to. In other words: you're at risk of measuring the internal perspective of your company, rather than the true experience of your customer.
The only way you can be absolutely sure that each channel, activity, and campaign is performing as intended is to create a map that reflects reality, and attribute value to each touchpoint. Check out this article: What is Attribution, really?
Without this, you’ll never be able to influence the customer journey effectively.
Part 1: Why B2B customer journey mapping is valuable 🏆
What’s a customer journey map?
A customer journey map is a detailed illustration that visually communicates which touchpoints a customer passes through when interacting with your company. It ensures you don't overlook, underestimate, or overestimate any critical interactions, and can be a game-changer when it comes to increasing conversion and revenue.
In a world where prices and products are no longer enough to set you apart, a lot of SaaS companies look to customer experience to stand out amongst competitors. But before you can deliver an exceptional customer experience, you need to map out what that experience looks like.
A B2B customer journey map can help you to:
Uncover high-converting channels and touchpoints
Align products and services across departments
Improve customer experience (remove pains and frustrations)
Improve customer loyalty and engagement
Improve retention and contract renewals
Reduce costs
Improve brand reputation and key messaging
Tailor content for each stage of the customer journey
Create a common language between Sales, Marketing, and Product where everybody can focus on their contribution to revenue (For more on this check out this article on Revenue Marketing)
Repeat the actions that drive your revenue
In the end, a customer journey map helps you identify your B2B company’s high-level capabilities and uncover what changes need to be made (the people, processes, and systems) that will allow you to deliver the most ideal customer journey, impact revenue, and stand out from the crowd.
Populating a customer journey map
The four main elements that should be included in a B2B customer journey map are:
The very first time you see your customer and every single touchpoint up until the account is closed (all online and offline activities). At Dreamdata, we put a lot of focus on this all-important KPI, and call it "Time to Revenue”. This metric usually takes 2-3 months longer than what most marketers expect and is an essential part of knowing and analyzing the true length of the customer journey.
Any possible pain points in the journey that may create friction for the customer, resulting in feelings of negativity.
Key gaps in the journey between the internal and external perspectives that need to be mended.
Departments, teams and people whose work contributes to the delivery of the customer experience at each touchpoint (Marketing, Sales, Product, Support, etc.). Who owns the context of certain make-or-break experiences (gaps) and is responsible for optimizing (mending) them?
You should end up with a visual blueprint of the customer journey that includes every single stakeholder, every single touchpoint, and every single tool. This can be a flowchart, a diagram… Whatever makes the most sense for your B2B buyer journey:
Once the journey is mapped, you can apply the attribution model of your choice. But more on that later!
Everyone benefits from the journey
A customer journey map is not solely beneficial for the customer success department. Every department and team can gain insights from the map, resulting in a continuously optimized, cross-departmental journey from start to finish.
Customer Success
Rather than assuming or guessing a customer’s experience, the map empowers customer success teams by providing them with the data they need to remove pain points, lower friction, and enhance the overall customer experience (ie. during onboarding).
Sales
The map sets sales reps up for success by showing them each step the customer has gone through before making it to the sales stage. By knowing the mental and emotional state of the customer, sales teams are able to bring it home much faster.
Marketing and Demand Generation
A customer journey map visualizes the emotions and thoughts of customers at each touchpoint. Knowing this information allows marketing and demand generation professionals to customize and optimize content, anticipate questions and concerns, and increase the relevance of activities and campaigns.
Product and UX Design
Customers move through various touch points long before they ever hit product onboarding, product managers and UX/UI designers can use a customer journey map to create products and interfaces that address the customer’s expectations, solve their problems, help them reach their goals, and align with what they’ve been promised along the way.
Part 2: How to create your own B2B customer journey map 🛣️
Building a customer journey map can be quite complicated. To get a true reflection of reality, you need to do your research (without cutting any corners), and get an understanding of your customers. Basically, you want to avoid months of work ending up on a nice poster next to the watercooler that no one looks at.
The tricky part is that opinions on who the customer is and what their needs are will differ depending on each department’s point of view. That’s why the map needs to be created from the outside-in customer perspective. What do your customers value? What causes them frustration? Why does it cause them frustration? Sorry, there aren’t any shortcuts to getting these answers. It all comes down to good research.
The customer data is there to provide a reality check. It questions and tests the customer myths that may exist within your company ("all of our customers think X, Y or Z"). And in the end, you have a map that’s infused with the voice of the customer.
🛑 If you don’t have customer data as part of the journey mapping exercise, you’re at risk of measuring the internal perspective, rather than the reality.
There are two types of data B2B companies should use to create the customer journey map:
1. Qualitative (the “why”)
The “intention” piece of the puzzle. It covers how your customers think and feel at certain parts in the customer journey, and what they’re trying to accomplish ("How satisfied were you? How likely are you to buy again?"). You can get feedback from your customer-facing employees (Customer Success, Support, etc.), as they’re a great proxy for what's going on with your customers and are often the first to know what problems arise.
2. Quantitative (the “what”)
Rather than looking at intent, look at what your customers actually do.
This is where you dive into behavioral data (e.g. "What percentage of our prospects convert to buyers after they've interacted with a specific touchpoint?").
Knowing the “what” will add an even deeper understanding of your customers’ behavior to the journey map (and make it easier to track and optimize!).
Map creation can be overwhelming, but thankfully you can draw from the knowledge and material that already exists within your business to start your planning. The key is to put the pedal to the metal and just get started! 🏎️
Here are the 4 main steps to creating the first draft:
Make an ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)
Make personas (research-based representations of who your users/buyers are)
Define the customer journey map stages you want to track
Plot out the main touchpoints in each stage so you can track and measure them
1. Make an Ideal Customer Profile
An Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) helps you to uncover the kind of customer you want to sell to, as well as the customers you’re actually selling to. An ICP also identifies the pain points, motivations, and expectations of your target audience.
Unlike B2C, you also need to account for these attributes in B2B-specific profiles:
Company size
Industry
Number of employees
Number of customers
Budget
Buying process
Competitors
You can find a lot of the above information in Salesforce dashboards or on the LinkedIn page of a company.
You can also approach it from the perspective of the user personas who would benefit from your product or service the most. Define what professionals you’re trying to target and the departments and industries they work in, then list the attributes of those company profiles.
Making an ICP will quickly make it apparent whether you are actually selling to the customers you want to be selling to. This makes it a valuable asset even before it becomes part of your customer journey map.
2. Make Personas
Personas are research-based representations of who your users and buyers are. Not every user is a buyer, and vice versa, especially when it comes to the world of B2B. The stakeholders you end up talking to may be buyers (who’ll never actually use the product), users (who don’t have the authority/position to buy the product), or a mix of both.
Understanding how your product or service addresses their needs at the right time and in the right channel will be pivotal to the overall success of your customer journey (and actually making a sale!).
You’ll want to describe their job title, department, and background (who they are), as well as their goals, motivators, and frustrations (what drives them). Finally, you should clearly define their role in the buying process (are they a buyer, user, or both?).
There are a multitude of ways you can collect the information you need to create personas:
Interviews
Surveys
Customer support emails
Feedback requests
User trials
Voice of your customer programs (ask your Customer Success team!)
Ideal customer profile. ✅ Buyer personas. ✅
Now it’s time to dive into the individual stages of your customer journey.
Start building your B2B Customer Journey map now
3. Define the customer journey map stages
The stages consist of all the steps a customer goes through on their way to purchasing your product or service. For each stage, your customer will be in a different mindset and interact with different touchpoints. For example, buyers tend to be more critical in early-buyer stages.
That’s why it’s important to divide your customer journey map into the typical stages a customer moves through during the B2B buyer journey:
Awareness: the customer realizes they have a problem they want fixed.
Consideration: the research stage. The customer looks into what solutions to their problem are available on the market.
Purchase: the customer is ready to buy a solution.
Use: the customer becomes a (hopefully active and engaged!) user of the product or service they’ve purchased.
Dividing your customer journey map into these stages will give you a clear framework and help you understand how purchasing decisions are made.
It’ll also give you a comprehensive overview of your journey map so you can more easily pinpoint where your revenue is coming from, what stages have (too many) roadblocks, and what stages could be high-performers with just a few simple tweaks.
4. Plot out the main touchpoints in each stage
Now that you’ve divided your journey map into stages, it’s time to find out which touchpoints influence your customers in each stage. Each touchpoint is an activity, campaign, piece of content, or stakeholder your customer interacts with on their way to accomplishing their goal (buying a solution to their problem).
It’s all about finding out which activities in each stage are performing as expected, which ones are ready for quick-and-dirty optimization, and where you should put the brakes on. To do that, you need to get on top of your commercial tech stack and data analytics so you can correctly track and identify your customers across the funnel.
If you’re low on battery and time (as most of us are), don’t make the common mistake of implementing identification absolutely everywhere. You go from running around in the dark to highlighting absolutely everything. The result is that you’re just as lost as before (but with better lighting). 🔦
Start out with the four main places you should always run tracking and identification on: traffic that comes from email links, web forms, logins, and ad platforms.
Keep in mind that these are predominantly online touchpoints, and that interactions also happen offline. But if you get the online touchpoints done as a first step, you’ll be pleasantly surprised how much your tracking improves.
Ready to start digitizing and mapping out the full customer journey and finding out how your accounts move from end-to-end? Then it’s time to go down the rabbit hole, to the wonderful world of attribution.
Part 3: How to fully digitize your B2B customer journey map
Feeling overwhelmed? Makes sense. Connecting the dots between your touchpoints and data can be a daunting process. Each individual department is inclined to trust their own data set (Sales, Marketing, Product, Support, etc.). There’s just too much data, period. Where do you even start? What customer journey mapping tool or software is the right one? What data set most accurately reflects reality?
The challenge (if you choose to accept it) is to dive under the hood: gather, clean and consolidate all your data in one shared place, and then apply customer journey analysis to uncover what touchpoints perform well. Once you’ve done that, you’ll know what touchpoints actually drive your company’s revenue and growth.
Dreamdata Customer Journeys
You can either do this yourself with the use of templates and attribution tools. Or you can go for an account-based revenue attribution platform like Dreamdata, that does all the data-crunching for you. We pull together all existing data sources and attribute value to the individual parts of the customer journey, so it makes sense from a revenue perspective.
With the Dreamdata Customer Journey feature you can reveal the complete picture of each customer journey in real time, giving you complete transparency of every touch of every account. Sort through interactive and visualized customer journey timelines to reveal every detail behind every account and access a single source of truth for a shared understanding across teams. Drill down on each contact's individual journey through the dashboard’s intuitive search and timeline and reach out with relevant, timely messaging. Analyze the journeys of your ABM target list to see what's driving them down the funnel to optimize your campaigns. Find, compare, and understand your deals instantly by selecting your preferred time frame, pipeline stage and segment to identify and easily compare your deals - all with Customer Journey.
What does this mean? You’ll be able to say, with certainty “the customer actually clicked that ad, they actually clicked that email, they got a phone call”, and so on. You’ll have eyes on and understand the entire digital customer journey.
This is exactly why customer journey maps are such a powerful asset in the right hands. Each action taken by each team is mapped out and assigned a digital touch that can be tracked and identified.
With the right map, all of the actions made by all your teams will finally have that digital reflection and before you know it, your company will have gone through a digital transformation. 🎉
Start your engines!
Things are changing fast in the B2B landscape as traditional sales funnels are being overtaken by data-driven, customer-focused journeys. Knowing what moves customers is the fuel companies need in the tank to really drive growth and revenue. And once you’re sure of your data and the full customer journey, chances are you’ll win the race from your competitors a lot more, too.
Start with mapping out everything you already know and have. Get on top of your tracking. Bad tracking leads to bad data, which in turn leads to bad business decisions. Embrace the fact that a customer journey map is a living thing. It needs to be. Nothing is static in a company. Economies rise and fall. Markets change. Product departments release new features. Marketing and Demand Generation come up with new initiatives and campaigns.
🛑 Just as your company keeps evolving, so does the customer journey, and so should your customer journey map (don’t be that person who just makes a static poster that’s nice to look at).
Finally, it’s important to accept that attribution is never going to be perfect and solve all your problems. There will always be bits and pieces in the customer journey you can’t discover or reflect digitally. That’s okay. What attribution can do for you is to get you as close to the truth as a B2B data set can take you.
The end goal is that you’ll end up with a data set that reflects the full end-to-end customer journey, allowing you to make confident business decisions that are sure to rev up your revenue. 😉
