Customer Journey Mapping: The Growth Engine for your Business in 2024

By Ethan White, updated 7/29/2024

 

Growing a company is hard. Knowing where your next customers are, how to better serve your existing customers, and articulating what they are experiencing in a way that you can communicate both with them and your team is a challenge every company deals with in one way or another.

 

The customer journey is the roadmap to clarity in the growth. Especially for founders, sales, and marketing leaders, understanding and optimizing this journey goes beyond a strategic advantage—it’s an absolute necessity. 

 

Why is that, and what is a customer journey map anyway? Customer journey mapping is the process of charting the course that customers take from the first spark of awareness to the final act of purchase and beyond. It’s a tool that reveals opportunities to increase deal size, enhance customer lifetime value, accelerate the sales cycle, and improve conversion rates.

 

The Importance of Customer Journey Mapping 

 

Customer journey mapping is crucial because it provides a detailed understanding of how customers interact with your company at every touchpoint. This insight allows businesses to:

 

Increase Deal Size: By identifying key moments where additional value can be offered, companies can introduce upsells or cross-sells effectively for new and existing customers.

 

Enhance Customer Lifetime Value: A well-mapped journey fosters customer loyalty, encouraging repeat business and additional cross-sells.

 

Accelerate Sales Cycle: Understanding the customer’s path helps streamline the sales process and leverage the right resources at the right time, reducing the time from lead to conversion.

 

Boost Conversion Rates: By understanding who is involved in decisions on the customer’s side at each stage, and what objections you’ll face, you and your team can present the right things to the right people at the right time to keep the deal from dying.
 

 

The Sequence of Customer Journey Mapping

 

The sequence involves three key steps:

 

1. Define Your Ideal Customer Profile (here's a handy resource on that), Account Segments and Buyer Personas: Categorize customers into distinct groups based on shared characteristics and behaviors. Depending on the overall context, you may create unique customer journeys for different segments, e.g. Enterprise vs. Self-serve SMB vs SLED.
    

2. Align on Strategy: Ensure that whoever is in charge of this project understands your company’s overall strategy - we want to design a customer journey (and subsequent programs) that align with how our company wants to compete in the marketplace.
    

3. People, Process, Policy, Tech, Data: At each stage, consider how your people, processes, policies, technologies, and data come together to drive action and decisions that drive the results in a programmatic way.

 

The 9-Stage Customer Journey Methodology

 

My breakdown of the customer journey typically involves 9 stages, depending on the business context. Here’s a breakdown of each stage, with questions you should ask yourself, as well as what a typical resource and call-to-action (CTA) looks like. Additionally ask yourself in each stage if it’s where you should be focusing on developing or enhancing capabilities, now or in general.

 

Problem Identification

1. What is the trigger for recognizing a problem?

2. Who recognizes it?

3. What resources or capabilities does our company have to help prospects at this stage?

4. Typical resources/capabilities: Ungated content

5. Typical next steps/CTA: Learn more about how others like you solved this problem.

 

Solution Exploration

1. Who is looking for the solution?

2. What is their primary concern? Dollars, risk mitigation, time savings, etc.

3. Typical resources/capabilities: Ungated content, targeted account-based marketing/retargeting efforts, intent data, sales calls w/ team.

4. Typical next steps/CTA: Learn about how others like you used our solution to solve this problem.

 

Product Awareness

1. Who is involved in discussions on the prospect’s side? This means both their internal discussions as well as ones with our own representatives.
2. Who is involved in discussions from our side? (Typically marketing, biz dev, AEs.)
3. How do we handle transitions, e.g. from marketing to biz dev, biz dev to sales.
4. What questions are prospects asking? (Mapped to the persona.)
5. What objections do we encounter? (Mapped to the persona)
6. Typical resources/capabilities: Ungated content, targeted ABM/retargeting efforts, sales calls w/ team.
7. Typical next steps/CTA: Schedule discovery, understand how the contacts measure success, whether this is part of an existing initiative, and understand your champion.
    

Interest

1. Who is involved in discussions on the prospect’s side? 
2. What new personas are getting involved on the customers side?
3. How are we proactively multithreading into the account?
4. How are we getting executive buy-in?
5. Who is involved in discussions from our side? Marketing, AEs, SEs, etc.
6. What questions are prospects asking? (Mapped to the persona.)
7. What objections do we encounter? (Mapped to the persona)
8. Typical resources/capabilities: Ungated content, targeted ABM/retargeting efforts, sales calls w/ team, technical/solution resources, custom solution presentations, webinars.
9. Typical next steps/CTA: Deep dives, business cases, understand how they will make a final decision, the timeline for a decision, and who is going to sign the contract.
    

Purchase Decision

1. How are we de-risking the final stages?

2. How do we ensure the person who will manage the implementation of our solution is involved and bought in?

3. What internal executive support can we escalate to for customer calls?

4. What cross-functional support do we have to handle back office tasks?

5. Who else is talking behind closed doors on the prospect’s side?

6. How do we ensure we control the narrative?

7. What is the contract review process?

8. What is the contract signature process?

9. Typical resources/capabilities: Ungated content, targeted ABM/retargeting efforts, sales calls w/ team, technical/solution resources, custom solution presentations, webinars, other events.

10. Typical next steps/CTA: Finalizing scope, contract redlines, final executive decision, signatures, on-sites.

 

Implementation/Onboarding

1. Was the point of contact involved in the sale? If so, were they a promoter or detractor in the decision? If not, what do we need to do to get them bought into our solution?
2. How do we ensure a smooth handoff from the sales team to the implementation/onboarding team?
3. What resources do we have for customers to learn how to maximize the value they get from the solution?
4. What personas are involved in driving implementation?
5. Typical resources/capabilities: Gated and ungated content, project managers, training modules, in-app tutorials, webinars, customer events.
6. Typical next steps/CTA: Customer training, regular project management calls until project completion, setting up calls with ongoing Customer Success and/or Account Management reps, on-sites.
    

Success and Support

1. Who is the point of contact for Customer Success and Account Management?

2. How do we ensure we have champions at every level from individual users to executive management?

3. How do we track the value the customer purchased our solution for?

4. How do we measure our success at delivering the value they purchased?

5. What is the cadence for checkpoints with the customer?

6. How do we monitor account health?

7. Typical resources/capabilities: Gated and ungated content, project managers, training modules, in-app tutorials, webinars, customer events.

8. Typical next steps/CTA: Customer training, regular project management calls until project completion, setting up calls with ongoing Customer Success and/or Account Management reps, business reviews, on-sites.

 

Renew/Upgrade

1. How do we keep a pulse on the customer’s unique needs?
2. How do we identify where their needs align with your solutions?
3. How do we ensure the customer is aware of new and existing solutions so we’re top of mind when they recognize a new problem?
4. How far ahead of a renewal/new purchase opportunity do we engage?
5. How and to whom do we escalate if a customer is at risk?
6. Typical resources/capabilities: Other solutions, renewal date tracking, usage monitoring, purchase tracking.
7. Typical next steps/CTA: Customer sales calls, demos, on-sites.
    

Churn

1. What will we do to try preventing churn? Proactively and reactively.
2. How do we identify the root cause of the churn? Then how do we identify accounts with the same risk?
3. As a customer is churning, how will we facilitate their offboarding? What concessions will and won’t we make by default? What is our exception handling policy?

 

Bringing it all together

 

Once you've gone through each stage asking these questions and more, you should have an exhaustive list of projects and programs to execute to tie your people, process, policy, tech, and data together in a way that unites the customer journey.

 

Unless your company is filled with highly-capable people sitting around doing nothing, you'll need to prioritize which ones will make the dents you need at the pace you require. I try to aim for a mix of fast wins and longer-term but higher-impact ones so that you do see quick improvements, while also having some bigger initiatives moving in the right direction.

 

I tend to use either a Balanced Scorecard or OKR framework to define what the progress and performance of each of the initiatives is, but if you have a different one you prefer, use what's intuitive - as long as it involved provable progress and performance!

 

Until next time

 

Across all businesses, a customer journey map provides a strategic framework that aligns every aspect of a business with the needs and experiences of the customer. Done well, it’s a lens to understanding and improving every interaction, increasing deal sizes, enhancing customer lifetime value, accelerating sales cycles, and improving conversion rates.