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A step-by-step guide to mapping the B2B customer journey (with real-life examples)

It’s tricky to effectively map out all the different user personas and purchasing processes in the B2B customer journey. But understanding your customer's experience is key to improving conversions and retaining users.

That’s why it’s essential for B2B companies to follow an effective customer journey mapping process.

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Use our step-by-step guide to create a map for your business-to-business (B2B) company that tracks your users’ unique journeys, giving you key insights into your customers and their needs. 

Get valuable insights into your B2B customer journey

Hotjar helps you understand how buyers interact with key web and product touchpoints to improve their experience.

How to map out the B2B customer journey in 5 steps

Mapping the customer journey is essential in understanding your buyers and turning them into loyal customers. 

Follow these steps to create an actionable B2B customer journey map that gives insights into who your customers are and helps you build an optimized user experience (UX) for them:

1. Set goals unique to your business

Before you start mapping out the customer journey, define your larger business and customer goals. 

To begin, ask yourself what you want your customers to achieve—what are their jobs to be done (JTBD)? Does your business depend on repeat customers, or are your products one-off larger ticket items? Your customer journey will look different if you sell business clients a one-time-purchase product, like a hardware device, versus a subscription service.

For example, different B2B firms—like GE Renewable Energy and Hubspot—will have very different objectives. A company like GE Renewable Energy that sells large equipment to B2B customers may prioritize goals like generating more website conversions and creating brand advocates who recommend GE products to other businesses in the industry. 

On the other hand, a software company like Hubspot will need to emphasize the customer journey's onboarding and renewal components to increase customer retention. 

Know what your goals are before creating your B2B customer journey map to prioritize the most important steps for your customers and your business.

2. Identify your customer segments

The purchasing process is an especially nuanced cycle for B2B businesses, because the end users of your product or service are often not the same people making the purchasing decision .

John Forberger , founder of Forberger Communications , highlights this complexity: 

Typically, multiple people have influence over a deal. Maybe one person researches how to replace a current tool, then a second person does a demo, and a third person actually cuts the check.

Don't just focus on the users who’ll try out your product or service, or on the C-level decision makers: understand every stakeholder involved in the purchasing process to map out an accurate B2B customer journey . 

Consider the different needs of end users versus purchasers and think about how your user personas may differ depending on company size and type. 

Take Canva, for example: the design tool is used by a variety of businesses, from freelancers to large corporations like PayPal and Danone. Understanding different user profiles and needs gave Canva the insight they needed to design their homepage for different B2B customer types who can choose their own adventure and head off on their most relevant user journey.

Pro tip: once you define your user profiles, learn more about different buyer types by asking the right survey questions . Use these questions to dig deeper into user goals and jobs to be done to better design the B2B customer journey. 

3. Define the B2B customer journey stages

Once you have clear goals and user personas, it’s time to define the stages of  the customer journey. Let’s take a look at a typical 7-stage B2B customer journey, using the popular SEO tool Ahrefs as an example.

Awareness: a buyer becomes aware of their problem and begins to search for solutions, which is when they discover your brand. In our example, a buyer knows they need to improve their website’s SEO performance, so they search for “best SEO tools” and come across Ahrefs. They visit the homepage, where the tool’s value proposition entices them to learn more.

Consideration: customers consider your product or service as a potential solution. Here, the buyer visits Ahref’s website and learns about the brand’s unique selling proposition , reads about features, watches a demo, explores resources like the Ahrefs blog and SEO guide, and weighs up whether Ahrefs is the product solution for them.

Decision: the buyer makes a decision and purchases the product or service that best fits their needs. In the case of Ahrefs, the buyer purchases the subscription (Lite, Standard, Advanced, or Enterprise) that’s right for them. The Ahrefs website guides users in the decision and purchasing process by displaying clear CTAs that encourage users to become paying customers.

Onboarding: the buyer starts to use the product, goes through the onboarding process, and gets familiar with the tool by reading guides and watching demos. They (ideally) start to adopt it into their everyday workflow. 

Support: users contact customer teams as they need support. In our example, customers have easy access to customer support agents and the Ahrefs help center to smoothly resolve issues and questions.

Retention: customer retention is a key part of the B2B buyer journey, and at this stage, buyers decide whether or not they’ll remain loyal customers and continue using your product. Ahrefs offers a range of subscription models and gives users who sign up for an annual subscription a two-month free plan. 

Advocacy: the final stage in an ideal customer journey is turning customers into brand advocates. Ahrefs has done a good job of this: the homepage shows reviews from real users who recommend the tool, including pro SEOs, content marketers, and agencies.

Pro tip: your product's user journey may look different depending on your company and customer types: a business customer purchasing a one-off product will have a very different journey from a company subscribing to a service. 

Oleg Donets , founder and chief marketing officer at Real Estate Bees , points out how the stages of non-SaaS B2B customer journeys can differ from SaaS journeys : 

"Since the vast majority of SaaS companies utilize subscription revenue models, this directly impacts the customer journey. B2B customer journeys often scale back a notch shortly after a sale has been made, but that’s when the customer journey of a SaaS company just starts kicking in."

4. List all possible B2B customer touchpoints 

Once you map out the steps in your customer’s B2B journey, identify each ‘touchpoint’ where they interact with your company, from social media posts to your homepage CTAs and your product itself. 

Let’s go back to the Ahrefs example. 

A key touchpoint in the early awareness, consideration, and purchase stages of the B2B customer journey is their homepage and a clear call-to-action (CTA) button. These onsite touchpoints show customers what their next steps in the product experience (PX) should be and give them the information they need to make a decision. 

In the next phases—onboarding and support—follow Ahrefs' example by making it easy for users to connect with your B2B business, resolve their issues, and upgrade. On the Ahrefs help center page, customers can reach out to representatives and receive support within minutes. 

Make sure you continue mapping out  how your users interact with your B2B after they become customers—in the retention and advocacy phases . How can you make it easier for them to renew their subscription? Do you offer any rewards for referrals?

As well as mapping out touchpoints by customer journey phase, consider the different touchpoints experienced by different user personas.  

For example, the product experience of high-level executives who make the purchasing decision may not be the same as their employees who are your end-users. 

By identifying key B2B customer journey touchpoints for different customers and purchasing stages, you can improve UX, making product advocates out of your buyers.

Pro tip: use Hotjar's Observe tools—like Heatmaps and Recordings —to explore how your users interact with key B2B customer touchpoints on your website and product—and get the insights you need to improve their journey. 

Hotjar Session Recordings show you how users experience your page to improve low-performing touchpoints 

5. Measure and analyze the success of the customer journey

One of the most important customer journey mapping best practices is measuring the success of your customer journey.  

Use the right customer journey mapping tools to help you evaluate the impact of your touchpoints. For best results, combine website analysis tools with software that offers more in-depth product experience insights and user feedback. 

Use Hotjar's Observe tools to track how customers are engaging with your touchpoints. Then use Hotjar’s Ask tools—like Surveys and Feedback widgets—to learn what your users really think and feel about their B2B experience.

Tools like Google Analytics also help in mapping and analyzing the customer journey, giving you more general information on the types of users that visit your website and whether they convert or bounce. 

Combine Hotjar with Google Analytics to dig deeper into B2B customer touchpoint insights to improve conversion rates and enhance the customer experience .  

After you’ve mapped the customer journey, regularly check in on your key goals and what matters most to your customers. Keep measuring the outcomes of your customer journey to understand which aspects of the B2B customer journey are successful and what needs improvement.

Create a brilliant B2B user journey for happier customers

Successfully mapping out the B2B customer journey requires a deep understanding of all your buyers and how they interact with your brand and product. 

Adapting these steps to your customers and company helps you create a customer journey map that identifies what your users need at each stage of the buying cycle to provide them with the best possible experience.

Use Hotjar to understand how buyers interact with key web and product touchpoints—and improve their experience with your B2B business.

FAQs about B2B customer journey mapping

Why do you need b2b customer journey mapping.

Visualizing the customer journey is the first step to understanding and improving it. B2B customer journey mapping helps you identify what type of experience customers have with your product at every stage . 

Without B2B customer journey mapping, you won’t understand the process of converting potential buyers into loyal customers, meaning you have no way to make adjustments that enhance the customer journey.

How is the B2B customer journey different from other customer journeys?

With the B2B customer journey, there are often more stakeholders involved in the decision-making process than with a B2C customer journey. For that reason, the B2B customer journey is often much longer and depends on various decision-makers . 

Plus, the B2B customer journey is often cyclical, as customer retention is such a key goal for many B2B companies.

What are some common mistakes of B2B customer journey mapping?

A big mistake in B2B customer journey mapping is failing to consider all user personas. B2B products often have a number of diverse customer profiles, whether that be different positions within one company (administrator vs. C-level executive) or different types of companies (like a small business vs. an enterprise). 

Another common mistake is not taking into account the length and complexity of the B2B customer journey , which often has a lengthy approval process, and requires several different stakeholders to sign off on purchasing decisions.

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The B2B Customer Journey: Back to The Basics

The B2B customer journey is a complex matter, packed with a host of different touchpoints that affect customer experience. Understanding that complexity is essential in planning your customer service and marketing strategies. 

So, how can you analyze your journey and go about improving it in the right way? We’ve come up with an essential guide to help you do just that.

• Definition of B2B customer journey
• B2B customer journey stages
• Difference between B2B and B2C journeys
• Building a customer journey map
• Improve your B2B customer journey

Let’s get started.

What is a B2B customer journey?

The B2B customer journey is the collection of touchpoints and interactions a customer has with a B2B company, from their very first encounter, all the way through to post-purchase. 

Consider a B2B buyer who becomes aware of a SaaS software company that can address their particular needs, for example. There’s a whole load of other steps to go through before committing to a purchase. And even after purchasing, there’s still the setup, making sure they're getting the most out of it, and so on. That’s all part of the customer journey.

It’s the lasting impression of this journey that creates the all-important customer experience .

The B2B customer journey stages

The B2B customer journey stages consist of five main areas: awareness, consideration, conversion, loyalty, and advocacy. The exact stages may be broken down further or vary depending on the specific type of business (for example, some companies may require onboarding, or have multiple points of purchase).

Incredibly, throughout this whole journey, most B2B buyers spend only 17 percent of their time actually talking to you, according to Gartner's 2019 Future of B2B Buying Journey Report.

The rest of the journey happens "behind your back" — mostly researching and discussing with their team. That means that quality content is of paramount importance to give buyers access to the information they need to move through the stages. 

The table below provides a general overview of how the B2B customer journey could look.

Difference between B2C and B2B journeys

The difference between B2C and B2B customer journeys is essentially that B2B customer journeys are more complex. And of course, they’re selling to different audiences.

That means that although the overall structure, running from awareness through to advocacy, is similar in both, behavior is guided by different motives in B2B.  We can therefore make a number of distinctions. The table below shows some of the most important.

These differences impact how a B2B company goes about its business.

For example, in the case of selling to multiple people, when you’re talking to a non-decision-maker, it might make sense to talk about how user-friendly your service is, and try to give them the tools they need to make a business case to the decision-maker. 

On the other hand, if it’s the actual decision-maker you’re talking to, you might want to think about a strategy that is much more focused on business results and KPIs.

6 Steps to building a customer journey map for B2B

Creating a customer journey map for B2C helps chart the stages your customers go through. It is a crucial first port of call in improving your customer journey, because it allows you to find touchpoints you had neglected before or bottlenecks that appeared. Here are six steps to help you create your B2B customer journey map.

1. Analyze typical buying groups

In a B2B environment, there are often multiple people involved, all with different roles and responsibilities. In fact, the typical buying group for a complex B2B solution involves six to 10 decision makers according to Gartner. And they’ll all have different requirements you’ll have to take on board. Make sure you understand their level of influence on buying decisions, too.

2. Understand your customers’ goals

What needs are your buyers trying to fulfill or what problems are they trying to solve? Take the time to get a handle on their motivations so you can better understand the value you’re going to provide.

3. Leverage data and analytics

Analytics is an extremely useful tool in your B2B customer journey arsenal. It can help you move away from making subjective decisions and ensure you instead deal in cold, hard facts. Use data from multiple sources like your CRM or customer experience platform to get a holistic view of the journey.

4. Build out the B2B customer journey stages

As mentioned previously, your precise customer journey map for B2B will depend on your business’ exact processes. To make things easier, it might help to start from a generic template (you can use the generic stage layout above), and then split that out into more complicated components as you go. It helps to put yourself into your customer’s shoes (perhaps assuming one of your buyer personas) and try to go through the B2B customer journey stages as an experiment.

5. Lay out the different touchpoints

Many B2B touchpoints, for example websites, blog content, and organic search, are shared between B2B and B2C. Others, however, are more specific to B2B. Demos, sales meetings, onboarding — you need to map all that. A digital customer journey may be more commonplace now, but don’t forget to take into account analog channels like print media, too.

6. Define your own goals

It’s useful to keep the end results you want in mind as you go through the process as well. Ultimately you’re going to want results in areas such as retention and customer satisfaction . Gather customer feedback and cross-reference your business analytics to see if you hit these goals.

Note : Depending on your company’s processes, it may make sense to have one customer journey map per major B2B client.

How to improve your customer journey for B2B

According to Gartner’s 2019 report, 77 percent of B2B buyers feel that making a purchase is very complicated and time-consuming. And, ultimately, that is bad for business. To minimize complications, make sure you optimize your B2B customer journey the right way. Here are some ideas to get you going:

• Create buyer personas. When we buy a product, what we’re really doing is ‘hiring’ it to help us do a job, according to Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen. A good place to start then is with a list of your customer’s jobs . What is it that they need to do? Consider factors like your contact’s position in their organization, their business needs, and their role within the decision-making process. These days, 60 percent of all B2B tech buyers are millennials (2 percent are even Gen Z) so this is definitely something to take into consideration.
• Stay focused on content creation. More than half of all B2B buyers view at least eight pieces of content during the purchase process, and 82 percent of buyers viewed at least five pieces of content from the vendor prior to purchase, according to Forrester. Make sure each piece of content is aimed at improving the customer journey and sets up the next action you want to see from your buyers to move prospects along the journey. Structure content around the issues that are most important to your customers. 
• Identify and remove roadblocks. Make targeted interventions to remove friction and improve results by working backward to pick out anything from your customer journey that could get in the way of a sale. Factors nearest to the purchase point are often the lowest-hanging fruit. 
• Qualify your leads properly. Don’t take any old form-fill to be a qualified lead. At the end of the day, pushing a lead through the process when they’re not ready is going to be damaging for everyone, your business included. 
• Get onboarding right. Make sure your onboarding process is as smooth as possible. It will help you stand out from the crowd and lay the path for customer success. 
• Stay front of mind. Nurturing current customers is crucial. Keep in touch so they stay engaged, update them on how things are going, and give them access to useful reports. And when it comes to renewal dates, make sure you send out timely reminders.

Learn from the B2C journey

Customer journeys tend to be thought of in terms of B2C. In fact, the reality is that in B2B, buyers are not only looking for but expect a buying experience like that of a B2C customer. And if there’s one thing B2C does well it’s personalization. 

Yet, can you think of a time you’ve had a truly personal B2B interaction? To really stand out from the crowd with your B2B customer journey, always keep in mind that behind every brand logo are actual human beings.

What are your thoughts about the B2B customer journey? Let us know with a comment.

Looking to better manage your customer experience and gain greater insight into your customer journey? See what the Acquire platform could do for you by booking a demo with our team of experts.

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Mapping the B2B Customer Journey: Key Stages and Touchpoints

The B2B customer journey serves as a compass for businesses navigating the complex realm of buyer interactions and decision-making. Understanding the intricacies of this journey is crucial for organisations looking to build lasting partnerships and drive exceptional business outcomes. 

A customer journey map helps B2B operators re-imagine their customer journey and deliver more personalised experiences. It presents a great opportunity to reinforce brand awareness and drive customer satisfaction.

This article explores B2B customer journey mapping, unravelling its key stages and touchpoints that pave the way to fruitful business relationships. 

Table of Contents

How B2B and B2C customer journeys are different

What makes an effective b2b customer journey map, why you need a b2b customer journey map, #1. awareness, #2. consideration, #3. decision-making, #4. implementation, #5. support and relationship management, #6. renewal and expansion, awareness stage, consideration stage, decision-making stage, implementation stage, support and relationship management stage, renewal and expansion stage, define buyer personas, conduct customer interviews, analyse data and metrics, collaborate with sales and customer service teams, conduct journey mapping workshops, analyse competitor journeys, 13 gamification tools to boost engagement and product adoption, how gamified websites are engaging their audience, 19 awesome gamification ideas – ted talk edition, what is the b2b customer journey.

The B2B customer journey refers to the process that business-to-business (B2B) customers go through, from problem identification to post-purchase. 

The process encompasses the entire lifecycle of a B2B buyer’s interactions with a company or brand. This includes their research, evaluation, purchase, ongoing relationship with the business and experiences along the way.

Consider a small business needing a scalable CRM (customer relationship management) solution, for example. There are many steps that it goes through before committing to a purchase. Even after the purchase, there are still post-purchase steps to cover, such as setting up the CRM system and providing after-sales services. That’s all part of the customer journey.

The B2B customer journey is characterised by multiple touchpoints across various channels. It is influenced by several factors, including industry-specific needs, organisational dynamics, and the involvement of decision-makers. Ultimately, the lasting impression of this journey is what defines the overall customer experience

Businesses and individual consumers approach the buying process quite differently. Understanding these differences is crucial for companies to tailor their strategies effectively to meet their customers’ unique expectations.

Some key aspects in which B2B and B2C (business to customer) journeys differ include: 

• Target audience — As a B2B operator, you rarely buy or sell to one person. More likely, you’ll transact with businesses, organisations, or a diverse group of individuals composed of stakeholders, senior management, and end-users
• Complexity —  B2B customer journeys tend to be more complex and involve longer sales cycles compared to B2C journeys. For example, B2B purchases typically involve higher stakes and larger investments, so there are often multiple decision-makers and longer negotiation processes.
• Decision-making factors — B2B customer journeys prioritise factors such as ROI, efficiency, scalability, and alignment with organisational goals. On the other hand, B2C journeys are frequently influenced by emotions, lifestyle preferences, and individual satisfaction.
• Relationship duration — B2B customer journeys typically involve longer-term relationships compared to B2C. This often necessitates continued engagement and support beyond the initial purchase. With B2B transactions, you look at ongoing partnerships, term contracts, or retainer arrangements.
• Personalisation approach — B2B journeys often emphasise customisation to meet the specific requirements of the purchasing organisation or target market segment. B2C customer journeys, on the other hand, may prioritise personalisation based on individualised experiences.
• Communication channels — B2B customer journeys typically involve multiple touchpoints across various channels, including direct sales interactions, professional networks, and industry-specific publications. B2C customer journeys rely heavily on digital channels such as websites, social media platforms, and online marketplaces.

What is the B2B customer journey map?

Simply put, the B2B customer journey map is a framework for capturing the customer experience. This visual representation illustrates customers’ pain points and their internal perception of the company throughout the business relationship. 

Source: apizee.com

These insights help the business identify areas to optimise to design and deliver more positive customer experiences.  

Mapping the B2B customer journey requires a business to step into the customer’s shoes to see how its processes impact its purchase decisions.

The customer journey map is a blueprint for the journey the customer takes. This means it should be comprehensive enough to cover all the important touchpoints — from initial awareness to post-sale.

Depending on the type of business relationship, customer journey maps should also cover the cessation of the relationship with the company. How a business handles this stage can be crucial to minimising churn and encouraging future relationships. 

Generally speaking, effective customer journey maps should include the following:

• A detailed flowchart of the customer journey showing the various interactions between the customer and the company
• Clearly outlined customer pain points or issues that may get in the way of a positive customer experience
• Identified areas where the company can take action to improve overall customer satisfaction 
• Details about what departments or people are responsible for moving the customer relationship forward at each touchpoint 
• Well-defined linkages between touchpoints
• The company’s performance at each touchpoint

Mapping the B2B customer journey gives businesses a powerful way to understand and cater to their customers effectively. 

Here are the key reasons to design a B2B customer journey map:

• Enhanced customer understanding —  A customer journey map provides valuable insights into the needs, motivations, pain points, and behaviours of your B2B customers. It helps you better understand their challenges, preferences, and decision-making processes.
• Strategic decision-making — A customer journey map helps businesses make data-driven decisions about their marketing, sales, and customer service strategies. It allows them to identify areas of improvement, optimise touchpoints, and align resources better to serve customers at each stage of their journey.
• Personalised experiences — A customer journey map enables a company to deliver tailored experiences to its B2B customers. This ultimately fosters stronger relationships and dramatically improves customer satisfaction.
• Alignment across teams — A customer journey map is a common reference point for different teams within an organisation. Marketing, sales, customer service, product development, and other departments can become more aligned and collaborative. This ensures consistent, cohesive customer experience across all touchpoints.
• Continuous improvement — Mapping the B2B customer journey is an iterative strategic process. It provides a framework for ongoing evaluation and optimisation of the customer experience to drive better business outcomes.

Key Stages of the B2B customer journey

The B2B customer journey typically consists of the following stages:

In this stage, the B2B vendor aims to raise awareness about what their business offers. The B2B customer, on the other hand,  becomes aware of a need or problem they want to address. For example, the company might be planning to attend an industry event in another state. So one of the first things they’ll need to sort out is the transportation for their staff. 

Now they’re aware of the need, so they start researching potential solutions and exploring available options.

As the name implies, this is where the customer “considers” their options. In the consideration stage, the B2B customer narrows their choices and evaluates different vendors or providers. 

Here, they delve deeper into the features and benefits of each option. They may compare the prices offered by the shortlisted vendors and consider payment options, flexibility, and customisation. At the end of the day, it’s about arriving at an informed decision about who they will purchase from.

Having narrowed down their options, it’s time for the B2B customer to decide what B2B vendor to contact to initiate the buying process. 

This is a pivotal moment in the B2B buyer journey. For one, it represents a successful conversion for the vendor, and is a sign that their lead nurturing methods are sound.

After the decision is made, the customer moves into the implementation stage. This involves the buying process, onboarding, and installation/configuration. 

Depending on the product or service being provided, this stage may also include special training for specific staff within the B2B customer’s organisation. Once everything is properly set up, the customer integrates the chosen solution into their existing business processes.

With the solution fully implemented, the customer enters the support and relationship management stage. For instance, they might require ongoing technical support or they might be assigned an account manager to handle post-purchase concerns and requests.

This is the B2C equivalent of customer loyalty. In this stage, the B2B customer evaluates their experience with the vendor and decides whether to continue the relationship. Additionally, there may be opportunities for upselling or expanding the scope of services provided to the customer.

It’s important to note that the B2B buyer journey is not strictly linear. This means it’s not uncommon for buyers to move back and forth between stages based on their specific needs and circumstances.

Touchpoints in B2B customer journey mapping

The customer journey mapping process includes several critical touchpoints that occur before, during, and after a sale. Touchpoints are the various customer interactions or moments of engagement with a company throughout the customer journey. 

Each one provides an opportunity for the company to leave an impression on the customer and ultimately impact their decision-making process. That’s why optimising touchpoints to deliver a consistent and personalised experience is essential in building strong relationships and fostering customer loyalty.

Source: salespanel.io

These touchpoints can occur through various channels, both online and offline, and are crucial in shaping customer experiences. 

Customer touchpoints can occur at different stages of the buying journey. Here are some examples:

• Industry events and conferences — These events are great for learning about new trends, technologies, and potential solutions.
• Online research — Conducting searches on search engines and exploring industry publications and social media communities are great ways to facilitate customer interactions.
• Word-of-mouth referrals — Seeking recommendations and feedback from colleagues, industry contacts, or trusted sources make for great customer touchpoints.
• Company website and landing pages — Visiting the company’s website and landing pages to explore detailed information about potential solutions.
• Product demonstrations or webinars — Participating in live or recorded demonstrations and webinars to gain insights into the functionality and benefits of the offerings.
• Case studies and success stories — Reviewing real-world examples and success stories that highlight how the product or service has helped other businesses.
• Consultations — Engaging in meetings or consultations with sales reps to discuss requirements and solutions.
• Proposal and pricing discussions —  Collaborating with the B2B vendor on contract terms and negotiating proposals that align with the B2B customer’s requirements.
• Reference checks — Seeking references from existing customers to validate the company’s reputation and track record.
• Vendor presentations or pitches — Attending presentations or pitches by vendors to assess their expertise and how well they understand the business’s challenges.
• Onboarding and training sessions — Participating in onboarding sessions and training programs to learn how to use the solution effectively.
• Technical support and guidance — Seeking technical support and advice during the implementation stage to resolve any issues that arise.
• Documentation and user manuals — Accessing comprehensive documentation, user manuals, and resources to support the implementation process and user adoption.
• Dedicated account managers or customer success representatives — A designated point of contact is great for nurturing current customers. 
• Helpdesk or support ticket systems — Utilising helpdesk or support ticket systems to log and track support requests, ensuring timely resolutions. This is a key part of modern B2B customer expectations and is a leading factor in increasing customer retention.
• Surveys and feedback mechanisms — Providing feedback through surveys or related mechanisms to help the vendor improve their offerings and sales process.
• Contract renewal discussions — Engaging in discussions with the B2B vendor regarding contract renewal terms and potential adjustments based on changing business needs.
• Cross-selling and upselling opportunities — Exploring opportunities to expand the relationship by considering additional vendor offerings.

Mapping the B2B buyer journey

Customer journey mapping requires a thoughtful approach to design truly innovative experiences tailored to the B2B context. 

It’s important to look for common pitfalls that typically accompany a journey mapping exercise. 

Some businesses make the mistake of overgeneralising the buyer’s journey. This results in them creating a one-size-fits-all customer journey map that doesn’t account for the unique needs of different customer segments. 

Another common mistake is focusing primarily on the sales stages and neglecting other key touchpoints of the buyer journey. This makes it difficult to capture the nuances of the buying experience truly.

The ideal customer journey map takes into account all the key stages of the journey with the view to achieving repeat business. It must also contain all the major elements necessary to improve customer touchpoints.

Check out the B2B customer journey map template below for an idea of the mapping process. 

Source: slideteam.net

Here are some techniques you can use to map the B2B customer journey:

Start by developing detailed user personas that represent your target B2B customers. The most effective way to create personas is first to identify the pain points, motivations, and decision-making criteria of various customer segments. 

This helps you understand their needs and tailor the customer journey map accordingly.

Engaging in one-on-one interviews with existing customers is a surefire way to gather insights about their experiences and interactions with your company.  You can also collect customer feedback data through the usual tools — customer satisfaction surveys, feedback forms, focus groups, etc. This helps identify areas of improvement and shape the customer journey map.

Leverage data analytics tools to analyse customer behaviour, engagement metrics , conversion rates, and customer journey progression. This data provides a quantitative understanding of the customer journey and helps identify bottlenecks or areas of improvement.

Involving your sales and customer service teams in the B2B customer journey mapping process is important. They have valuable insights into customer interactions and can provide detailed accounts of the pain points at each journey stage. 

Additionally, this collaboration can help buoy your marketing efforts and drive quicker outcomes.

Conduct workshops involving cross-functional teams from all relevant departments. Encourage brainstorming and collaboration to gain different perspectives.

Study the customer journeys of your competitors in the B2B space. Identify areas where they excel or fall short and use that knowledge to differentiate your own customer journey mapping. 

Keep in mind that the B2B customer journey is not static, so regularly review your customer journey map. There will always be new customer insights, market trends, and changing customer expectations to incorporate down the line. This ensures your customer journey map remains accurate and relevant.

Mapping the B2B customer journey is an essential practice for businesses seeking to understand and optimise their interactions with customers. By comprehensively mapping the key stages and touchpoints, businesses can gain valuable insights into customer behaviour, preferences, and pain points. 

Understanding the B2B customer journey enables companies to align their efforts to deliver a seamless and satisfying experience at every touchpoint. Ultimately, an effective B2B customer journey map serves as a roadmap for success, guiding businesses towards delivering exceptional experiences.

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Navigating the B2B Customer Journey: Definition, Stages, and Examples

Companies that fail to meet their customers’ needs will drop out of the race faster than you can say B2B. So how can you avoid being one of them?

We’ll talk about how to navigate the B2B customer journey, discuss the various stages, and give you the tools to execute a customer-centric strategy.

Understanding the journey for a B2B customer will allow you to better position your business and its offerings and ultimately meet your customers where they are in that customer journey map. If you choose not to put these strategies in place, you’ll be losing resources, opportunities, and maybe even your customers.

Let’s first take a look at what exactly the B2B customer journey is.

Examining the B2B customer journey

The B2B SaaS customer journey is the path prospects or customers follow, going from a potential customer to an actual one. This path has many stages that are usually represented by a funnel.

The B2B SaaS customer journey outlines how prospects become customers.

It's often visualized as a funnel:

• Top of Funnel (TOFU) - Awareness: Prospects discover your brand.
• Middle of Funnel (MOFU) - Consideration: Prospects compare you to competitors.
• Bottom of Funnel (BOFU) - Decision: Prospects are ready to buy.

Unlike its B2C counterpart, the B2B customer journey is a much more complex purchase process involving multiple stakeholders, a much longer decision-making process, and transactions of much higher value. 

When your marketing and sales are well-prepared, you can better anticipate and handle the customers’ needs which can lead to higher conversion rates and loyal customers. 

Now, let’s unpack the customer journey stages:

First stage: Initial contact and awareness

The starting point of the B2B customer journey is about letting your prospective customers know you exist and getting that initial contact.

But you must set your brand and offering apart from your competitors. Why should they contact you if they can’t tell what it is that makes your product or service different? 

→ Strategies for generating awareness

You’re already reading one of the ways brands generate awareness.You’ve arrived here at this blog post because you probably did a Google search and asked, “What is the B2B customer journey and its stages?”

• Content marketing & SEO: Blog posts optimized for search engines help people find your brand.
• Social media power: Repurpose content for social platforms to expand your reach.
• Targeted advertising:  Reach your ideal audience through precise ad campaigns.

→ Identifying potential customer touch points

• Consistent analysis:  Marketing teams constantly scan the B2B landscape for opportunities.
• Mapping and analysis: Track touch points like industry events, websites, social networks (like LinkedIn), and email campaigns to understand audience preferences.

→ Measuring awareness effectiveness

There’s no point in rolling out strategies and not analyzing whether they’re working.

• KPIs are key:  Track metrics like brand visibility, website traffic, and social media engagement to gauge your success.
• Data-driven decisions: Use insights to refine your strategies for even better results.

The second stage of the funnel is where you really get to shine.

Second stage: Consideration and Interest

As we mentioned before, this part of the customer journey B2B funnel is where prospects are weighing the benefits and costs of your product or service.

Here is where you can really set yourself apart from the competition by demonstrating your value and building trust with potential customers.

→ Tools and techniques for nurturing interest

Equipping your box of tricks with the right tools and techniques is important when you’re trying to nurture the interest of your prospects down their journey in the funnel.

Customer relationship management (CRM) tools , highly-targeted messaging, and personalized content can all be implemented to maintain communication to make sure you’re staying top-of-mind. 

→ Key metrics in the consideration stage 

Here’s where you’ll want to evaluate lead quality. Sure, you could just throw any lead into the top of the funnel, but you want those high-quality leads to make sure the chance of conversion is higher.

You also want to monitor the lead-to-opportunity conversion rate as well as the time spent on pre-sales activities such as product demos. Here it’s going to be about efficiency and winning back time through process optimization.

→ Building relationships with prospects 

The end goal, in the customer buying journey in B2B, should never just be the sale.

So many different things are happening to the prospect along their journey that if you ignore them, you may lose them to your competition.

Really understanding their needs, as well as transparent communication, go a long way to fostering great relationships .

Also, having consistent follow-up strategies is the key to sustaining these relationships way beyond just sales.

Do what you’re going to say you’ll do and personalize their experiences!

Now it’s time to get them to make that final decision.

Third stage: Decision and purchase

With the average SaaS sales cycle length of around 84 days, closing the deal will always be super satisfying.

But to get your prospect to the finish line, you have to concentrate on making the decision-making process easy by addressing concerns they may have.

Here’s where you’ll need to brush up on dealing with objections, too.

→ Influencing factors in B2B purchasing decisions

It’s not just pricing that can affect whether someone chooses your solution or not, but other things like the terms of the contract and if you offer stellar customer support will also come into play. 

→ Role of content and demonstrations

Getting the right content to the right customer at the right time during the customer journey for B2B is crucial in helping guide their decision-making process.

Things like whitepapers, case studies, and product demonstrations can help the client see how your offering benefits them. It will give them a way to visualize how your tool or service could be implemented into their daily business. 

→ Negotiation and closing strategies

1. Product expertise and pain point mapping

‍ Sales reps must deeply understand the product and skillfully connect its features to the prospect's specific challenges. ‍

2. Objection handling mastery

‍ Reps must be prepared to address objections constructively and persuasively. ‍

3. Effective negotiation ‍

Salespeople should aim for mutually beneficial outcomes, demonstrating flexibility and a focus on the prospect's success. ‍

4. Objection-handling techniques ‍

Offering incentives like discounts, or demonstrating cost savings are valuable tools for overcoming objections.

But what now?

Post-purchase experience and customer retention

Along with marketing and sales, customer success teams make up the “trinity” of the customer decision journey for B2B.

Your organization must have strategies in place to ensure the customer is getting the most out of their experience with your product or service.

A successful customer onboarding program is vital to make that happen. 

The importance of customer support and services

The first step is getting a prospect to sign up and become a customer. Now, your customer support team has to show they’re responsive to queries and provide tailored solutions to problems that might arise.

The aim here is to maintain high customer satisfaction and retention rates. 

Feedback loop implementation

Not all customers are going to constantly write to you with questions or suggestions. In that case, you’ll need to reach out on a regular basis to collect customer feedback.

This isn’t just to hear what’s going well and what’s not but also to see if they have suggestions on improving your offering.

Making them part of your growth creates a feeling of “community” with your brand allowing them to align themselves with you in the long term. 

Strategies for sustainable customer retention

→ Loyalty Programs - Reward long-term customers with perks like:

- Yearly discounts

- Access to exclusive features

→ Upselling & Cross-selling

- Identify if additional products or services can benefit your customer's business.

- Clearly demonstrate the added value they would receive.

→ Exceptional Support

- Emphasize your availability and responsiveness. This fosters trust and demonstrates your commitment to customer success.

The Result:  These innovative strategies, combined with excellent support, will encourage customers to stay loyal for the long term.

The role of analytics in understanding the customer journey

Being able to take a look at your processes and strategies to make sure everything is going as it should is key to being successful and growing your business.

B2B organizations need to embrace analytics to smooth out the customer journey by identifying patterns, trends, and things that could be improved. 

Key analytics tools and metrics

‍ These tools provide data to inform strategic decisions and highlight customer pain points.

• Web Analytics: Google Analytics tracks website traffic, user behavior, and conversions.
• Marketing Automation Platforms (MAP): Tools like Hubspot Marketing Hub manage campaigns, automate tasks, and nurture leads.
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Systems like Salesforce centralize customer data, interactions, and sales processes.

‍ 💡 Analytics are crucial. Without data-driven insights, you're operating without a clear direction.

Interpreting data for strategy improvement

The importance of data-driven insights cannot be overstated. Data is static, yes.

But how you interpret that data to improve your marketing or sales strategies dynamically, as well as product or service offerings, will ultimately determine your growth trajectory!

This is all great when everything is running smoothly, but what are some of the challenges or obstacles to your customers’ success during their journey?

6 Common customer challenges during their buyer’s journey

Your teams need to be able to put themselves in your prospects’ and customers’ shoes so they can effectively respond to their needs and provide a seamless experience. Identifying stumbling blocks that may lie in the path to your customer’s success is essential in creating a customer-centric business.

1. Lack of information

If your customer or prospect can’t find relevant product or service information to help them make informed decisions, you’ll most likely lose them. Make it easy to find relevant and comprehensive information about your offerings. 

2. Too many choices

The modern market is flooded with products and services that are similar to each other. If you don’t find a way to differentiate your brand from your competition, you’ll make it overwhelming for customers to make a decision. Find gaps in your competitors’ strategy and exploit them by doing what they didn’t!

3. Lost in complex sales funnels

Is your website layout confusing or complicated to navigate? Or are they finding it hard to register for something? Worse still: they want to finalize a purchase but find the steps unintuitive and give up. Be sure to remember user experience across all your touchpoints to make sure you don’t lose potential customers at crucial decision-making points. 

4. Inconsistent communication

If your branding and messaging are misaligned, this can negatively impact your potential and existing customers by confusing them and throwing them off-course on their journey with you. Be sure to create a seamless customer experience by making sure everything about your brand and messaging is aligned and consistent.

5. Bad customer service

We’ve all been there - struggling to get help on an automated customer service line or waiting days (or even weeks!) for an email response to an inquiry.

If your customer service team isn’t responsive, or it’s hard to get in touch with an actual human, your customers will feel neglected.

Have customer service that truly serves the customer by being available on multiple channels such as chat, email, and telephone.

Be sure to also have tools in place so your customer service team can deal with inquiries and issues in a timely manner and track the progress.  

6. Lack of personalization

Today, your customers expect you to understand their specific needs. If you don’t offer personalized experiences and the customer feels they’re just a number to you, it will create a disconnect that will be difficult to resolve.

Be sure to use data-driven insights and other tools to see how you can create better personalization for your various customer segments along the entire journey.

When you have the right tool, ex. like emlen, you can really bring a level of personalization that will set you apart from your competitors.

How emlen’s insights can help optimize the customer journey 

Understanding which content is relevant for your customer helps you to focus and streamline the customer journey.

This means your customers will only find and see what’s relevant to them, making their purchasing experience easy and as effortless as possible.

💡Here's how emlen can help:

→ Content relevance: Streamlining the customer journey

- Focus matters: Tailored content ensures customers find what they need, creating a smoother purchasing experience. ‍

→ emlen's transformative approach

- Early integration: Introducing emlen Destinations early (e.g., after a successful call) provides seamless product exposure. ‍

- Beyond product showcasing: emlen reveals who's visiting, highlighting genuine interest and aligning with your business goals.

→ Refined targeting and outreach

- Valuable insights: emlen's data fuels laser-focused marketing, replacing broad efforts. ‍

- Engagement depth: Track content views, interests (case studies, videos), and repeat visitors for a detailed understanding of prospect behavior.

→ The goal: A resonant customer journey

- Tailored Approach: Use insights to personalize messaging and interactions.

- Customer-Centric Experience: Prioritize the prospect's needs and interests for maximum engagement.

Digital transformation and the B2B customer journey

Digital transformation has taken the B2B customer buying process and journey to another level by offering new channels for communication, ways to improve organizational performance and efficiency, and allowing businesses to enhance personalization for their customers. 

→ Impact of digital channels

The rise of social media, email marketing, and webinars contributes strongly to the B2B online customer journey.

Before the arrival of these digital channels, organizations were limited in terms of customer touch points.

For example, the pandemic made it impossible for B2B companies to go to conferences or trade shows to meet with buyers.

That meant that businesses could still engage with their customers and not miss out because they used digital channels.

→ Using technology for a better customer experience

Artificial intelligence (AI) and predictive analytics can help your organization by giving you personalized, relevant content and support to your customers. Things like tailored marketing materials, product recommendations, AI chatbots, and virtual assistants can drastically improve your customer’s experience with your brand. 

Be there at every step of your B2B customers’ journey

When you can understand and then optimize the journey that your customers take with you, you’ll be one step ahead of your competitors.

Pay close attention to the customer data for customer journey maps and insights on how to continuously improve that journey and improve customer retention to stay ahead.

Don’t forget to:

• Map your B2B customer journey
• Use the right analytics and metrics tools
• Personalize their experience along all touch points
• Adopt technology to support your overall revenue and customer goals

The goal isn’t just to keep gaining new customers but to retain existing ones by converting them into repeat customers

If you’ve done your job right, brand advocates. So be sure to continue analyzing and improving along the way because the customer journey is always evolving!

Marc is co-founder of emlen and responsible for the go-to-market strategy and execution that convinces today's modern B2B buyer.

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What do B2B Customer Journeys Look Like in 2024?

We walk through how B2B businesses should approach constructing the ideal customer journey in 2024.

What is a B2B customer journey? 

The 5 stages of the b2b customer journey, b2b vs. b2c customer journey mapping, how b2b customer journeys are evolving in 2024, 3 challenges of b2b customer journey mapping, how segment can supercharge your b2b customer journeys.

A B2B customer journey refers to all the interactions that take place between a business and a customer as the latter moves through the funnel. But in a B2B context, the customer in question is usually acting on behalf of their organization (e.g., a team of stakeholders looking to bring in a new email automation tool into their MarTech stack) . 

As a result, B2B customer journeys are usually much longer than business-to-customer (B2C) interactions – sometimes culminating in months-long exchanges that require input from multiple decision-makers. 

The customer journey describes all the interactions that take place between a customer and a business. It starts before a customer discovers your product and continues beyond the point of sale.

While they’re are key distinctions, both (B2B) and (B2C) customer journeys share the same five basic stages:

Awareness  

This is when a customer becomes aware of a specific pain point or need they have, and starts searching for a solution. From a business perspective, this is where having a sharp understanding of your audience and target personas comes into play. When driving brand awareness, you’ll often cater your messaging to speak to each individual and relevant persona. For instance, if you’re marketing a live chat tool, when advertising to a potential end user you’d likely showcase specific features and its ease of use. But when promoting it to someone in upper management, you may focus on the ROI their business stands to gain. 

One way to capture your target audience’s attention is to run ads based on lookalike audiences – here’s how . 

Consideration  

The consideration stage is when a prospect discovers your product or service as a potential solution to their problem. This can look like: browsing relevant product pages on your site, requesting a demo, speaking with live chat bot – a sort of fact-finding mission to understand how your product stacks up to their expectations (and why it’s better than your competitors). As we said earlier, in a B2B setting this process can take a long time due to the multiple stakeholders involved in making a decision. 

The conversion is the point when the customer makes a decision to commit to your brand, perhaps by signing up for an account or committing to a premium subscription (whatever your ultimate conversion goal happens to be). 

Conversion is not the end of the road, though. Once a customer starts using your product or service, a new facet of the customer journey begins: one that’s concerned with helping them reach time-to-value as quickly as possible and preventing churn. This is where personalized onboarding flows can come into play, and when onboarding journey maps can be especially useful to have a solid idea of what milestones your customers should be hitting and when. 

5 Tried-and-True Onboarding Campaigns + Templates

This step-by-step guide describes how to implement 5 user onboarding campaigns to drive long-term loyalty..

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For example, at Twilio Segment we know that setting up a Source and Destination, and having data flow between these two points, is a crucial step for users to recognize product value. By analyzing the behavior of both retained and churned customers, we were able to pinpoint when, approximately, a customer should have completed this step – and proactively intervene if they seemed to be struggling. 

You can learn more about how we used data to streamline onboarding here . 

An overarching goal is to have your customers become staunch supporters of your product  – not only so they remain customers, but so that they also become brand advocates. 

Referrals are an incredibly powerful and cost-effective way to acquire new customers. And with the right data, you can pinpoint the most strategic time to ask customers to give a referral and even automate your referral program.

Customer journey maps are “documents that visually illustrate customers’ processes, needs, and perceptions throughout their relationships with a company,” according to Forrester Research . They identify interactions and touchpoints at every stage of the customer lifecycle. 

You create these maps to understand how customers view the experience of doing business with your company – meaning you take their perspective. That’s why Forrester also calls these documents “moment of truth” maps.

There are some differences between B2B and B2C journey mapping, however, mainly: the number of touchpoints, and the number of decision-makers and stakeholders involved. 

Touchpoints

Customer journey touchpoints take place before, during, and after a sale. As B2B sales cycles tend to be longer than B2C ones, B2B customer journey maps have more touchpoints in the awareness and consideration stages.

Certain touchpoints are particularly important in B2B relationships – think reading case studies and customer testimonials, viewing product demos, comparing prices and product features, going through week 1 onboarding, and evaluating a plan upgrade.

Decision-makers

With B2B marketing, you have to convince multiple stakeholders of your product’s value since the end-user may not be the same person with the purchasing power. You need to understand these individual personas, and engage them on the channels they prefer .

By contrast, in B2C marketing, the consumer and end-user are usually one and the same person. (Family products tend to be an exception – for example, you’d market baby products to parents, not the babies themselves.)

B2B customer journeys are becoming more complex, as more business users now expect a customer experience similar to that of B2C brands. This demand is largely driven by millennials, who are now the primary B2B decision-makers, according to research by The B2B Institute and LinkedIn .

Being digital natives, millennials are used to cloud-based software and collaboration tools, and the experience of using these services has shaped their expectations of B2B products and solutions. For instance, they demand self-service sales transactions – choose a plan, pay for it, set up an account, and go. Gartner found that 44% of millennials don’t want to interact with a sales rep when it comes to making B2B purchases.

The report notes that millennials “are being met with a wave of new digital products, brand concepts, AI-powered plug-ins and productivity tools that are more akin to the consumer user experience of Uber and Airbnb than traditional business services.” To deliver similar experiences, B2B brands like Basecamp, Stripe, and Slack have mimicked popular lifestyle apps with their high-gloss marketing campaigns, aesthetics, and emphasis on UX.

The post-sale experience is changing, too. With the rise of “everything-as-a-service” models like SaaS, businesses need to convince customers to renew their subscriptions either monthly or annually. It’s now crucial to repeatedly engage customers at the service and loyalty stages through customer retention and engagement strategies.

Plotting out the B2B customer journey is a crucial step in empathizing with your prospects (and hopefully streamlining the path to conversion). However, B2B customer journey mapping is not without its challenges. As we mentioned above, these interactions can be complex, lengthy, and span numerous touchpoints. The point being: there is rarely a linear path between awareness, conversion, and retention when it comes to B2B customer journeys. 

Below, we talk about these challenges (and how to overcome them) in more detail. 

Identifying & prioritizing potential customer touchpoints

For a long time, marketers have turned to third-party cookies to help them with ad attribution and retargeting prospects. But in the past few years, data privacy regulations and browser-led changes on iOS, Safari, Firefox, and Chrome have been leading to one thing: the end of third-party cookies .

However, many companies haven’t completely broken up with third-party cookies yet – meaning they may be ill-equipped to understand the customer journey in its entirety if they don’t implement a new strategy. 

So, what’s the way forward? In short, a prioritization of first-party data . This type of data, which businesses gather from direct interactions with their customers, is compliant and serves as a competitive differentiator (that is, no other business has access to those insights). But for first-party data to be effective, it has to be consolidated – or in other words, there shouldn’t be any blindspots between teams when it comes to customer interactions.

Integrating the customer experience across touchpoints

One goal of customer journey mapping is to create a consistent experience across channels and touchpoints. But as the number and variety of those touchpoints grow, integrating tools can be complicated. 

For instance, different tools might use different naming conventions for data collection . You’d have to standardize these names if you want to unify data from multiple sources. To create this unified view, there are a couple steps you need to take:

Create a universal tracking plan for your business that clarifies the proper naming conventions for data, what’s being tracked (and why), and where that data originates from and ends up.  

Ensure this data is consolidated into a central repository and that data is democratized across teams (e.g, marketing teams don’t need to depend on analysts or engineering to pull audience lists – they can do it themselves, in real time). 

Preventing data silos & ensuring all teams can access customer data

The lack of integration between tools results in data silos and missed opportunities to engage customers. Let’s say sales has given a product demo to a specific prospect. If marketing doesn’t know that, they might email the prospect an invitation to try a demo. As a result, you waste the customer’s time (and your own), along with inviting their annoyance.  

What are the hallmarks of an effective B2B customer journey? As we’ve explored in this article, there are a few healthy indicators: an emphasis on first-party data, a democratization of data across teams, unified, real-time customer profiles . 

With consumers gravitating to multi-channel interactions, it’s become imperative for businesses to fix any blindspots that may crop up in their strategy. Effective marketing and top-tier customer experiences are now built on data, and having a scalable infrastructure in place is fundamental. 

Enter, the customer data platform. CDPs have emerged as a must for businesses, helping to collect, clean and consolidate data in real time and integrate every tool and app in their tech stack. Here’s how a CDP like Segment can supercharge B2B customer journeys.

Centralize & consolidate your data

Segment’s CDP can consolidate data from every customer touchpoint , ensure it’s cleaned and validated, and then send it to any downstream destination (like email, advertising, customer service, or product development software) for activation. 

A common challenge for businesses is being able to consolidate and trust the data they collect to glean insights. Too often, data silos pop up due to disconnected tech stacks, resulting in blind spots across teams. This can wreak havoc on the customer experience and business operations. 

Say a customer has an issue and tries to resolve it via live chat – providing details about their account, the problem at hand, and so forth. They end up being transferred to a phone call with a representative…and have to repeat everything they just went over. Not ideal. 

With consolidated, trustworthy, and accurate data, businesses can have more precision in their customer interactions, creating a better overall experience that pays dividends when it comes to greater customer satisfaction and retention rates. 

Create a single customer view

Identity resolution is the process of stitching together a customer’s behavior, from across channels, into a single, unified profile. This single view of the customer is essential for effectively engaging them – giving every team a 360-degree view of how they’ve been interacting with your business. It’s a crucial component of creating a cohesive customer journey, especially when these profiles are updated in real time . 

Personalize campaigns with real-time data

With this complete, overarching view of customer behavior, businesses can then leverage real-time data to personalize experiences at scale . For instance, with Segment Journeys , teams are able to orchestrate multi-step, and multi-channel campaigns based on a person’s actions in the moment . 

Interested in hearing more about how Segment can help you?

Connect with a Segment expert who can share more about what Segment can do for you.

Frequently asked questions

What are the stages in the b2b customer journey, what are the benefits of creating a b2b customer journey map, what are examples of customer touchpoints, how are b2b and b2c journeys different, how can twilio segment help b2b companies construct customer journey maps.

The New B2B Customer Journey: How to support all 6 stages

If the B2B customer journey used to be a one-way path, today’s journey is more like a maze. Customers have to loop and circle back through multiple forked paths until they find the right solution.

There are many reasons for this change: 

• B2B consumers have so many options to choose from that they suffer from information overload
• Adopting new services or software now requires buy-in from more stakeholders
• Product-led growth has blurred the lines between being buyers and customers
• Monthly subscriptions require a greater sales focus on retention

The big takeaway: companies that keep looking at the B2B customer journey as a one-directional funnel are doing themselves a disservice—and ultimately, harming their company’s performance and goals. 

Instead of pushing customers through a funnel, you should support and guide your customers through the confusing B2B labyrinth.

Today, we’re your guide to this new B2B customer journey. Keep reading for a breakdown of the new B2B customer landscape and how you can support your buyers and customers through its fluid, changeable stages. 

What is the B2B customer journey?

The customer journey is the complete, full-funnel experience a B2B buyer has with your company, from first hearing your brand name to using and loving your products for years. 

Every single business creates a customer journey, whether you’re selling legal services, french fries, or project management software.

But that journey looks different—and more complex—in the B2B world. Your target audience is other businesses, and these large-scale purchases are seen as an investment that will save the buyer time, resources, or money in the long term. 

That means the stakes are much higher. These purchase decisions are grounded in research and information, rather than in emotions (like you might be if you were impulse-buying a pair of jeans). 

How is the customer journey different from the buyer journey?

The term ‘buyer journey’ should be familiar to anyone working in sales. 

This is the process a prospect moves through as they consider whether to work with you and (hopefully) decide to become a paying customer. 

Think of the buyer journey as a subset of the customer journey. The customer journey begins earlier—from when the prospect first becomes aware of your offering—and extends much later, throughout the entirety of your working relationship.

But just as the B2B customer journey has become more fluid and less linear, so too have the lines between buyer and customer journey. In this new landscape, marketing, sales, and customer support all need to work in parallel. There’s no longer a clear, sequential handoff from one team to the next. 

The new B2B customer journey

The concept of a simple, one-directional B2B sales funnel, created and controlled by the seller, is dead. 

Here are three fundamental ways the B2B customer journey looks different today. 

1. B2B buying is (messy) information-gathering

Buyers have access to an incredible amount of data as they strive to make informed decisions. Nearly everyone involved in the buying process will do their own research, and likely come up with a mountain of information. 

Look how complicated the buyer's journey has become:

So rather than serve as the buyer’s main source of truth, the seller’s role is to empower the buyer by distilling down all the available information.

And because the distinction between buyer and customer have collapsed, that role might be filled by a salesperson, customer support representative, or even content marketer, depending on the prospect’s first point of contact. 

This does give Sales less control over the buying process. Gartner estimates that buyers spend just 17% of their time talking to sales teams directly (for all solutions they’re considering, combined).

But well-informed purchase decisions should be seen as a net positive for all parties. In the same report, Gartner identified that providing customers with relevant, personalized information is the most powerful way to create high-quality, low-regret deals. 

2. The line between prospects and customers is blurring

Traditionally, sales and marketing were focused on gaining new customers—and that’s where their involvement stopped. Customer success or support teams would take over, answering customers’ questions about the product to ensure they were satisfied. 

But today, there are more entry points into a product. Communication, sales, and marketing happen across multiple channels:

• In product-led growth, a prospect’s first contact with your product might be as a user, through a free trial or freemium plan. What used to be questions for sales are now questions for support.
• Existing customers might request support through what are conventionally seen as marketing channels, like social media. 
• To support contract renewal or expansion, sales might need to stay in close touch with established customers, monitoring how the product can better meet their changing needs.

To optimize the customer, buyer, and user experience in this new paradigm, revenue leaders need to break down silos between these business functions. 

Sales, Marketing, RevOps , and Customer Success (CS) should work together as an integrated, cross-functional revenue team.

3. Adoption and retention are critical for growth

Before cloud computing, it was onerous for customers to move away from their existing vendors and software providers. This led B2B companies to focus primarily on sales and marketing to drive revenue growth. They put comparatively little effort into enabling their existing customers’ success. 

But for a subscription-based SaaS model, conversion isn’t a single, one-and-done decision. Customers can unsubscribe (or conversely, upgrade their plan) at any time. And because customers have so many options, it’s harder than ever to gain customers—and easier to lose them. 

That makes adoption, customer loyalty, and customer retention hugely important metrics for companies from ecommerce to software to keep growing revenue and reduce churn. 

Dock for the new B2B journey

Enabling revenue in this highly integrated, cross-functional way is no easy task. It can be near-impossible to collaborate across internal teams, let alone with the customer themselves.

While we do have tools for tracking touchpoints and customer data, like CRMs, they’re built for internal use—not to manage customer-facing interactions. This leaves companies to cobble together client-facing solutions from emails, PDFs, Google Docs, and other internal tools. 

It’s inefficient, it looks unprofessional, and it only gets messier the bigger you scale. 

Instead, this new, integrated approach to revenue enablement calls for new kinds of tools. 

We need to manage the entire customer lifecycle holistically, not silo important data in drive folders and personal inboxes. 

Dock is a single, organized source of truth for revenue teams and their customers: 

• Workspaces give Sales and Success one place to manage customer interactions
• Content Management lets Product Marketing upload assets for Sales and Success to share with customers
• Order Forms helps Sales share pricing quotes and close deals faster
• Security Profiles helps Sales and Success manage security reviews

We believe this collaborative, cross-functional approach to revenue enablement calls for a single, integrated platform. That’s why we created Dock.

The six B2B customer journey stages

Yes, today’s B2B customer journey is different—but the traditional journey stages are still a useful lens through which to understand the purchasing process, and around which to design your revenue strategy.

But think of the modern B2B journey as a winding path, not a one-way road. 

We can understand this journey as six phases, the boundaries of which can sometimes be fuzzy. Buyers will cycle and loop back through these phases at their discretion.

• Awareness: buyer realizes they’re facing a problem or opportunity, for which they’ll need to find a solution. 
• Consideration: buyer researches possible solutions to their problem and analyzes which is the right fit. 
• Decision and purchase: buyer reaches an internal group consensus to settle on one solution.
• Onboarding and implementation: buyer gets product training and implements it across their organization. 
• Ongoing service and product use: buyer makes the solution part of their regular operations, overcoming challenges as needed. 
• Growth, expansion, and renewal: buyer scales up, scales down, or renews their agreement as needed. 

Here is a brief exploration of each stage of this B2B customer journey, along with common challenges the customer will face and how the seller can address them. 

Remember, these customer journey phases aren’t linear. All buyer personas will hop between stages as they clarify their needs, analyze new information, and confer with different members of their team. 

1. Awareness 

The customer journey usually starts by realizing there’s a problem within their business they need to solve, or a growth opportunity to take advantage of. Either way, they’ll need an external solution to address it. 

Key challenge

At the awareness stage, customers need to identify their problems and explore potential solutions. Both tasks call for extensive research and information gathering. 

And because there’s so much content out there for buying teams to sift through, finding information that's relevant to their specific use case is like finding a needle in a haystack.

This is where the seller can step into their role as a consultant and curator of information, by sharing content made specifically for buyer enablement . 

This is content that helps them make an informed purchase decision. These can be:

• Software guides (e.g. Dock’s Sales proposal software guide )
• Jobs-to-be-done tutorials (e.g. How to write a pricing proposal )
• Thought leadership content (e.g. It’s Time for Revenue Enablement )

Dedicated collaborative workspaces like Dock are the perfect way to share, store, and organize this information for prospects. 

It’s even better if you can create and curate content for each buyer segment that makes it feel more personalized and relevant to their needs.

2. Consideration 

In the consideration stage, the buyer has a general understanding of their problem and what kind of solution will be required to fix it. Now, they need to clarify their needs and get tactical. 

Key challenges

The buyer will need to drill down on what the right solution looks like for them (requirements building) and determine possible solutions to meet those needs (supplier selection). 

Since buying typically happens in teams, the customer might spend significant time and energy discussing their requirements internally with other decision-makers. 

Sellers can help by coaching the buyer on common questions, concerns, and objections they might need to respond to in these closed-door discussions. 

Mutual action plans drive these discussions forward by giving buyers all the to-do steps required to making an informed decision.

3. Purchase decision

Next, the buyer needs to internally align their team behind a final decision. Even if the buyer is fairly positive your solution is the right fit, getting buy-in from everyone on their team can be a significant hurdle.

The buyer will need to validate their decision and reach a consensus by getting all stakeholders on board. They might also face some technical hurdles, like ensuring the chosen solution meets security standards.

Share bottom-of-funnel content that supports their purchase decision, such as:

• ROI studies
• case studies
• competitor comparisons
• technical documentation

A client-facing workspace like Dock is the best way to share this content with your prospects. It keeps things organized, and you can see exactly how often the prospect is viewing them. 

Dock also offers built-in security profiles , where security information can be shared proactively with the client. This speeds up the process by allowing buyers to answer important technical questions themselves. 

4. Onboarding and implementation

The best way to keep your customers is to make sure they’re getting the value they want from your product. That starts with strong, comprehensive customer onboarding and implementation . 

Traditionally, onboarding is where buyers become customers. There was a clear handoff from sales to customer support. But those days are behind us, and the stages after the purchase decision are just as important—if not more so—for driving revenue. 

Keep in mind that in a product-led growth model, onboarding might come before the purchase decision, through contact with a free version or free trial of a software product. 

When users show interest in becoming paid customers by taking key activation actions in your product, that should trigger a sales conversation —moving the journey forward, but looping back to what’s traditionally considered an earlier stage. 

Adoption and retention are critical to revenue growth—you won’t keep customers who don’t see quick time to value . But most customers won’t have an established process for adopting new software, so vendors need to lead the charge on helping drive adoption across their organization with a smooth onboarding process.

For example, for SaaS products that need to be adopted across an entire organization, onboarding a client will take significant cross-functional coordination at both the management/admin and end-user levels. 

However, most CS teams onboard customers with messy spreadsheets or project management tools rather than using dedicated customer onboarding software .

Another common onboarding challenge is that knowledge is lost between the sales and onboarding process. Customers are asked to repeat their key stakeholders, goals, and KPIs that they already shared with sales.

Set customers up for success with a clearly defined onboarding process that includes touchpoints like kickoff meetings, welcome emails, and regular check-ins to assess satisfaction and look for blockers to overcome.

With Dock, you can seamlessly transition customers from sales to onboarding in the same digital environment they’re already comfortable with. You can also create a reusable customer onboarding template that lets you manage personalized onboarding at scale.   

5. Ongoing service and product use

Conversion isn’t a one-time decision. Customers have plenty of other vendor options—they need a clear reason to keep using your product, every day. 

As they continue using your product, your customers will inevitably run into struggles and challenges. How effectively you help them overcome these issues will determine how satisfied they are with your offering—so don’t leave them to figure things out on their own!

Proactively equip your customers with the knowledge they need to get the value they signed up for—and check in regularly to ensure their satisfaction. 

At SaaS businesses, customer enablement like product tutorials, live support, and knowledge bases, is a critical piece of the puzzle. Revenue teams should also use in-product metrics to stay aware of how actively customers are using the product, and reach out proactively if they need to be re-engaged. 

Service businesses should hold quarterly business reviews to talk through their customer’s experience and identify ways their experience can be improved. 

6. Growth, expansion, and renewal

Your customers’ own businesses will keep changing and evolving—and so will what they need from your product. A thoughtful, involved approach to revenue enablement can make it more likely that customers will renew (or even expand) their contracts, instead of switching to other providers. 

At this stage, the customer might be gaining a deeper understanding of the problems they need to solve, and revisiting what they need from a solution. This echoes the earliest stages of the customer journey, but would likely be happening in a more conversational, informal way, in dialogue with the existing vendor. 

Auto-renewing contracts are one powerful way to promote customer renewals . Thanks to opt-in-opt-out psychology, people are much more likely to choose what’s presented as the default option. 

However, a well-planned revenue enablement strategy can support renewals and expansion even before they’re explicitly on the table. In Dock, this entire journey, from the first touchpoint to contract renewal, happens within the same collaborative workspace that customers are already comfortable with. 

Other ways to map the B2B customer journey

Many companies also use customer journey mapping as a way to visualize their customers’ experience. This makes it easier to identify problem areas or pain points that are causing them to lose leads or customers. 

Another way of looking at the B2B customer journey is as a series of jobs to be done. 

In Gartner’s report The new B2B buying journey and its implication for sales , they identified six distinct buying jobs, with B2B customers typically revisiting each at least once. 

• Problem identification: “This is an issue we need to address.”
• Solution exploration: “What are the available solutions to this challenge?”
• Requirements building: “What exactly do we need from our solution?”
• Supplier selection: “This is the solution that best meets our needs.”
• Validation: “We need to finalize our choice of this solution.” 
• Consensus creation: “Everyone needs to sign off on this decision.”

Buyers will need to step in and out of these roles throughout the buying process. 

Dock: The new platform for the new journey

Dock was designed to support today’s B2B customer journey—the twisting path through the forest, not the single highway that cuts through town. 

The customer journey involves many different teams and skill sets. But they all need to work together, and sometimes, they need to work closely with the customer themselves.

So why should their data be trapped across many different internal systems? Why shouldn’t their platform be designed around the customer , not the company? 

We created Dock around the process that we know creates revenue growth today. Dock provides sales rooms, customer onboarding, price quote and proposal templates, and more—all in one, centralized place. 

Dock is free for up to five dedicated customer workspaces. Give it a try and streamline your revenue enablement today.

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Demand Gen: Growth Unleashed.

The B2B Customer Journey: What It Is and Why You Should Care

Ron Sela / Last updated: January 14, 2022

The B2B customer journey is one of the best tools you can use to understand your customers. A good customer journey map will help you understand your customers and the thought processes they face when buying your product, from pain points and bottlenecks where they leave to good interactions and services that keep them coming back.

Understanding your customer’s journey from when they first become aware they have a problem to post-product satisfaction will help you optimize your processes to create satisfied customers who advocate for you.

A good customer journey map can be the difference between business growth and a high customer churn rate . B2B customer journeys are more complex than B2C customer journeys, making mapping their journey all the more important for your business.

Table of Contents

Key Takeaways

• A B2B customer journey map visually illustrates the entire process a customer undergoes before, during, and after purchasing a product, highlighting key pain points and opportunities for process optimization to enhance customer experience.
• The complexity of B2B customer journeys, involving multiple decision-makers and a longer decision-making process compared to B2C, underscores the importance of mapping these journeys to effectively cater to both buyers and users, ultimately facilitating business growth and reducing customer churn.
• Creating a B2B customer journey map involves identifying and understanding the seven key stages (awareness, consideration, conversion, delivery, support, loyalty, and advocacy) and using customer feedback and data analytics to refine business processes and improve overall customer satisfaction.

What is a B2B Customer Journey Map?

A B2B customer journey map is a visual representation that shows all the processes your customer goes through before, during, and after buying your product.

The customer journey should include pain points and bottlenecks where your customers may decide to go to one of your competitors. However, the most essential function of a customer journey map is to show you how to optimize your processes and decrease those pain points, creating a more positive customer experience .

Why B2B Customer Journeys Are So Important

The B2B customer journey is far more complicated than B2C customer journeys. That’s because in B2B journeys there’s more than one buyer, and the buyers might not be the same as the users.

The buyers are usually the senior management while the users are typically lower-level employees. This matters because you’ll have to find a way to market and appeal to both of them. Knowing what each segment wants will help you market and support them more efficiently.

Moreover, it takes far longer for businesses to come to a decision on whether to buy your product or service. Months longer than the typical B2C customer, and they typically perform a lot more research than B2C customers as well. Ultimately, B2B customer journeys are longer, more complex, and as a result, much harder to chart accurately.

A customer journey map can show you where they feel like they should drop you, where they need more support, and in general help, you see where you need to focus your resources to keep more customers and make sure they’re happy.

Why Does Customer Journey Mapping Work?

You probably already have a good idea of what your customers are thinking, right? Wrong. You feel that you know what your customers think when they buy your product. Your company’s internal perspective on what customers think and feel is often wrong.

The reason journey mapping works is because it is data-based. Data gathered from customers who’ve enjoyed your product and are happy and those who decided to drop you for something else.

Those who dropped you are especially vital as they indicate processes you can improve that could keep future customers like them.

What Makes B2B Different From B2C?

They both start with a problem, seek a solution, and either end up satisfied or go somewhere else. That’s where the similarities end.

In B2B transactions, there are frequently many decision-makers in the business that decide whether to go with your product.

The B2B customer journey includes many different people, from the buyers to the users, to the buyer-users, and they all have different pain points, needs, and experiences.

Trying to map all this out can be complicated, but the result is worth it. A good B2B customer journey map will give you a comprehensive view of your buyers and how you can optimize your business processes for them.

How a B2B Customer Journey Map Can Benefit You

Now that you know what it is, why do you need one? Well, understanding your consumer is vital for any business. Visual representation of how customers move through your company processes is invaluable for marketing and sales . They’ll know how to target the customer and when.

This understanding is also valuable for fulfilling your customer’s needs and supporting them. It lets you know what to expect when your customers contact you for support, how you can make complicated processes such as delivery and conversion easier for them, and just in general, improve your customer’s journey with your business.

Benefits of a B2B Customer Journey Map

●     create a high-level view of the customer journey, ●     establish buy-in on the senior level, ●     help employees understand the customer’s view and needs, ●     increase employee engagement, ●     curate a better customer experience, ●     increase advocacy of your brand, ●     better results in generating and acquiring leads, ●     lower churn rates, ●     boost customer retention, increasing lifetime value, ●     all-around business growth, how can i create my own b2b customer journey map.

All customer journeys have seven steps, awareness, consideration, conversion, delivery, support, loyalty, and advocacy.

1.    Awareness

The first step in the customer journey is awareness. Being aware of your customer’s needs will help you with this. The beginning of the journey is when customers realize they have a problem and actively seek out a solution. The best thing you can do for this step is to rank high on search rankings so customers can find you swiftly and efficiently.

2.     Consideration

Consideration is when the customer researches your product and service and compares them to your competitors.

Having readily available materials is vital for this step, such as white papers, demos, videos, and other readily available online research materials. This step in the customer journey is crucial for the next step.

3.    Conversion

Conversion is everyone’s favorite step in the customer journey. The customer researched all their available options and decided you were the best. They’ve contacted you and are ready to pay up and buy your service.

The buying experience is vital to customer satisfaction, and having good business practices for their purchase is essential. The buying process should be painless and easy for the customer.

4.    Delivery

Delivery may be the most critical step in the B2B customer journey. Your company has to fulfill all of the promises made during the previous stages. Delivery of the product should be fully supported and easy for the customer.

5.    Support

Business success comes from customer success, so you should do everything you can to make sure they succeed. While delivery may be critical, so is this.

You need to continue supporting your customer, answering questions about the product, helping with issues that arise, and supporting the customer in all aspects of your product. Nurturing current customers is the best way to ensure you get new ones.

6.    Loyalty

Positive customer experience and support for the product or service you’ve given will lead to customer loyalty and trust in you and your product.

They’ll be more likely to keep you in the future, boosting customer lifecycle value, especially for companies that offer services such as SaaS companies.

7.    Advocacy

The best advertisements are words straight from the consumer’s mouth. Good brand experience will lead to testimonials and glowing reviews, bringing in more customers, starting the process anew.

This last step in the customer journey helps you get more customers to feed into the process again, creating a never-ending loop of success for you.

Data, Data, Data

You need to get customer feedback from every step in the process, from your customers, from people who went to another company, from people who dropped you, from everywhere customers contact your company.

Customer feedback data is what drives your customer journey maps. That said, you don’t need to gather everything solely from customers.

It might be helpful to ask departments and people who regularly contact customers, such as sales teams, customer service representatives, and support departments. They all have regular contact with customers and are essential touchpoints in the customer journey.

Why Research Is Important

Market research is crucial to learn about your core customer segments, and compiling that data into a readable chart is a daunting task. However, the journey mapping exercise is key to understanding the buyer’s journey. In B2B journey mapping, you need to prove you’re worth your market share to the buyer and ensure they’re satisfied at all the journey stages.

Often the people buying the product and the people using the product are two completely different sets of people, so the buying journey is long and complicated.

That is why data analytics is so crucial for B2B customer journey mapping.

It gives you a clear view of how the customer moves and feels throughout their experience with your company. Customer journey analysis helps you see where customers fall through the cracks and how you can patch them.

Remember Data, Not Internal Perspectives

Remember, you should use data for your customer journey map, not your internal perception of the customer journey. B2B customer journey mapping relies heavily on data as it’s overly complex and can have many more customer touchpoints than B2C customer journey mapping.

A good customer journey map helps you identify where you can do better, while a bad one sits on a poster in your office. So gather data on as many different touchpoints as possible to optimize your business practices.

Customer Personas

Who is your ideal customer? Understanding your customer’s journey doesn’t mean much unless you know who’s walking it. That is why you should create personas . Personas are caricatures of your ideal customer, who they are, and what they need.

In B2B customer journey mapping, personas can get messy because there’s more than one buyer, and buyers and users may not be the same people, which is why you should include personas for all of them. Buyer personas, user personas, buyer-user personas.

Include their job title, company size, what they’re looking for in your product. The customer needs between buyers and users might differ, and their decision-making process focuses on different things.

Learn About Your Consumers

Buyers tend to focus on value, while users focus on your product’s integration and usability. So you need to create these personas and find different ways to target them. You should ensure you are getting through to your target audience and even create profiles for the ideal company you would like to work with, like what industry they should be in and how many employees they have.

You should have a good idea of whom you want to work with and check if your current clients match this profile. If they don’t, you may wish to change your marketing strategies to target the B2B customers you want.

Buyers tend to focus on the value you bring to the business. This includes high-level management and stakeholders in the company. They tend to be critical near the beginning of the journey stages but warm up to you once you prove your worth to them.

They’re focused on whether your product or service is worth the money to them. So make sure you’re providing plenty of value.

Unlike buyers, users are focused on the usability and versatility in your product. They want something that’s easy to learn and integrate into their workflow. They’re typically the ones doing the research to see if your product is a match for their needs, so give them plenty of materials that prove your support and versatility.

Managing Your Customer Experience

Positive customer experiences don’t just manifest out of thin air. You have to curate them. Journey mapping is one part of that. Once you understand how the customer moves through your processes, it’s time to update them.

Update all of your processes to give better customer experiences, whether that’s more frequent calls to check up on the customer, update your website with new research materials showing your company’s value, or even get a better delivery process and support system.

Everything should come back to the customer, and if you’re doing it right, you’ll see it reflected in an updated customer journey map.

You’re Not Done Yet

Mapping your customer’s journey is just one step in the process. Afterward, you need to identify critical touchpoints, identify pain points and relieve them, open up bottlenecks and confer with your department heads on how to improve processes to improve the customer journey.

Moreover, improvements don’t just end. You don’t finish your journey mapping and optimize your processes just once. You should repeat this process every year or two to make sure you’re on top of the ball for customer success and satisfaction.

Change the Way You Think About Customer Service and Customer Satisfaction

Finally, you need to change how you think about your customer experience management. The touchpoints you interact with stretch across your whole company, and even departments that don’t come into direct contact with customers can be improved to offer a better customer experience.

You can use everything from your sales qualification process to the purchase process and even your marketing efforts to enhance your customer relationship. Journey mapping is just one step of this process, along with personas and fulfilling your customer expectations.

Change the Way You Think About Customers and Watch Your Business Thrive

For example, sales reps familiar with personas can better target buyers and users to give more effective pitches. Having a B2B customer journey map your employees are familiar with increases employee engagement and helps senior management optimize their department’s practices to make the end-to-end experience perfect for customers.

Customer success and satisfaction also lead to better lead generation and lead acquisition. When customers see testimonials or receive recommendations, they’re more likely to move to the purchase stage and buy your product or service.

High customer service and satisfaction also lead to repeat business, making it easier to acquire enterprises who’ve used you before. All of this leads to more business growth for you, so customer success is integral to your own goals.

Keep In Mind

Customer journey mapping isn’t easy, especially B2B customer journey mapping. But at the end of the day, you need to remember it’s about the customer experience. You want to manage the customer journey to create a better customer experience.

Here are some of the most common questions about the B2B customer journey

Awareness, consideration, conversion, delivery, support, loyalty, and advocacy are the seven steps every customer journey map needs to take in order to succeed.

The buyer persona, which is the fictional representation of the customers you are targeting. The pain points , which is the reason customers hesitate to buy or bottleneck the business. The customer’s emotional journey as well as their actions and thoughts and finally the touchpoints, which is where the business has some kind of contact with the customer.

First you have to identify what your business is all about, how it’s organized and how it makes decisions. Then you have to do the same, but in this case, for the customer. Once you have perfectly placed who is who, understand each one’s needs and desires. Finally, map the journey into phases.

Related Posts:

• The Complete Guide to the Customer Acquisition Funnel
• Digital Content Strategy: How to Make the Most of…
• How to Develop an Accurate B2B Buyer Persona that Converts
• Full Funnel Marketing Strategy for Lead Generation
• How to Provide the Best B2B Customer Experience

About Ron Sela

Ron is a marketing advisor to technology-driven businesses. He has 15 years of digital marketing experience and an MBA from the University of Florida. Ron helps companies grow their revenue by developing and executing integrated marketing plans that align with their business goals. He has a proven track record of success in helping companies achieve their growth objectives.

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• Expert advice

B2B customer journey: the ultimate guide + templates

Mapping the journey of a B2B customer is a handful. There are so many variables to keep in mind that it becomes overwhelming. A customer journey in B2B is longer, more complex, and has domain-specific touchpoints and stages that you should know before diving into mapping.

We didn't want to leave this stone unturned, so we came up with this guide on how to create a B2B customer journey map. Here, we will also cover the key differences between mapping customer journeys for B2C, B2B, and B2E. As well as some pitfalls you should avoid. 

At the end, you will get free CJM templates to map the journey of your B2B customers. You will be able to download them in PDF, CSV, PNG, PPTX, or change them online.

• 1 What is a B2B customer journey?
• 2.1 The decision-making process
• 2.2 Journey length and complexity
• 2.3 Touchpoints
• 3.1 1. Conduct a research
• 3.2 2. Personas in the B2B customer journey
• 3.3 3. Visualize the journey with processes, actions, and interactions
• 3.4 4. Take action
• 4 How to improve your customer journey for B2B
• 5 B2B customer journey map templates
• 6 Final word

What is a B2B customer journey?

This journey represents the entire process a customer (a business in the B2B context) goes through when interacting with a brand, product, or service. It encompasses all the touchpoints and interactions occurring as a business progresses from being a prospect to becoming a customer and beyond. 

What do such journeys look like in the real world? Here are some examples illustrating B2B journeys:

• A growing digital agency realizes the need to improve team collaboration and project management. They stumble upon an Instagram ad for a SaaS productivity platform and request a trial. Satisfied with the trial, they engage with a sales rep, who offers a customized plan that scales with the agency's growth. After a successful demo with the team, they purchase a subscription. Continuous support and new feature updates ensure the customer's loyalty and improve customer retention, and they eventually become advocates, referring other businesses to the platform.
• A construction company needs to buy new track loaders. The procurement manager visits a trade show and sees an exhibit that seems to match their needs there. The manager discusses equipment needs and financing options with a salesperson from the equipment manufacturer and then shares the information with the company’s management. Impressed by the product's capabilities and the flexible financing options, the construction company places an order. They receive operator training and maintenance support, ensuring a long-term relationship between the businesses.
• An aerospace parts manufacturer seeks to cut production time and costs. After discovering an industrial 3D printing service provider through an industry report, they initiate contact with the provider. The manufacturer gets a consultation, receives sample parts, and decides to engage in a pilot project. Its success leads to an ongoing partnership between companies.

The difference between B2C and B2B journeys

There are some critical differences between these B2C and B2B customer journeys, the major of which include:

The decision-making process

In B2C journeys, customers make decisions quicker compared to B2B ones. The difference stems from the number of stakeholders involved in the decision-making process.

• A B2C journey

A customer who visits a grocery store to buy some food for breakfast may be the only decision-maker. It will take them, say, twenty minutes to purchase a few groceries and go home. Suppose a customer has a partner, children, neighbor, parents, or someone else who may influence the purchasing decision. In that case, the shopping will take a little longer as the customer may consult with other people by, for example, calling, texting, or messaging them.

• A B2B journey

A medical facility decided to introduce a new service, and they are looking for a healthcare solutions provider to help them launch it. The clinic’s representative finds a healthcare manufacturer offering the required solution. But as other stakeholders (e.g., the finance department, chief surgeon, medical director, etc.) are involved in decision-making, each step toward signing a contract takes not minutes but hours or even days. And yes, there are many meetings, calls, and emails.

Journey length and complexity

Typically, B2C customer journeys are shorter than B2B ones. Let’s compare two similar journeys to spot the difference.

A couple seeking to rent a flat starts with searches on dedicated websites, filtering for their preferences. They quickly move to virtual tours and select a few flats to view in person. After several visits and considering aspects like location and price, they submit an application for their chosen flat. Following an approval process, they sign the lease, pay for the first two months, and move in, completing the journey from search to the new home.

A startup team that is in search of an office defines its requirements and hires a real estate broker to help them quickly find a perfect place for their rapidly growing team. The broker is actively searching for options. They visit several properties, weighing factors such as lease conditions and location against their budget and current and expected growth. After careful negotiation and legal review, they sign a lease and coordinate office setup before moving in.

The second journey doesn’t only sound complex, it’s really complicated. There are many decision-makers in the startup (and the person searching for the office isn’t one of them), some business-specific stages reflecting higher stakes, greater costs, and a longer sale cycle, and, on top of that, a lot of bureaucracy.

In B2C, customer emotions often drive purchasing decisions, along with price and convenience. In B2B, business needs, ROI, efficiency, and long-term value usually impact purchasing decisions more than emotions.

A consumer is choosing a new smartphone. They find two models with comparable features and prices, but one is endorsed by their favorite film star, who uses the phone in a series of stylish, upbeat ads. Despite similar specs on other devices, the emotional appeal wins, leading the consumer to purchase that particular smartphone.

• A B2B journey 

A marketing agency is looking to streamline its client reporting process. They evaluate several analytics platforms and choose a service that not only integrates seamlessly with their existing data sources but also offers advanced AI-driven insights. In this case, the decision is driven by the need to deliver more comprehensive and intuitive reports to their clients and the desire to enhance their service offerings.

Touchpoints

Touchpoints in a B2B customer journey can differ from those in B2C because of differing customer expectations, sales cycles, and relationship dynamics. 

For example, it’s quite typical for a business to get online demo sessions with a potential service provider before they even sign up for a trial period. On the contrary, a person on the fence about buying a subscription is more likely to create a free account in the platform first and start exploring it on their own before asking about trialing a paid plan.

How to create a B2B customer journey map

How to get started with B2B customer journey mapping? Follow these tried and tested steps:

1. Conduct a research

Researching a business market is so much different from researching a B2C. So, you have to pick a radically different approach here. Here are some points to keep in mind:

• Businesses are less open than consumers. You will have to convince them to share intel with you in most cases. If we take business-to-employee (B2E), then squeezing information about the employee experience and journey becomes close to impossible.
• B2B research has to be profound, so the hypothesis will not work here. However, given the previous statement, you will probably start with the hypothesis anyway.
• Due to a complex network of stakeholders from different departments, it is harder to define needs, pain points, and decision-makers.
• There's a larger geographical spread for B2B, so it's unlikely for you to have face-to-face interviews or focus groups.

💡 Tip: A considerably smaller sample size will make up for the pains mentioned above.

What information to collect

The nature of data you're going to look for the journey of your B2B customer is quite different from data for B2C. So, for the latter, you want to know your target audience's expectations, pain points, and motivations. 

However, knowing expectations and pain points is not enough. Let's see what information you should collect during the research:

• Business model;
• Organization structure;
• Purchasing & other processes;
• Their customers and competitors;
• Levels of influence of each stakeholder;
• Hierarchy of needs.

Note that this is by far not the complete list. When researching, you should consider every detail that can impact the journey and lead you to priceless insights.

Sources of data

Finally, once you know what you are looking for and what to expect, it's time to identify what sources of information you will use. For B2B research, there are a couple of well-tried sources.

• Phone interviews with existing customers;
• Online search;
• Existing knowledge from sales and customer relations departments .

Of course, options will vary depending on what kind of business and customers you have. But this is something you can start with.

2. Personas in the B2B customer journey

Having gathered all the information, you can move to the next stage: creating customer personas for your B2B journey.

The critical difference from B2C is the number of decision-makers you will have to deal with. Of course, if we're taking small or medium biz, it can be that just a couple of individuals make the decision.

But once we move one step up the ladder, the number of stakeholders starts to grow. You will have all sorts of representatives from different departments who will participate in the process of decision-making. Each will have their own expectations, demands, and pain points.

How to deal with complexity?

Making a corresponding persona for each stakeholder is probably the ideal option, but you can start with something simpler and more generic. For example, take the entire business and treat it as your persona. 

The benefit of this approach is simplicity and speed. In a situation where there is no time to develop 10 full-blown personas, a "business" persona is a fine workaround. Once you have enough resources and data, you can start splitting it into separate personas.

Another approach you can take is to break down this hoard of stakeholders into groups. It can be:

• Informers — individuals who find your product and spread the word about it within their company.
• Decision-makers — the ones who decide whether they want to use your service or not.
• End-users — the actual people who will use your product.

The major challenge here is figuring out how much influence each party has.

Key differences

Business personas seem to be more rational than consumer personas. This isn't entirely true. People are irrational, and it's their nature. However, there are many constraints in business that make the process of decision-making less irrational.

So, if we take each stakeholder individually, we will see notes of irrationality. But, once they're in one room, they will have to appeal to rationality to come to a decision.

Also, if in B2C the buyer persona is often the end-user, customer journeys in B2B are a great example of a buyer vs. user persona division.

What to describe

Depending on the type of a particular persona, you will want to pay attention to different things. Thus, for informer personas, you will want to pay special attention to the information channels they use. As for decision-makers, you will want to focus on their higher-level goals and pain points.

But the trickiest part will be to map all relations between each party to figure out whether informers and decision-makers are the end-users as well. Or how much influence informers have on end-users or buyers have on the decision-makers. You may even create a separate section in your persona profile for this.

💡 Tip: Using empathy maps in B2B is also a bright idea, as it can help you better understand stakeholders.

3. Visualize the journey with processes, actions, and interactions

With B2B personas in place, you can proceed to mapping out their journey. We recommend starting with defining the stages your personas move through. 

Then, determine sections to include in the map. Common sections include customer goals, touchpoints, processes, channels, problems, and improvement ideas. Put together, B2B journey stages and map sections will make up a map skeleton you can fill with data to represent your B2B customer experience. 

As you already know, in B2B, not only are customer journeys longer, but they are also often more complicated, considering the number of people taking part in the process. 

Now, let's look at some aspects of a customer journey in B2B and B2E and how those are different from a typical consumer journey. 

B2B customer journey stages 

Unlike it is for customer journeys in B2C, stages for a B2B or B2E customer journey have some extra steps that you don't want to miss. They are critical to the entire journey and can be so-called moments of truth .

So for a typical consumer journey, we have stages like ‘Aware’, ‘Research’, ‘Consider’, ‘Buy’, and ‘Use’. Here's what a B2B one would look like:

• Contact & Request a Demo;
• Make a Decision;
• Contract Negotiations;
• Delivery & Integration;

And this isn't the entire list. Depending on your business and your customer or buyer expectations and processes, there might be stages like ‘Trial’, ‘Conducting an audit’, ‘Legal procedures’, and so on. At some point, they can fork, loop, or go back. For example, a legal issue at the ‘Contract Negotiations’ phase may push the whole process back to the ‘Consideration’ stage.

To make it all worse, different decision-makers will come into play during certain stages, and they will have a serious influence. Well, that is obvious. But, and there's always a but: at some particular stages, there will be multiple decision-makers having quite the opposite opinions. For instance, before deciding, an IT director is happy with how your product fits in the current infrastructure, but the legal procurement team has their doubts.

To minimize risks (if that's remotely possible), you can mark stages and phases where the interests of different parties intersect. This way, you will know where you need to go the extra mile in order for the journey to be less bumpy and your chances for success a lot higher.

B2B customer journey touchpoints

There are a number of B2B customer touchpoints to consider when mapping your customers' journey. And not just because businesses may use different approaches and channels when looking for solutions. Which they do. Here are a couple of B2B customer journey touchpoints you can find in your case:

• Getting a product demo;
• Participating in sales meetings;
• Attending business conferences;
• Getting business proposals ;

...and a whole bunch of others. No matter how many touchpoints you find, all of them must end up on your map.

4. Take action

What to do next once you’ve built the journey map ?

Synchronize

Mapping a B2C customer journey alone isn't particularly easy (not to mention it's not even effective) but doable. Being a lone ranger while mapping a B2B journey is just insane and counterproductive. 

Ideally, you should involve representatives from all teams across your entire company. Front-line staff, back-end folks — everyone. If it's not possible to let them participate in the process of mapping, at least make sure they can look at the complete map.

Read also: Who should own customer journey mapping in your organization?

Your map should not end up collecting dust on a shelf. It must be put to the test right away. Whether you come up with a list of ideas, features, or recommendations, a map must work for you. Not the other way around.

💡 Tip: Introduce customer journey metrics to track. Having them on your map, your team will be more inclined to use it.

And, of course, mapping the journey of a B2B customer isn't a one-time activity. It is a process that, once started, must go on for as long as your company functions. So, depending on your case, make sure you always get back to your journey map and update it according to the new data, changes in your company's internal processes, or changes happening in the market.

How to improve your customer journey for B2B

There are no easy steps to improve your customer journey once and for all. Although B2B journeys will have much in common, each journey has its specifics. 

Creating a map of your B2B customer journey is the first step toward improving this journey. Working on this asset, you will get a deeper understanding of your B2B customers, their needs, motivations, goals, and so much more.

You will also learn what happens at each stage. You will know for sure where you shine and where are issues that need to be addressed to improve your B2B client experience.

Yet, there are some common B2B journey issues that may be relevant to your journey. So be sure to check whether you have them when doing mapping:

• Touchpoint inconsistency: you interact with prospects through many different channels, which leads to inconsistencies in messaging or experience, ultimately confusing prospects and leading to a disjointed customer journey.
• Insufficient personalization: today, even businesses expect personalized experiences.
• Ineffective account management: your customers may expect a deeper understanding of their business from you.
• User experience issues related to the usage of your website, web app, platform, mobile app, etc.
• Poor onboarding and customer service. Inadequate training, insufficient support, lack of regular check-ins, or neglect of feedback can make customers feel undervalued or frustrate them.

B2B customer journey map templates

And just as I promised, I am sharing some examples of B2B customer journey maps.

• Example 1: Banking

This template, which includes both a B2B customer persona and a journey map, focuses on the journey of a business owner who wants to subcontract payroll processing to a bank.

• Example 2: Bespoke manufacturing in healthcare

This B2B journey map describes the journey of a medical facility that is looking for an orthokeratology supplier to expand its offering. There are many personas involved in the journey, and their interactions are visualized in a dedicated section. 

• Example 3: SaaS

It’s another example of a customer journey with multiple personas . The key actor is a representative of an IT company who is looking for project management software.

These and other B2B journey mapping templates are absolutely free to use and available in our template library. Make sure you check them before you start your next B2B CJM project! 😉

As you can see, mapping a customer journey map for a B2B case is a tough row to hoe. But once armed with our tips and tools, it's pretty manageable. Speaking of tools, UXPressia has quite a handful of those suited for all possible journey map scenarios. With our Customer Journey Mapping tool , you can create, update, share, and export all your journeys (and personas!) in a matter of minutes. 

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Would just like to add that detailed, well-researched personas are essential for B2B customer journey mapping. It’s not like they aren’t important to B2C as well, but when you think of a business, the end user is often not a decision maker. Like it’s up to the CTO to choose a SaaS, the CFO has to approve of the purchase, and a regular employee will be the one working with it. So three different grounds to cover, with different aspects to focus on.

Was wondering how to create a b2b customer journey map for an insurance company. Came across this article. A good general outline, a question though: do you have something that is insurance-specific? Thanks

Hi Jed, sure! We have several pre-filled insurance templates that you can view and download right here: https://uxpressia.com/templates/banking-finance-and-insurance

They come with industry-specific channel icons, B2B customer journey touchpoints, and B2C examples for different cases.

• Home > Publications > Customer Journey Mapping in B2B Markets: A Comprehensive Guide

Customer Journey Mapping in B2B Markets: A Comprehensive Guide

More and more companies now actively recognize that customers are their biggest asset; with no customers to buy our products and services, there is no business at all. People who have a positive customer experience are more likely to spend more with that supplier, pay a premium for that service, and recommend the supplier based on the experience it delivers. People who change to another supplier/brand are more likely to do so because of poor service, and they are equally likely to broadcast this.

What is Customer Journey Mapping?

In order to design great customer experiences, it is critical to understand the current customer experience; customer journey mapping is an ideal framework for this and is central to customer journey research studies.

Customer journey mapping is a visual representation of customer interactions with a company and thus a tool to investigate, analyze and ultimately lay the foundations to improve customer experiences. Customer experience journey mapping requires us to step into the shoes of the customer and understand how our processes impact on the experience he or she has with the brand and the company.

It is a blueprint for the journey taken by the customer, marking all touchpoints. It should extend from touchpoints designed to raise awareness and interest – including advertising and marketing efforts, PR, etc. – through to the touchpoints associated with usage e.g. sales reps, accounts teams, support services complaints handling, etc. It should also extend to the cessation of the relationship with the company e.g. closing a bank account, switching to an alternative provider, etc. as the handling of this stage can be critical in turning around experiences and inviting future return to usage.

A Customer Journey Map (CJM) should therefore include:

• A flowchart or diagrammatical representation of the journey which customers take
• All interactions and interfaces (touchpoints) between the customer and the company/brand
• Likely “pain points” in the journey i.e. areas where the customer is likely to experience difficulties or negative emotions
• Key “moments of truth” i.e. areas where there is the opportunity to “make” or “break” the relationship.

Once maps have been developed, it is also common to then populate them further, to include:

• Identification of departments, regions and people responsible for the delivery of the customer experience at each touchpoint (e.g. customer service, technical support, HR, sales and marketing, etc.)
• Linkages between touchpoints
• Emotions elicited and desired in the customer at each touchpoint
• Importance ratings for each touchpoint. This can include looking at the internal perception of importance compared to customer measures
• Performance of the company/brand at each touchpoint. As with importance, the gap between the internal and external perception can be identified.

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Why Conduct Customer Journey Mapping?

Most large corporations operate in ways which separate different functions of the service delivered to its customers e.g. ordering, technical support, complaint handling, warranty claims, general inquiries, etc. This is generally felt to be necessary to build expertise and manage operations. However, unless the various functions are joined up, the customer can feel this disconnect or even fall between departments or functions. By tracking and describing the customer’s experience at each stage of this ‘journey’, a company is able to…

• Deliver seamless, streamlined products and services that cut across departments within the company
• Tailor services to meet the needs of both customers and the business
• Understand the experiences, thoughts and feelings of customers
• Develop compelling propositions.

Customer journey mapping has obvious advantages within a company, not least in developing a customer culture and the internal buy-in with the brand. Customer experience journey mapping exercises focus the business on the customer. Simply by spending the time considering what the customer’s lifetime experience is with the company highlights the strategic positioning the customer has within the company, the customer culture, and the degree to which the customer is considered in service design and delivery.

Many brand strategies are developed in the absence of the customer and yet it is the customer who lives the brand. Their perception of the brand comes not only from the messaging, imagery and promotions, but also from the experience they have with the company and its products. Whilst this philosophy can now be seen in the imagery of the mass promotional campaigns of some leading brands, it has to be backed up by the experience delivered when interacting with the supplier. A company that understands the customer journey in detail is able to design “ideal” experiences and orientate the operations and the people delivering these to engage its customers with the brand and build loyalty.

Problems and Pitfalls with Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping and touchpoint analysis is not without its problems. Knowledge and perceptions, both internal and external, are required to develop the Customer Journey Map, particularly in more complex B2B markets. Pitfalls which can be experienced when embarking on the process can include:

• Getting buy-in from senior management
• Getting co-operation from staff who are responsible for the various elements of the customer journey
• Availability of resources to undertake the process
• “Blank sheet syndrome” – having difficulty getting started.

Types of Customer Journey Maps Used in B2B Markets:

Customer Journey Maps can take several forms, depending on the needs of the business and the extent to which business processes are incorporated into the map.

Typical customer journey mapping:

A map that provides a strategic overview of the stages of the B2B customer journey, along with the component B2B touchpoints where a customer can interact or engage with the company at each stage of the journey.

Tactical customer journey mapping:

The tactical B2B customer journey map focuses on a particular touchpoint (or cluster of B2B touchpoints) to highlight the journey that the customer goes on at that stage. This is particularly useful when looking at an important (or painful) touchpoint where performance needs to be at a high standard. Tactical maps can also be a useful tool for training teams that are responsible for a particular stage of the customer journey.

The performance and improvement customer journey map:

The performance map is similar to the tactical journey map, though it goes into more detail about the performance at each step of a process, and provides key recommendations at each stage. These are invaluable when identifying “pain points” and “bottlenecks” for the customer, and identifying how processes impact on customers. Therefore, they can be very useful for circulating information to those responsible for making the improvements on a day-to-day basis.

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

A customer journey map details all the individual touchpoints and interactions that customers have with a specific business.

Whilst all customer journey maps are unique to a business and its different customer groups, the process in creating these journey maps is broadly the same. If an end-to-end customer journey map has not been created, then it can be useful to map this out starting with how a customer becomes aware of a business or brand (such as through the website or a word-of-mouth recommendation), right through to service delivery and ultimately, what happens at the point at which a customer wants to exit the relationship or indeed, return and continue doing business.

Alternatively, a business may want to instead focus on one part of the customer journey (rather than the end-to-end journey) to understand this better and to explore this in more detail. As an example, if a business is happy with the sales process upfront but is more concerned about understanding the after-sales customer experience, then it may wish to build a map to explore specific interactions that occur at this point in the journey to examine where they are performing well, where there are potential problems or customer “pain points” and which departments are responsible for owning each of these specific customer interactions or experiences.

A key point to bear in mind is that the focus should always be on the customer, i.e. the customer journey map must be produced through the lens of a customer. In other words, it should represent the interactions the customer sees and experiences, rather than the internal processes that may occur behind the scenes within a business, which the customer does not see. For example, a customer may order a product for delivery, but they might not see how that order is specifically processed by the organization internally.

Creating the customer journey map

Depending on the industry in which a company operates, the range of its operations and the type of products and services it offers, the starting point will be to define the different groups of customers and to establish how different their “journey” with the company can be. Typical approaches to customer experience journey mapping here are to segment B2B customers on firmographics (i.e. classifications which make them different such as geography, age, SIC code), behaviors (i.e. what they buy) or needs (what they are looking for). This exercise is required before any journey mapping can take place.

The next step is to map the journey of each of the customer segments from end to end, detailing all the customer touchpoints with the company, and the customer responses to these.

The key overarching stages of the customer journey form the “spine” of the customer journey map. Under each key stage of the “spine” is where you list all the individual touchpoints or interactions a customer may have at that stage.

As an example, under the “awareness” stage of the spine, the individual interactions a customer may experience in becoming aware of the brand may include some or all of the following:

• The company website
• Social media
• Trade publications
• Word-of-mouth recommendations
• Branded vehicles or delivery trucks
• Seeing the brand at sponsored events

Post-it notes and flip charts (or similar) are useful for capturing all this information. We would always advise that one post-it note is used for each touchpoint, as when doing this as an internal group exercise, then you will likely want to add or remove individual touchpoints, or potentially move these around or group them together. The key here is to keep reminding yourself that these touchpoints should all represent experiences through the eyes of the customer and so if a customer does not experience it (i.e. it’s an internal process they do not see), then it should not be included.

Heat-mapping performance

With multiple touchpoints and interactions mapped against each key stage of the “spine”, a customer journey map can shed light on the hundreds of specific interactions a customer can have with a business. Knowing what these are is a vital basis for formulating a plan or allocating resources appropriately towards effectively managing the customer experience across these different interactions.

However, a useful exercise in helping a business understand where attention is required, is to heat-map performance of these touchpoints. Once again, it’s important to put yourself in the shoes of the customer and then decide (either in groups or individually) which touchpoints can be classified into the following:

Customer pain points: Those touchpoints where there are challenges faced by the customer or where a business feels it fails to meet customer needs and expectations now.

Moments of delight: On the flip side, those touchpoints where a business feels that it delights customers by doing a good job or exceeding their needs or expectations.

Moments of truth: The touchpoints which are the most important or critical because they have the most impact on the longer-term loyalty of a customer.

When heat-mapping, it is not necessary that every single touchpoint is classified into one of the above and some may be left blank because they could be somewhere in the middle – neither a pain point nor a moment of delight. Equally, it is ok if some touchpoints are marked as a pain point and a moment of delight as well as a moment of truth, since this might represent that this touchpoint is important, but there are extreme inconsistencies in the experience of the customer here.

Of course, this exercise captures an internal perspective only and so it’s important to also test this out by speaking directly to customers. By doing this, it can be a powerful catalyst for change to conduct gap analysis on what we think internally versus what customers feels in practice. These insights can be used to help a business prioritize its resources on where these are needed most and where these could have the most positive impact on longer-term customer loyalty.

The role of internal employees and customers in customer journey mapping

Customer experience journey mapping can be done using a variety of methods which engage stakeholders involved in the process, and ensures their input into the development of the maps. A combination of workshops, staff interviews or focus groups, and customer interviews are normally used. These are then validated externally with customers (current, potential and lost) to ensure the maps encapsulate the customer experience, and no critical touchpoints are missing.

Internal workshops (usually senior management) can help to:

• Establish a high-level view of the customer journey
• Establish buy-in at senior level
• Start thinking about things from the customer’s point of view

Internal interviews (usually departmental) can help to:

• Validate the high-level map
• Ascertain more touchpoints at particular stages
• Understand pain points and important touchpoints

Customer (both current and lost) input – interviews, focus groups and social media can help to:

• Validate the journey both in terms of stages and touchpoints
• Understand important touchpoints for customers
• Understand pain points for customers
• Understand gaps in internal vs. external perception

The Value of Customer Journey Mapping & Challenges in B2B Markets

Customer journey mapping is just one stage in the move towards a customer centric approach. It marks the starting point; placing the experience of the customer at the heart of what the company does and how it operates. It provides a single overview of how customers interact with the business, focusing the company’s thinking on the customer and how the service appears from an external perspective. It is all too easy for large corporations to think in terms of departmental tasks, and so it facilitates cross-departmental working to understand the impact on the journey for the customer, and consider the “desired” emotional response from the customer at each point.

However, customer experiences, rather than being neat and linear, are often convoluted and complex, particularly in B2B markets where tendering, multi-site requirements, and technical product and service requirements often define journeys. These complexities can confound the customer journey mapping team, resulting in maps which are either overly complex or overly simplified, failing to capture the most important B2B touchpoints from the customer perspective and the emotional response to these from the customer. Resultant actions can then be process- rather than experience-driven.

The outputs from customer experience journey mapping deliver a tool for identifying outstanding and problematic areas, as well as “delight” and “choke points” in the journey. Using the customer experience management (CEM) process cycle (see below), the next stages are to design the “ideal” experience, put in place the processes and people addressed to deliver it, and develop a feedback mechanism to measure progress. As a result, valuable resources can be targeted where they will have the greatest impact for the customer coupled with efficiency for the business.

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

Customer journey mapping is an excellent tool to help an organization redesign its customer experience. It can help an organization piece together the current structures and processes affecting the customer and, by listening to customer feedback, identify gaps from the ideal experience. However, customer journey mapping is not an easy process, and getting it wrong can ultimately leave you with a lack of direction. Below are 5 tips to ensuring a successful project:

What does success look like?

You need to be upfront and clear about what your true objective is for undertaking the project, and this needs to be aligned within the business. This makes sure that the customer journey mapping work stays focused. Customer journey mapping can capture a wide range of information, and therefore it is important that the ultimate goal is kept in mind during the initial planning stages.

Identify complexities early

You need to think about your business and whether any intricacies in the way you operate will affect the journey mapping process. For example, different product groups or different customer segments may have different journey maps. The journey mapping exercise needs to take these into account, and it could be appropriate to design different journey maps to take these into account.

Preparing for the workshop

Ahead of the workshop, enough groundwork needs to be done to make the customer journey mapping exercise run smoothly. You may want to hold stakeholder conversations ahead of the workshop to make sure there is internal alignment. You also need to ensure all of the right people are going to be present at the workshop – a healthy cross-section of different teams who are knowledgeable about the customer. You also want to have the right exercises in place that will ensure your output contains everything you were looking for.

Validating the customer journey map

As well as gathering the internal view, it is important to speak with customers to learn more about the processes from their experiences. It is often only necessary to do a small number of depth interviews to achieve this. Again, looking back at ‘what does success look like’ will inform the design. You may only need to speak to customers about a certain element of the journey, or speak to certain job roles.

Visualizing the output

We would recommend that much consideration is given to the final output. Ultimately this is what you and your colleagues will be using to improve the customer experience. There are many creative ways that the map can be visualized – from giant posters, booklets, excel spread sheets or Prezi. It needs to be something that is easy to understand, easily shared and can generate the actions you want.

Closing Thoughts

As a key element of Customer Experience Management, customer journey mapping is a “step back” exercise, and one which affords the opportunity to design truly innovative experiences which differentiate. However, it has real value in engaging staff at all levels within a business with its customers and their experience of the company and brand.

Customers are the greatest advocates of a brand or specific product or service: they tell stories and they make recommendations. They have the power to infect others with their enthusiasm for adoption, and therefore have to be seen as a core element of long-term strategic growth.

Learn More About Customer Journey Research >

Readers of this article also viewed:

Customer Satisfaction Surveys & Research: How to Measure CSAT How to Determine the Strength of Your B2B Brand A 5-Step Framework for Driving Action and Seeing Results from your CX Programs

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Map B2B Success Paths

Tips for Creating a Data-Driven B2B Customer Journey Map

The road to converting a prospect into a paying customer is a winding one. In the world of B2B, the customer journey can be overly intricate and frustrating to navigate .

In this post, we’ll cover:

• who the B2B customer is (as opposed to the B2C customer)
• what a customer journey map is
• the four types of customer journey maps
• types of data to collect for your customer journey map, including data based on stages
• how to create your own customer journey map 

The B2B “Customer”

As they move along their customer journey, prospects can hit a couple of roadblocks:

• There could be numerous stakeholders during a single company’s purchase. Unlike B2C, the “customer” in B2B is a group of people representing the company. So you have multiple persons and their varying opinions that need to agree and align on buying your product or service. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
• Throughout their B2B buyer journey, an average prospect interacts with a minimum of six channels, making it difficult to track the origination of the sale and how to automate that success.
• On top of that, the average sales cycle may last up to four months . So it’s imperative to track this metric to know the actual length of your B2B buyer journey and what drives your success.

According to McKinsey’s research , these three daunting factors are the reason why nearly 65% of your customers won’t convert.

So, what do you do? The only way to ensure that every channel, activity or marketing campaign is performing as intended is to create a customer journey map that reflects reality and attributes value to each touchpoint.

However, there are a lot more reasons why your business needs a B2B customer journey map. But before we dive into that, let’s understand what a customer journey is first.

We can count on them to bring new ideas to the table consistently

What Is a Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map (CJM) is a concept map  of customer interactions with a company. It is a tool to investigate, analyze, and lay the foundations to continuously improve customer experiences.

Without an established customer journey map, your organization will soon drown in the sea of data and incomprehensible noise. Creating a customer journey map helps you tell the story of your customers’ experiences with your brand across all touch points.

This process also allows B2B business leaders to gain insights into common customer pain points, which will allow them to optimize and personalize sales process steps. Journey mapping creates a panoramic picture of how a customer interacts during the customer lifecycle journey  and the roles and responsibilities of the various teams in charge of fulfilling that experience.

Creating a customer journey map will also bring an organization together and develop a shared sense of ownership between teams because everyone in the company will know what is required to deliver the experiences that customers expect. Doing so will help you nurture a customer-centric culture.

Related Content: 3 Ways to Personalize the Customer Journey Experience

4 Types of Customer Journey Maps

Depending on the business needs and the extent to which business processes are incorporated into the concept map, B2B customer journey maps may vary.

Typically, there are four types of journey maps. While they look similar on the surface, each has a different focus and business purpose.

1) Current State Customer Journey Map

This is the most commonly used B2B customer journey map that offers a strategic overview of the four main stages of a B2B customer: awareness, decision making, service delivery and feedback, and relationship strengthening.

The current state customer journey map is the best for continuously improving the overall customer experience:

2) Future State Customer Journey Map

While current state maps demonstrate the customer journey as it exists today, future state maps center around what the customer journey should be like in the future, in addition to experiences and reactions.

This is a strategic process that requires a lot of planning and mind mapping on your end, so it’s good to use mind mapping software  to make it more efficient and effective. Mapping your ideas and creating detailed flow charts will prove valuable when brainstorming and putting your data to use.

Although data is undoubtedly a vital input, future state journey maps also suggest a fair amount of creative thinking and interpretation:

Future state journey mapping is a valuable approach when your objective is to explore possible customer expectations and create new experiences.

Developing a future customer journey map helps teams align around a common goal. It visualizes what actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers will experience in future interactions with your company.

Based on their current experience, you’ll have a clear picture of where your business fits in. These maps are best suited for illustrating your vision and setting clear, strategic goals.

3) Day-in-the-Life Customer Journey Map

A day-in-the-life map visualizes your customer’s daily routine, such as their interactions with family, commuting, meetings, afternoon coffee, and so on. And it doesn’t matter whether or not these activities are business-related.

However, these events should be organized chronologically. The day-in-the-life map below is relatively straightforward. It highlights the feelings, thoughts, and actions of a frequent business traveler over 12 hours:

This type of customer journey map is excellent for shedding light on what a customer experiences throughout their day. You can use this customer journey map to identify moments in a customer’s day when your product or service will be most valuable.

4) Service Blueprint Customer Journey Map

A service blueprint can complement a classic CJM. If a customer journey map focuses on the customer’s needs, thoughts, and actions, a service blueprint considers the organization’s perspective and its employees.

The map below displays a typical service blueprint : It’s chronological and hierarchical and is divided into four layers — the customer journey, frontstage employee actions, backstage actions, and supporting processes:

Ultimately, service blueprinting helps visualize everything that needs to happen behind the scenes for the customer journey to occur.  

Creating a blueprint can provide a lifeline when making organizational or procedural changes. It can also find solutions to specific roadblocks in the customer journey.

Collecting Data for Your Customer Journey Map

Pictures without data are just that. But data brings them to life.

Sometimes, data can become convoluted and complex, particularly in B2B markets where tendering, technical product and service requirements often define journeys. To help alleviate this pain, a HubSpot integration, for example, is a great way to channel your customer data into a downloadable and shareable file.

Among other challenges that a CRM platform solves is understanding your customer activity and behavior. Is there a specific touchpoint that everyone seems to pass through before moving on in the customer journey? Analyzing which part of your online marketing campaign or a piece of content has resonated the most with your prospects or clients is integral to your e-commerce metrics.

Your journey mapping will influence your journey analytics across the business. For instance, it will determine what you ask, who you ask, when you ask, and why you ask in your overall customer success program.

Customer journey analytics helps you make informed business decisions because it bases your journey maps on hard evidence rather than a hypothesis. Billions of individual interactions can be captured over time through a myriad of sources like websites, CRM programs, data servers, call center logs, and even IoT devices.

Yet, despite the diversity of data you can harvest, here are two types of data that B2B companies can use to create a customer journey map.

Qualitative Data

Qualitative data covers how your customers think and feel at certain parts of the customer journey and what they’re trying to accomplish — for example, asking your clients questions like, “How satisfied were you? How likely are you to buy again?” Connect with your account managers or customer success champions to get a better understanding of the problems your customers are trying to solve.

Quantitative Data

Alternatively, aside from looking at intent, look at your customers’ actions. This is where you dive into behavioral data — the percentage of your prospects that convert to buyers once they’ve interacted with a touchpoint. Map creation doesn’t have to be overwhelming because you can draw from the experience and material that already exist in your organization to start your planning and begin driving the profit.

Related Content: Buyer’s Journey 101: What Your Email Data Says About Your Customers

Customer Journey Map Data Based on Stages

Breaking down the customer journey by stages, aligning each step with a goal, and reorganizing your touchpoints accordingly are crucial steps towards maximizing your efforts. After all, you should put your customers center stage and offer such a product or service that helps solve their problems.

The Consideration Phase

During this phase, consumers compare and consider different brands based on their reputation, online presence, and other factors. This is how a consumer begins their journey.

• Top of Funnel Content Performance. Conduct keyword research for the top of funnel search terms. To see some of the common questions people ask, use a free tool like Answer the Public  or an advanced one such as Semrush. You can then use those questions and search intent to create relevant content for your consideration phase.

Additionally, make sure you take advantage of content heatmaps and event tracking to understand exactly how your prospects are browsing around your website.

• Direct Website Traffic. Measuring direct traffic answers how many people are looking for your brand intentionally. In your website analytics tool, compare your direct traffic number to other traffic sources.

As you comb through relevant data for the consideration phase, assess what your prospects are thinking, feeling, doing, and the touchpoints they experience.

The Evaluation Phase

By this point, your prospects know about the top players in the industry and have completed the initial round of eliminations. Look closely at questions, concerns, or hesitations that customers have about your brand.

• Reviews. Gather reviews from Google, Capterra, G2 CROwd, and other review sites. Group them based on both positive and negative feedback, or according to the customer journey stage they fall under.
• Polls on Product Pages. Ask your prospects if they’d like to access any further information or if they have enough to answer their basic questions. From here, analyze the responses to improve your content, especially regarding benefits your competitors offer.

The Decision-Making Phase

This phase is defined by closing the deal. The prospect has completed their research, has talked to sales or consulted a trusted source, and is now ready to decide.

However, your team shouldn’t assume the situation is irreversible. You can lose a customer at this stage, too.

• Feedback and Surveys. Whether sent through an email or asked directly over the phone, reach out to your newly onboarded users and find out where they first heard about your company or why they chose your product.

According to the Harvard Business Review , “When it comes to service, companies create loyal customers primarily by helping them solve their problems quickly and easily.”

The Post-Purchase Phase (Relationship Strengthening)

This phase is rather critical because it’s time to influence a customer’s experience positively so that they circle back to the consideration or closure stage.

In this stage, the customer expects the brand to deliver on the promise made about the product or service. They’re also highly likely to reach out to customer service or an account manager regularly.

In the post-purchase phase, it’s essential to look for data that shows brand loyalty, or lack thereof.

• Net Promoter Score. Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures how likely your customers are to recommend your brand, demonstrating their customer loyalty on a scale from 1 to 10:

NPS is then calculated by taking the percentage of promoters — those who answered 9 or 10 — and subtracting the percentage of detractors (answers 6 or lower).

• Repeat Purchase Rate. To track if a customer has made any repeat purchase or if there’s an upsell/cross-sell opportunity, set up proper customer and web analytics. For e-commerce, you should look at repeat purchase rate, which is calculated by dividing the total number of customers who have purchased more than once by the total number of customers.

For SaaS and other service companies , look at renewal and upsell rates. To calculate your renewal rate, divide the number of customers who paid their invoices by the total number of customers invoiced, then multiply by 100 to convert that number to a percentage.

• Content Engagement. Review your customer newsletter engagement, time spent on page for returning visitors to your blog, internal website traffic, and exit rate. These metrics demonstrate how your existing customers and visitors engage with your content and where you might be losing them.

How to Create a B2B Customer Journey Map

No two B2B customer journeys are alike. Various factors, such as your sales process steps  and customer success efforts, will affect the outcome of your journey.

It’s crucial to organize your journey map in defined stages so you can get a complete overview of what’s happening. Your customer journey may have more or fewer stages depending on your customer expectations and the nature of your business.

Using a B2B CJM template such as this one could be helpful to get started:

Define Clear Objectives

Before creating your customer journey map, ask yourself what goals this map is destined to accomplish? What is it about? What experience is it based on?

The goal of your customer journey map for your company is to give you a comprehensive oversight of the journey and steps your customers take in order to achieve one of their goals. These can be to make a purchase, sign up for a newsletter, join a loyalty program, and many more. Ultimately, your goal is to use this journey map to create a better customer experience, shorten the sales cycle, and help them achieve their goals faster.

Knowing these answers, you might want to invest in creating a buyer persona . Having a distinct persona helps remind you to direct every phase of your customer journey map towards them.

Related Content: 4 Steps to Discover Your Ideal Buyer Persona for B2B Marketers

Develop Your Personas and Understand Their Goals

Next, conduct your research. The best way to receive valuable customer feedback is through surveys and user testing. It’s worth mentioning that only actual customers or prospects can provide you with accurate information. Based on what you procure from your customer feedback, populate that into your newly created user profiles.

Specify the Touch Points

Touch points are the areas on your website where your customers interact with your business. Based on your research, specify all the touch points your customers and prospects are currently using, along with the ones you think they should be using.

Keep in mind that these touch points include your website, social media and email, but also your affiliates. Make sure you’re monitoring the performance of all affiliates with affiliate-tracking software that allows you to maximize conversions on other sites and social accounts.

These are all critical steps in developing your customer journey map. Doing so illuminates the path your customers have taken to get where they are now. If they use fewer touch points than anticipated, does this mean they are not finding what they need right away and leaving your site early? If they are using more than anticipated, does this mean your website is intricate and requires multiple actions to get to the intended result?

However, your website isn’t the only platform to look at. Consider monitoring your social channels, paid ads, email marketing campaigns, and review sites.

Engage Stakeholders

Involving stakeholders in your customer journey map development can help raise awareness of the project so that people — whether that’s your senior leadership, technical specialists, creative project managers , or front-line employees — get on board with participating. 

However, even though stakeholders are integral to the research, you shouldn’t rely solely on their interviews to create a customer journey map. They understand the domain and perspective on the present situation. They can also advise what roles to add to the user research.

It’s best to create your customer journey map in a workshop setting with all necessary stakeholders to get a unified perspective of what people believe is the case.

Socialize the Map

In most organizations, seeing a comprehensive current customer journey map across organizational silos is eye-opening. Once ready, distribute your journey map to your teams or print it out and put it in shared spaces. Invite people to provide their feedback to make sure it’s a living, breathing document — which brings us to the final step.

Make Changes and Improvements

Once you’ve interpreted your data, make the appropriate changes to your website and other touch points. It can include updating your call-to-action or writing longer on-page product copy to emphasize the unique benefits.

These changes should trigger some immediate improvements as they mirror customers’ pain points. Instead of blindly making changes and hoping that they will improve customer experiences, you can feel confident that they will.

Your map should be a constant work-in-progress. Reviewing it monthly or quarterly will help you locate gaps and opportunities for further streamlining your customer journey. Take advantage of your data analytics along with customer feedback to check for any roadblocks.

The process of creating a practical customer journey map is extensive but valuable. To streamline work and improve team collaboration, most businesses opt for online tools with shared access, such as Google Workspace. If you’re working with large quantities of data, using Excel integration with Google Sheets  will allow you to automate the process and consolidate several Google sheets into one Excel sheet.

Related Content: Data-Driven Marketing: Your Key to Digital Success

Creating a customer journey map is a “step back” exercise that allows designing truly innovative experiences. It’s highly valuable to engage team members across all departments of your company with its clients and their experience of your brand.

Ultimately, a customer journey map helps you identify your company’s capabilities and uncover what changes need to be made that will allow you to deliver an ideal customer journey, impact revenue, and stand out from the crowd.

Your customers are the greatest advocates of a brand: they tell stories and make recommendations. They have the power to spread enthusiasm and have to be recognized as a core element of long-term strategic growth.

Hopefully you learned how to create a B2B customer journey map! But if you just want an expert B2B agency to do it for you, click here .

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Unlocking the B2B customer journey: step-by-step guide

Last updated

22 February 2024

Reviewed by

Regardless of your industry or the unique goals of your business, every customer interaction is important. From the time a customer discovers your product or service to when they make a purchase and beyond, you and every member of your team should pay attention to the impression you’re making. A positive customer experience can make the difference between a one-time sale and a customer for life.

The B2B customer journey helps businesses understand how customers perceive their products and services. It can assist sales representatives and customer service agents in uncovering opportunities to serve clients better and highlight ways to improve your products and services. 

Whether you're new to the world of B2B or a seasoned marketer looking for new ways to serve your customer base, this guide will help you.

• What is a B2B customer journey?

A B2B customer journey contains all the touchpoints a customer has with a B2B business. This journey starts with the first interaction a customer has with your business and extends to the post-purchase timeframe.

The journey of a B2B customer generally takes longer than a B2C interaction (contact between a sales agent or customer service representative and the customer).

• The B2B customer journey stages

There are typically five stages of the B2B customer journey. The exact route can vary from organization to organization, but these five steps represent the basic outline of a customer journey:

1. Awareness stage

The awareness stage starts well before a customer discovers your business. It begins when a person becomes aware of a problem they have or a pain point that needs resolving and they begin to look for solutions.

Through your marketing and sales campaigns, you'll connect your product or solution with that customer's needs.

2. Consideration stage

During the consideration stage, a customer could be checking your website for reviews, reading case studies, or watching videos on your site to learn more about the product or service.

3. Customer conversion

When a customer decides to commit to your brand, they have entered the conversion stage of the B2B customer journey. The conversion stage doesn't necessarily have to be a purchase. It could be:

Signing up for a newsletter

Creating an account

Registering to receive a product demo

This stage can also include product delivery if a purchase is made, and onboarding work for your sales and customer service teams.

Conversion is only the midway point of the B2B customer journey. Once a customer has been converted, you'll need to continue to serve them via interactions with customer support. If a customer has questions or concerns, they must be handled promptly to keep satisfaction high.

5. Retention and advocacy

Ideally, you'll have a customer for life. Retaining customers and encouraging them to become brand advocates should be the goal of every business. After all, satisfied customers are more likely to not only purchase again but to encourage their friends and family to check out your business if they are in the market for a product like yours.

When creating your customer journey map, try to align the customer journey with your sales funnel. You'll create a symbiotic process that allows you to better control touchpoints and make it easier for your sales and service teams to track the customer's journey.

• The difference between B2C and B2B journeys

While B2B and B2C journeys share many similarities, including stages such as lead acquisition, there are also distinct differences.

B2B customer journeys tend to emphasize personalized engagement, while B2C journeys can feature a one-to-many mindset that prioritizes sales and marketing steps. Additionally, B2C marketing is often aimed at the general consumer. B2B is more industry-specific and focuses on target customers.

There can be multiple stakeholders involved in a B2B journey, while B2C journeys are usually individuals or families. Finally, B2B journeys involve greater discussion about return on investment (ROI), while B2C outcomes are often based on benefits to the individual or end user.

• How to create a B2B customer journey map in seven steps

Creating a B2B customer journey map can help your organization understand where to devote resources by identifying every point where a potential customer might come into contact with your business. When you can appropriately prepare your sales, marketing, and customer service teams, you'll be in a better position to retain more customers and grow market share. 

Creating a customer journey map can take time and might involve contributions from multiple stakeholders. Here are the seven basic steps for journey mapping:

1. Analyze typical buying groups

While B2B journeys target specific customer groups rather than general consumers, multiple groups can often be involved.

You'll want to ensure you understand everyone involved in the journey and their requirements as you complete the journey mapping process.

Different groups might also have varying levels of influence on the buying process.

2. Understand your customers' goals

The first stage in a B2B customer journey is the awareness stage, when a customer becomes aware of a problem they need to solve or a goal they wish to complete. For the most successful customer interactions, familiarize yourself with your customers' motivations and concerns.

Take time to thoroughly understand their goals by reading your target customer personas and try to put yourself in their shoes. If you fully understand their needs, you'll be in a better position to address them.

3. Make use of data and analytics

Analytics are some of the most powerful tools in your arsenal. Data and analytics will give you factual insights into what's working and what isn't.

It's easy to make subjective decisions, especially when multiple stakeholders are involved. Use data from multiple sources, including your CRM, to figure out which touchpoints need more attention and which are functioning according to plan.

4. Build out the B2B customer journey stages

Every business has different goals and different definitions of success. You will have unique ideas of the customer journey, depending on your industry and the products and services you sell. Customize your customer journey accordingly.

It's a good idea to start with a standard outline of a customer journey, such as the stages highlighted above, and flesh it out as you go. Think from your target customer's point of view and sketch out components to account for the final journey mapping.

5. Outline the different touchpoints

It's important to identify all the areas where your customers interact with your business. These touchpoints can include direct contact such as:

Sales meetings

Phone calls

Onboarding sessions

They can also include indirect contact, such as:

Organic searches

Social media posts

Some of these touchpoints are more personalized and vital than others, but they should all be taken into account and mapped in your customer journey.

6. Define your goals

With any project, it's vital to have a goal in mind. Whether your end result is increased revenue, greater customer retention, or both, having a defined goal in place from the outset of your customer journey mapping can help you and your team stay focused and motivated.

Along the way, gather customer feedback to accurately capture the voice of the customer and refer to your analytics, to see how well you're doing at serving your customers and achieving your goals.

7. Monitor and improve as you go

Things rarely go perfectly from the outset. Even the best-laid plans (and the most carefully created customer journey maps) can have blind spots and weak areas. Rather than dwell on mistakes or slow starts, commit to improving your processes as you go.

The best way to do this is to closely monitor analytics as they come in to see at what points customers fall out of the funnel. For example, if you see a pattern of potential customers falling off after the initial conversion, look into those touchpoints and see how you can improve them.

• How to improve your customer journey for B2B

Shopping online, whether looking for a new product or a new service, can be time-consuming and stressful. For many consumers, especially those who don't consider themselves tech-savvy, the idea of spending time online making a purchase isn't a pleasant prospect.

As a marketer or someone who is in the business of pleasing customers, anything you can do to streamline this process is ideal. When you make your customer's life easier, there's a good chance they'll turn to you again and again.

Here are a few ways to improve your B2B customer journey:

Refer to buyer personas

Buyer personas are descriptions of your company's ideal customer. The buyer personas you define should guide your sales and marketing activities and help you better understand what your customers are looking for. This can help you create a stronger marketing funnel and enhance the touchpoints in your customer journey.

If you haven’t yet created any buyer personas, take time to make them. Include specifics such as:

Geographical location

Create quality content

The content you create and distribute has the power to attract, convert, and retain customers. It should be:

High quality and thoughtful

Crafted to address customers' needs

Aimed at improving the overall customer journey

Structure your content around issues that directly affect your customers. Never create and share content just for the sake of it.

Focus on the onboarding process

Arguably, the most important stage in the customer journey is the onboarding process. A smooth onboarding can make or break your future relationship with the customer.

This lays the groundwork for success and shows your customers you care about their experience.

Wherever possible, tailor the experience to their needs and hone in on potential weak points to streamline and eliminate problems before the customer comes across them.

Stay visible

Even as you work to gain new customers, make sure you stay front of mind for your current customers.

Stay in touch through email newsletters, boosted social posts, and other regular check-ins, so you can see how things are going and let them know you care about their experience. If the product they purchased is subscription-based, send a renewal notice promptly.

By simplifying and streamlining the customer journey in as many ways as possible, you'll be creating a customer for life. This can make the difference between a one-time purchase and multiple purchases and referrals.

The time you invest now in creating an efficient, effective customer journey can pay off hugely in the future.

• B2B customer journey map templates

Customer daily routine template

This template can help you consider how your target customer spends an average day. By highlighting what the customer thinks and feels throughout the day, you can figure out how your products or services fit in.

What is the customer thinking and feeling in the morning? By the afternoon? Late at night?

What are the customer's actions and priorities in the morning? By the afternoon? Late at night?

What are the customer's biggest pain points in a day?

How can the customer interact with our product in a way that resolves their pain points?

Service template

This template is focused on the factors that can create impressions about the quality and prices of the service, rather than on specific phases in a customer's journey. These questions can serve as a standalone template or be incorporated into a more hyper-focused template.

What is the customer feeling?

Why is the customer feeling like that?

How can we make the customer's experience better?

What actions can we take in the background?

What actions can we take when interacting with the customer?

Adjust the questions in the template to suit your industry. Every template should reflect the unique nature of your organization as well as your buyer personas.

Classic buyer's journey template

A classic buyer's journey, consisting of a series of defined stages, is an excellent starting point for any customer mapping journey. Here are some questions to consider:

What is the customer thinking and feeling during the awareness stage? The consideration stage? The conversion stage?

What is the customer's action during the awareness stage? The consideration stage? The conversion stage?

How is the customer researching products or services?

How can we move the buyer along in their journey during the awareness stage? The consideration stage?

Customer journey mapping is the most effective way to visualize how to serve your customers. Whether you're developing a new product or refining your customer service processes, creating a B2B customer journey map is an exciting opportunity to grow your business and build a more satisfied client base.

What are the 4 types of customers in B2B markets?

While B2B markets vary widely, many experts point to four types of business customers in B2B markets: producers, governments, resellers, and institutions. Producers are companies that purchase goods and services that they transform in to other products or services. Governments include local, state, and federal government agencies. Resellers are companies like Wal-Mart that sell goods and services produced by other companies. Institutions are primarily nonprofit organizations like churches, hospitals, and charitable organizations.

What is the B2B lifecycle?

The B2B lifecycle is generally thought to comprise four stages: discovery, evaluation, purchase, and loyalty. This is a more compressed form of a customer journey, which includes stages before and after a customer discovers a product or service. The B2B lifecycle only includes the stages that occur from the time a customer discovers a product to the moments after purchase when the customer chooses to either seek out other options to fulfill their needs or remain a loyal customer.

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B2b customer journey map: starting guide + templates.

• November 27, 2023

What is even customer journey mapping, right?  It is the process of visualizing the road your users use while becoming promoting advocates for your product.  And I am going to teach you what you need to know about it.

Think of this article as your map for creating a map – a bit meta, I know, but stick with me . In this article, you are going to explore 11 proven steps, packed with insights and practical tips.

By the end of this, you’ll have a clear understanding of how to chart your customer’s journey, making your B2B customer interactions smoother and more effective.

• Recognize the impact of a well-defined customer journey map on customer decision-making and  retention
• Align your journey map with specific business objectives, whether focusing on quick sales or long-term relationships.
• Develop detailed personas to better understand and meet customer needs.
• Determine crucial moments in the customer journey that impact customer experience and decisions.
• Use analytics tools and  CRM  for informed decision-making.
• Regularly evaluate key metrics to assess the effectiveness of your journey map.
• Ensure all departments align with the journey map insights.
• Keep your map up-to-date with changing customer needs and market trends.

Before we dive in deep, let’s start with the basics of b2b customer journey. Let’s refresh our memory and ensure we’re all on the same page.

What is a customer journey?

In simple terms, a B2B customer journey is the process that a business goes through when interacting with your product or service. It’s the path they take from the moment they first become aware of your business, through the purchasing process, and beyond into customer retention and loyalty.

This journey is not linear, but rather a complex web of interactions and touchpoints that can vary greatly depending on the specific business and its needs. B2B customer journeys are often more complex than B2C journeys due to the larger number of stakeholders involved, longer sales cycles, and higher stakes in decision-making.

Understanding this journey is the key to creating a successful B2B customer journey map. It allows you to visualize the path your customers take, identify potential pain points, and find opportunities to enhance the customer experience.

Now that we have a clear understanding of what a B2B customer journey is, let’s move on to discussing what is a customer journey map.

What is a customer journey map?

A B2B customer journey map is a strategic tool that provides a visual representation of the customer’s experience with your product or service. It outlines the steps that a business customer takes from the initial discovery of your product or service, through the decision-making and purchasing processes, and into the post-purchase phase where customer retention and loyalty are established.

A B2B customer journey map is the predicted steps your customers might take after they decide to sign up for your tool. Knowing what steps they will take helps you guide them better, and determine the best times to promote upgrades, or surprise them to make them love you even more.

This map serves as a guide to understanding your customers’ needs, motivations, and pain points at each stage of their journey. It enables you to identify opportunities for improvement and innovation, and to align your marketing, sales, and customer service strategies to deliver a seamless and satisfying customer experience.

In essence, a B2B customer journey map is like a roadmap that helps you navigate the complex terrain of B2B customer relationships, making it an invaluable asset in your customer-centric business strategy.

5 Stages of B2B Customer Journey

In the world of B2B SaaS, knowing the steps customers go through is really important for success. These steps show how customers move from realizing they need your product, to starting to use it, to using it regularly and finally deciding to keep using it.

Each step is a chance to make the customer’s experience better, which can both improve customer retention and make them more loyal and likely to stay with you.

Next, we’ll look at each of these stages of customer journey closely to help you really understand the B2B customer journey.

“ Need for Business Solution ” starts when a company discovers a gap or difficulty in its operations that demands a new business solution.

After choosing a solution, “ Onboarding ” begins. B2B onboarding includes educating the whole account, which might include several users from various departments.

“ Ongoing Use ” means the company uses the product regularly after onboarding. This stage is for using the service for maximum efficiency and productivity.

“ Support ” is necessary because problems in B2B can have serious consequences. 

“The last step is “ Renewal “, deciding whether to keep using the tool. B2B companies don’t just buy something once; they think about how much the tool has helped them.

In other terms, it’s about painting a clear picture of their experiences, expectations, and interactions with your brand, helping you to strategize and align your services for maximum impact and efficiency.

What would happen without it? Well, you might still succeed, but the chances would be lower.

Crafting a Customer Journey Map in 11 Steps

Creating a customer journey map is crucial to understanding your customers’ experience with your product or service. It’s a strategic tool that visualizes the process a customer goes through from the moment they discover your product to the point of purchase and beyond.

This guide will walk you through the 11 steps to create an effective B2B customer journey map. These steps are categorized into four main sections

Identifying and Understanding Your Audience

Defining key stages and touchpoints, data gathering and research techniques.

• Analysis and Application of Your Customer Journey Map.

By the end of this guide, you’ll have a comprehensive understanding of how to create a customer journey map that will help you improve your customer experience and ultimately grow your business.

1. Understanding the Importance of Customer Journey Mapping in B2B Contexts

Let’s make a quick list to visualize the effects of having a clear customer journey map:

• Your B2B customers are comparing lots of competitors . If you aren’t clear with the path you provide them, they will not even start considering your solution as an option.
• 55% of customers  don’t bother to understand a product that they couldn’t understand at first glance.  Your signup page, onboarding, help modules, surveys, and referral programs are all a part of the journey, and these are most of the elements that the user needs to understand your product.
• By mapping out this journey, you gain valuable insights into the pain points, motivations, and decision-making processes of your customers.  This understanding is essential for coming up with tailored strategies and solutions that resonate deeply with your customers. 
• The customer journey map will also help you come up with more solid strategies.  The journey map will divide the user journey into steps. Assigning different metrics for each step will allow you to have a better look at how your customers are doing.

2. Goals Setting: Tailoring Your Approach to Your Business Model

Setting goals for your journey map means you are customizing your strategy to align seamlessly with your specific business model.

Are you aiming for long-term customer relationships, or is your focus on quick, efficient sales cycles?  Understanding and setting these goals will help you in creating a journey map that’s not just a “map”, but a strategic tool.

➡️ If you are looking for quick sales, then keep the pre-onboarding process shorter and promote referrals at an earlier stage.

➡️ If you are looking for long-term customer relationships, then tailor the sales and onboarding processes, and keep them a bit longer (if necessary).

Well, a “customer journey map” couldn’t exist without a “customer”. That’s why you have to  know who “ your customer ”  is and what they want.

Here are the easiest steps to achieve that goal:

3. Segmenting Your Customer Base: The Foundation of an Effective Journey Map

Not all your customers are the same. Especially in a B2B context where the number of customers is lower, but the value is much higher. After all, you aren’t selling 50$ sneakers, but an experience, and value for their business instead.

Back to our topic,  segmenting your users based on certain criteria and creating a custom journey map according to each type’s needs is crucial.  It involves categorizing your customers based on specific criteria like industry, company size, or buying behavior. 

Effective segmentation leads to a more focused and impactful customer journey map, paving the way for personalized marketing strategies and improved customer experiences.

4. Creating Detailed Customer Personas

Some people love the  idea of customer personas , and others hate it much more than they hate their enemies.  My take on the subject is that as long as the customer persona represents a real user type and not a hypothetical being.

Your journey will bend and shape according to your customer profiles and personas anyway. Whether you see it or not. 

Therefore, if you create the ideal personas first and map out the ideal customer journey, accordingly, you will have the advantage of getting them to love your product at the first interaction anyway.

Ask yourself:

• What is the problem they are facing and why did they choose you to solve it?
• What alternatives were considered, or were alternatives considered?
• What do your customers love about your tool?
• What are the users’s aspirations?

Finally, we are at the customer journey itself. This is where you start to meet customer expectations and define the steps of the customer journey – which will affect your whole onboarding and retention strategies.

5. Mapping the Customer Journey Stages in B2B

There is a huge load of different stages that you “need to follow” while creating your customer journey map. Well, in reality, you have done most of the work I will list out below, so, feel free to pick and choose which ones you haven’t done yet and need to do:

• Touchpoint analysis:  Find all the touchpoints where your customers interact with your product. More information on this topic is below.
• Collect data:  Once you have your touchpoints, collect data about them. Which ones are more frequently used, what is the difference between different personas, and so on?
• Visualize the map:  Create the first draft of your map. While doing so, get help from the research you have done in the previous steps.
• Highlight pain points:  Figure out what the most challenging steps or transitions between steps are. You will have to find ways to smooth these steps out.
• Implement and Monitor:  Put your proposed improvements into action and continually monitor the results, adjusting your strategy as necessary.
• Add value:  Once you start to generate some data from this journey map, figure out what and where you can make improvements.
• Get feedback:  A simple “How was your onboarding?” or “How can I help you better?” will make a customer think deeply about your product and evaluate it further. So while you are getting your feedback, they are putting more thought into you! (Aww…)

6. Identifying Crucial Customer Journey Touchpoints

Identifying crucial customer touchpoints is all about recognizing the key moments that significantly affect the customer’s experience and decision-making process. PS. You can use Miro to create visually appealing maps.

In the B2B landscape, these touchpoints could range from:

• the first website visit,
• interaction with marketing content,
• sales calls,
• product demos,
• after-sales support,
• and feedback mechanisms.

Understanding these touchpoints allows you to optimize each interaction, ensuring they are as effective and engaging as possible. 

7. Research Approaches Unique to B2B Markets

The research methods and priorities for B2B and B2C aren’t the same. A B2B business needs to dive deeper into each customer and know how to customize. It focuses on understanding complex business needs, industry-specific challenges, and decision-making hierarchies within organizations.

Don’t swim on the surface, dive deep.

💡 Have interviews with key figures in your industry.  Bonus points if you use this interview as a base for your customer profiling.

💡 Ask others.  I bet you are in a few Slack or Facebook groups, or a LinkedIn community about your job. Ask those people.  If you are just starting and aren’t on any groups, just ask Quora or Reddit!

💡 And lastly, look out for patterns.  Since your customer base will have the same problem, there will be certain groups that want to solve it your way. Analyze their patterns and  use this data in your segmentation.

8. Using Resources for Informed Insights

It is already post-pandemic and I just know for a fact that you are using other 3rd party tools to figure out your product. That’s only natural.

And I also bet that you have at least one analytics tool and one CRM integrated. 

That is amazing news because the information that those tools provide will be your best friend at all obstacles.  The key is to integrate and analyze this information to gain a comprehensive understanding of the market landscape, customer behavior, and emerging trends.

Listen to your 3rd party tools and try to detect changes in behavior depending on the customer journey. If the numbers are mostly consistent, you are on the right path.

But if the numbers are too inconsistent to understand anything, you might want to go back to step 5.

Analysis and Application of Your Customer Journey Map

9. measuring and analyzing the success of the customer journey.

Measuring and analyzing the success of your B2B customer journey map is like conducting a health checkup for your business strategy. It includes using customer feedback data and evaluating key metrics – such as customer satisfaction, conversion rates, and retention rates – to understand how effective the journey map is for the customers.

Tools like UserMotion are invaluable here because they allow you to see what customers are actually doing and feeling during their onboarding process at the account level.

This kind of tracking helps you understand the story behind the numbers, revealing customer behaviors and activities that are essential for shaping a successful journey and leading to long-term paying customers.

10. Synchronizing Insights Across Teams

This step is about ensuring that marketing teams, sales, customer service, and product development teams are all aligned and informed about the insights gathered from the journey map.

Creating this map isn’t the job of one specific person, it is a collective process. Without understanding the different views of users from different departments, your journey map will be incomplete.

So, whether you do a big call or a shared document, make sure that all teams are content with the map, especially the steps that regard their input.

11. Regularly Updating Your Journey Map

Everything will change. Your business, your customers, their needs, and even the whole market.

That’s why you need to regularly update your journey map to keep up with the trends.

You may need to change your linear map into one that has more flows, or your simple journey map into one that is more in-depth.

Creating a working customer journey map is not too difficult since all you need is the customer data, that you should already have for your positioning, GTM, marketing, and overall customer journey success efforts.

All you need to do is look at the data from a different perspective and bring the users into the process.

Once you invest enough time into having a solid journey map, all those will become easier:

• Onboarding,
• And segmentation.

[EXTRA] Customer Journey Map Templates

Creating a customer journey map from scratch can seem daunting. Luckily, there are numerous online tools that offer templates and examples to simplify this task.

These platforms offer user-friendly interfaces and a diverse range of templates, allowing you to construct an effective B2B customer journey map.

Additionally, these tools allow you to export your completed map in various formats, such as Excel, Word, PDF, and more, facilitating easy sharing and collaboration.

Miro is a collaborative online platform that provides a variety of templates for creating customer journey maps. It’s a great tool for visualizing and understanding your customer’s experience.

👉 https://miro.com/templates/customer-journey-map

Canva offers a wide range of free templates for customer journey map designs that you can easily customize and share. There are countless options to choose from, including designs made by our creative community. These templates are designed to make your task easier and more efficient.

👉 https://www.canva.com/templates/s/customer-journey-map/

Mural is an excellent tool for creating interactive, collaborative customer journey maps. It’s a digital workspace that allows teams to visualize the customer’s experience, making it easier to identify opportunities for improvement.

👉 https://www.mural.co/templates/customer-journey-map

Final Thoughts

Creating a B2B customer journey map is an essential step in understanding your customers’ experience with your product or service. It allows you to visualize the path your customers take, identify potential pain points, and find opportunities to enhance the customer experience.

Remember, the journey map is not just a static document, but a living tool that should evolve as your business and customers change. Regularly updating your journey map will ensure it remains relevant and effective.

By following the steps outlined in this guide, you’ll be well on your way to crafting a comprehensive and insightful B2B customer journey map. This will not only improve your customer experience but also increase customer retention and contribute to the overall growth and success of your business.

Zeynep Avan

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Guide to Building a B2B SaaS Customer Journey Map

10 min read

A B2B SaaS customer journey map is key to creating a wholesome product experience for your customers.

To get it right, SaaS companies must step back and see the product from the customer’s viewpoint. Starting from their first point of contact to when they subscribe and eventually become raving fans of your product.

In this piece, we’ll break down what a SaaS customer journey map is all about, its importance, and practical steps for building one that boosts product adoption.

• A SaaS Customer Journey Map refers to the path a customer takes from the moment they discover your product till they become paid users.
• The SaaS customer journey consists of six different stages: awareness, acquisition , adoption , expansion , renewal , and advocacy .
• At the awareness stage, customers are searching for a solution to a problem.
• The acquisition comes when your target audience begins using your tool. Impress users with a seamless onboarding process to win this stage.
• The adoption stage is when users transition into paying customers.
• At the renewal stage, a customer has tried a product and is satisfied enough to renew their subscription.
• Expansion is the stage of upsells and feature upgrades for existing customers. Here, you’re trying to upsell your customer to upgrade to a premium account.
• In the advocacy stage, customers become true fans of your products. They act as referrals, answer questions and eventually, help you with user-generated content.

Steps to build your B2B SaaS customer journey map:

• Establish your company’s goals and align them to the intended customer journey mapping.
• Create your user persona to gather important information about your target audience.
• Identify important customer milestones for the journey you are mapping.
• Analyze existing gaps to uncover gaps that could cause friction
• Continuously collect user feedback and optimize your map for a more accurate result.

What is a SaaS customer journey map?

A SaaS customer journey map is the visual storyline of every interaction a customer has with your company and software. Typically, customer journey maps include touchpoints , emotions, pain points, and actions.

It’s not just about creating a timeline—it’s about encouraging empathy and understanding how customers’ needs and feelings fluctuate throughout their journey. Thanks to this shared understanding, teams can identify opportunities for improvement and innovation.

Why is it important to map your customer journey?

For SaaS companies, the customer journey map unravels the answers to questions about your customers. It shows you what problems they want to be solved and how you can help them.

It also helps you achieve the following:

Understand where customers get stuck and remove friction

A customer journey map helps you identify unhappy paths in the user experience .

Ask yourself: did a customer reach a milestone and get stuck there? For example, did they click on the “create an account” button but never finished the signup process? Identify the friction, and remove it.

Understanding what the next milestone is can help you pinpoint where users get stuck so you can remove friction and improve customer retention.

Enhance customer experience and prevent churn

Instead of generic in-app help, using a customer success journey map can help you anticipate your customer’s next steps to achieve success with your app

This means your communication strategy can focus on micro conversions , driving users to success with in-app guidance , or 1 on 1 help, etc, that’s specific and relevant to where the customer is in the journey.

By offering granular help when and where they need it, you decrease the risk of churn .

You can also monitor engagement to spot inactivity and proactively reach out to users when they show signs of churning. But first, you need to know what to monitor, and a journey map helps you understand that.

Boost customer lifetime value

Knowing where your customers are in the buying process allows you to always recommend upgrades that are contextual and relevant.

So, instead of randomly trying to upsell, with a journey map you’ll know when a customer has reached the point in their journey where an upsell would bring them more value.

Types of SaaS customer journey maps

There are four main types of customer journey maps, which include:

• Current State Map: this is mapped around the present state of the customer in their journey. It takes into consideration the thoughts, feelings, and behavior of the customers while interacting with your product.
• Future state map: this map is developed around predictions or projections of the customer’s experience with your product. It should be mapped after effecting the corrections based on insights gotten with your present state map.
• Day in the life map: this map illustrates your customer’s day-to-day activities outside their interaction with your product. It covers their overall lifestyle including their fun time, work time, etc.
• Empathy map: an empathy map dives deep into the customer’s behavior to create a personalized product experience. With an empathy map , you’ll dig down to the unique actions of your target persona from their own point of view.
• Service blueprint maps: this map accesses other types of maps to identify hidden elements that can disrupt the customer’s journey.
• Circular customer journey maps: this helps you visualize the customer journey in a loop or circle.

Stages in the SaaS customer journey maps

There are six stages involved in the SaaS customer journey, each of which comes with its own touchpoints.

Let’s look at them in detail.

Awareness and Consideration

The SaaS customer journey starts at the awareness stage. Here, your customers are triggered to search for a solution to a problem. It’s also when they first discover and develop an interest in your product through an ad, referral, review, or SERP results.

Think of this stage as an evaluation stage. Your customers are comparing you with competitors and evaluating their options.

Awareness and consideration stage touchpoint examples

• Reviews on review sites like G2, Capterra, etc
• Testimonials on your website
• Search engine result page
• Influencer marketing campaign
• Ads e.g social media ads, Google ads, etc
• Top of the funnel content on blogs
• Social media content
• Whitepapers
• Digital billboards

Here’s an example of a touchpoint of the awareness stage: a paid social media ad from PromoRepublic explaining their product benefits.

Acquisition

Acquisition comes next, after awareness and consideration. At this point in the process, your target audience signs up for a free trial.

Creating a seamless onboarding process is the ultimate way to win over your user at this stage. After all, it determines the first impression a user will have about your product.

Most times, the slightest hiccup here can make a user opt-out before they experience the ‘ aha ‘ moment or reach the adoption stage. This is why SaaS companies must invest in product-led marketing to paint users a picture of what to expect with a product and how it will work for them.

Acquisition stage touchpoint examples

• Free trial or freemium tier
• Demo requests
• Account registration and sign in
• SaaS comparison pages
• Middle-of-funnel blog posts
• Onboarding emails

A seamless onboarding experience can work wonders for how your users see your product, and whether they choose to become paying customers.

When users transition into paying customers, don’t leave them alone to figure things out for themselves. Provide in-app guidance to drive product adoption faster.

Use checklists to help users get quick wins during the customer onboarding process. Tooltips and hotspots are great for describing product features and directing the user on the right path.

Adoption stage touchpoint examples

• In-app notifications
• Video tutorials and webinars
• Virtual customer communities and forums
• Email sequences on more advanced usage of the product
• Self-serve resources, like a knowledge base

As many SaaS products use a subscription model to generate recurring revenue, this stage is a major determinant of whether or not a SaaS company breaks even.

This stage is especially important at the end of a free trial since this isn’t a subscription renewal , but the first purchase from your user.

To hit this stage, dig into your customer data to uncover what makes customers hesitate in their customer journeys. Then implement customer retention strategies to keep them.

Renewal stage touchpoint examples

• Sales calls (b2b SaaS pre-purchase)
• Educational and promotional emails (pre-purchase)
• In-app notifications and surveys (pre-purchase)

• Subscription purchase screen (moment of purchase)
• Account and billing features (post-purchase)

Expansion is the stage of upsells and feature upgrades for current customers. At this stage, you’re trying to achieve revenue growth without acquiring new customers.

An example of an upsell in SaaS is the tiered pricing model. Most SaaS companies offer multiple features—as part of different packages—to entice customers to opt for a more expensive plan.

It could also be getting them to increase the number of seats or users for products that come with a per-user charge.

To drive account expansion, start with a problem compass. Understand your users’ challenges and align your expansion strategy with their journey.

At this stage, you’ve unlocked the true fans of your products.

Because of how complex the SaaS customer journey is, advocacy can happen at any point of the customer lifecycle . Someone could be an avid reader of your company’s blog, fall in love with the content, and recommend your product—all without ever using it.

The probability of advocacy happening is higher with companies that have a product-led strategy. People have a first-hand experience with your product and see it in action without paying upfront.

Advocacy is better done by your customers; they act as referrals, answer prospect questions on your behalf, and eventually help you with user-generated content.

Advocacy stage touchpoint examples

• Social sharing
• Referral and loyalty programs
• Reviews and testimonials

Steps to build your B2B SaaS customer journey map

Building a customer journey map sounds simple, but how exactly can we build one that works?

Here are five steps to creating a successful SaaS customer journey map:

• Establish your company’s goals and objectives.
• Create and describe your target personas.
• Determine customer milestones and touchpoints for the journey stages you are mapping.
• Analyze gaps between existing strategies and expectations.
• Constantly improve and optimize your map.

Establish your company’s goals and objectives

Every product decision, campaign or strategy you come up with, should be in line with your company’s overall goals.

With that in mind, consider the final results you’ll like to get from the intended customer journey mapping.

In doing this, factor in the type of product you offer, the industry you play in, trends, and your customer insights. All of these will help you determine if the goals you set are realistic.

Here are some examples of objectives you may want to achieve with journey mapping:

• Generating more leads
• Increased conversion rate
• Reduced customer complaints
• Relaunching of brand messaging
• New feature or product update
• Shortened customer onboarding process

Create and describe your target personas

Your user persona is a fictitious representation of a subset of your target audience. This is based on factors like demographics, behavior, lifestyle, and more.

There is a multitude of ways to collect the information needed to create personas , and one of them is through in-app microsurveys .

Take note of your target audience. Are they the decision-makers or end-users? This way, you’ll know exactly who to design for. For instance, your end-users might be the social media team. Meanwhile, the decision-makers could be the marketing lead.

Determine customer milestones and touchpoints for the journey stages you are mapping

What are the main goals? What does the customer want to achieve, and what should they do to get to that stage?

Lincoln Murphy defines success milestones as “functional milestones within the product, but they won’t just be an activity for activity’s sake”.

They must be the result of meaningful activity and should be tied to other inputs to ensure that the customer is achieving the “desired outcome”.

For example, in a social media app, creating a new post is a functional milestone. So is reaching the activation point in SaaS. The point is, customers must engage with specific features to achieve this.

Analyze gaps between existing strategies and expectations

Finally, you need to determine what customers expect from each touchpoint, as well as how your company is currently performing.

For instance, your customers may expect advance notice and a seamless renewal process at the billing touchpoint. But what your company provides is a three-day notice, and it requires several manual steps to renew.

You can also check customer tickets and reviews for hidden clues. Likewise, you can collect feedback at multiple touchpoints with in-app surveys to listen to what your customers have to say.

Constantly improve and optimize your map

SaaS customer journey mapping is not a once-and-done deal. You need to continually update the information you’ve collected and iterate designs as you go. This way, your customers will have a better experience with your product.

Using product adoption tools like Userpilot can help you set specific goals. You can also add your milestones as your main goals.

Track in-app customer behavior and see where users get stuck and drop off in the journey and optimize the low-converting touchpoints.

By mapping the customer journey and carefully optimizing the critical touchpoints, you’re setting your product up for success.

And if you need a tool to build better product experiences without coding, sign up for a Userpilot demo to get started.

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B2B Buyer Journey Map

Master the b2b buyer journey and control your success.

See every step of the buyer journey. Automate every marketing and sales action.

Demandbase makes it easy to master the B2B buyer journey by combining your first-party data with our third-party and behavioral intent data to create one holistic view of your accounts. We call it Account Intelligence and it’s the single source of truth for your sales and marketing teams to see where your accounts are in their buyer journeys.

Now put that intel into action. Here’s how a typical Demandbase customer uses buyer journey stages within Demandbase One to automate all their sales and marketing motions.

• Market Qualified Account
• Opportunity

B2B Buyer Journey Stage:

These B2B accounts may be a good fit for your business, but at this buyer journey stage, they show little to no intent or on-site activity.

What do you do? Try these awareness marketing and sales tactics:

• Marketing: Add these accounts to an awareness advertising campaign and offer thought leadership content, webinars, eBooks, infographics, and interactive content. Check out Demandbase Advertising .
• Sales: Add these accounts and contacts into CRM to power outreach and marketing nurturing efforts. B2B Contact Data can help.

These accounts are showing that they're aware of your brand, but they haven't engaged heavily with your content. For example, they may have read about your business or competitors online.

• Marketing: Put the buyer group from these accounts into highly personalized email campaigns with content related to their industry. See how easy it is with Orchestration .
• Sales: Keep an eye on their intent and on-site activity to prioritize the accounts showing the highest engagement. Learn more about Intent Data .

These accounts are engaged with your brand, but are not quite ready for marketing to hand them off to sales. This is the time for marketing to double down on building engagement across all available channels.

What do you do? Try these ideas:

• Marketing: Use web personalization to customize the on-site experience with highly relevant content, maximizing the chances of conversion. Dive into Personalization .
• Sales: Scan news and social insights to personalize your outbound messaging. It's easy with Sales Intelligence .

These accounts are ready for sales. What might trigger this stage? A combination of high or trending intent, someone in the buying group visited a high-value page or attended a product webinar, or the account has a high pipeline predict score.

What do you do? Here's what we suggest:

• Marketing: Put them into a mid-stage advertising campaign. Drive them to white papers, product demos, live events, and relevant case-studies. See how easy it is with Demandbase Advertising .
• Sales: Get multi-threaded by reaching out to more of the buying committee across functions and job levels. Demandbase B2B Contact Data can help.

Congratulations! Your marketing efforts have been successful. Now, it's time to influence these opportunities and turn pipeline into revenue!

What do you do? Try these actions:

• Marketing: Remove these accounts from your general demand gen campaigns and create more personalized experiences in every channel. Use orchestration to automate a direct mail campaign with swag, a bottle of wine, or something more tailored. Dive into Orchestration .
• Sales: Tap into all the Account Intelligence Demandbase provides to create personalized and informed presentations and conversations. Explore Account Intelligence .

When an account becomes a customer, the job isn't done! Now you need to shift gears to encourage growth. It's time to identify cross and up-sell opportunities and then automate appropriate plays.

• Marketing: Add these accounts to growth advertising campaigns with a goal of increasing lifetime customer value (LCV). Share best practices and customer-stories, while introducing growth products. Learn how with Demandbase Advertising .
• Sales: Review Demandbase Account Intelligence to identify products that might be of interest, but are not currently owned. Use family trees to surface land-and-expand opportunities. Discover more about Account Intelligence .

Customers coming up for renewal are in a delicate stage. Sales and marketing need to work closely together to coordinate a cohesive strategy to influence growth purchases and mitigate churn.

What do you do? Give these a try:

• Marketing: Add them to an email campaign offering thought leadership content, relevant ROI-focused case studies, and exciting company news. Check out the ABX Platform .
• Sales: Keep in touch with the buying group, stay current with company leadership changes, and assess competitive intent signals. Get the scoop with Sales Intelligence .

Want to kick the tires?

See how Demandbase One could work for you.

More From Forbes

The new buyer's journey: how to win over informed b2b customers.

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Anna Convery-Pelletier is CMO at Jumio, a provider of automated, AI-driven identity verification, risk assessment and compliance solutions.

In the ever-evolving world of marketing, reaching B2B technology customers and prospects has become an undeniably daunting task. The landscape is saturated—inboxes overflowing with emails, social media feeds flooded with content and targeted ads popping up everywhere we turn.

Buyers have become desensitized to traditional marketing tactics. It's a frustrating reality for B2B marketers and a reality I know all too well as the chief marketing officer of an AI solution provider: Having a fantastic product or a well-crafted campaign simply isn't enough anymore. Success now hinges on a strategic approach that not only cuts through the noise, but also engages today's savvy buyers.

The Empowered Buyer

The buyer's journey has undergone a dramatic shift. Gone are the days of passive information intake. Today's empowered customers leverage the internet to become informed decision-makers, actively seeking out trustworthy sources and conducting in-depth research. In fact, research found that 75% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free sales experience.

Think about buying a car. Unlike the past when a buyer would spend their Saturday going from dealership to dealership and test driving every car, the modern buyer conducts online research and knows their choice before stepping foot in a dealership. They identify their buying criteria, from budget to safety features and vehicle type. This research goes beyond brand websites and encompasses reviews, comparisons and independent sources to discern genuine value from marketing messages.

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To effectively engage with these empowered buyers, it's crucial for B2B marketers to shift their strategies. Here are actionable steps to begin that transformation:

• Conduct thorough market research to delineate and comprehend your buyer personas, enabling tailored marketing strategies that resonate with each unique segment.

• Leverage website analytics to monitor user engagement, page visits and interaction patterns, providing a foundation for content optimization and user experience enhancements.

• Implement machine learning algorithms to sift through large datasets, revealing patterns and preferences that inform broader, cross-sector personalized marketing initiatives.

Cut Through The Noise

Acknowledging the evolved landscape, marketers must pivot toward strategies that emphasize insightful, personalized content to truly engage modern, well-informed buyers. As skepticism toward traditional sales tactics increases in an era of information overload, the necessity for marketers to adapt becomes undeniable.

Offering relevant and engaging content at every stage of the buyer's journey—not merely at the point of sale—is crucial for nurturing trust and fostering open dialogue. Research found that 84% of B2B buyers find it very important to have easy access to technical content. The strategy should proactively address the buyer's challenges and guide them to solutions, potentially before they themselves are fully aware of their needs.

To navigate this new terrain effectively, here are strategic approaches that can help marketers foster impactful engagement with their audience:

• Develop a content strategy that addresses each stage of the buyer's journey, providing value that guides the buyer toward a decision.

• Implement SEO best practices to increase the visibility of your content, making it easier for your target audience to find the answers they're seeking.

• Harness social media analytics and AI to create dynamic, real-time content that resonates with evolving trends and preferences.

Navigating The Digital Landscape

Having established the need to understand our buyers and create content that resonates with them, it's clear that the battleground for customer attention has largely moved online. The shift toward online customer attention underscores the importance of a robust "digital front door" in modern marketing strategy. A strategic, comprehensive approach to online presence is vital for engaging today's informed buyers, from understanding their journey to delivering impactful content.

Throughout my career, I've learned that thorough digital strategy is essential for making a brand's online presence a welcoming point of contact and a pivotal decision-making element. Such a presence serves as today's storefront, retaining customer interest with quality content.

Understanding digital engagement analysis is crucial for fine-tuning interactions and ensuring a brand's visibility is impactful. Meeting customers in digital spaces where decisions are made is now essential. A compelling digital presence, supported by a nurturing sales and support infrastructure, is key to developing deep, meaningful relationships and successful conversions.

Incorporating a holistic digital strategy, informed by buyer behavior and targeted content creation, is crucial for meaningful engagement and conversion success in the digital landscape. This approach ensures brands can meet and exceed modern buyer expectations.

Looking Ahead

The B2B customer power dynamic has shifted—they now control their buying journey, informed and aided by a wealth of information. For marketers, success depends on understanding the customer's context and journey stage. Delivering relevant, authentic content is paramount. Building trust and fostering meaningful conversations throughout the buying cycle distinguishes successful companies in today's marketing landscape

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Charting and optimising the end-to-end b2b customer journey.

13 min read Learn how to optimise the B2B customer journey, improve opportunities for upsell, and improve customer retention.

Personalised, meaningful B2B customer experiences  are proven to improve business outcomes.  Loyal customers  not only come back for repeat business, but they advocate for your brand and increase new customers’ trust in your products and services.

The value of investing in your B2B customer journey lies in the potential growth to be gained by building a solid customer base that repurchases, renews, and advocates for your brand.

However, every customer journey is different. So how can you improve and tailor every  customer experience  at scale, and how can you leverage loyalty to fuel growth?  

B2B customer journey definition

The B2B customer journey encompasses the end-to-end experience a customer may have with your brand from lead acquisition to renewals.

The B2B buyer/sales journey

The B2B buyer journey is the steps a customer may go through to discover your brand, products, and services and complete their purchase. The buyer journey encompasses all the experiences your customer may have from initial brand contact to completion of the purchase process and may relate to a completely new customer or take the form of a new sale (eg. cross-sell or upsell) to an existing customer.

Learn more about the B2B buyer/sales journey

The buyer journey vs the customer journey

The buyer journey – from discovery to the buying process – and the broader customer journey are often conflated.

However, the buyer journey is only part of the overall customer journey, representing the sales-focused stages of a customers’ overall relationship with your brand. Once a customer has purchased a product or service, the real work of developing loyalty and encouraging brand advocacy begins.

B2B customer journey stages

Generally speaking, the end-to-end B2B customer journey can be broken down into the following stages:

1. Awareness

The buyer becomes  aware of your brand , products, and services. Marketing – with sales support – will likely have a large hand in this stage. Means of generating awareness include advertising (out of home, social, display, direct mail), events, public relations, SEO.

2. Consideration

In this stage, your brand proves its ability to resolve any issues the customer may have, addressing the pain points that have led them to seek a solution.

3. Decision

The customer at this stage will be making decisions on which product or service they wish to choose.  Digital content  will often be at the forefront of providing vital information for this decision to take place.

4. Purchase and Delivery

Once the decision has been made, customers will make their purchase. This stage requires expert handling of buying and delivery processes to ensure that all  customer expectations  of products and services are met.

5. Support and Retention

A customer that has made one purchase and found the experience to be satisfactory is more likely to return for another or to renew their agreement. Building excellent experiences at the start of the customer journey will make this stage more attainable – but  building loyalty over time  means that the ongoing experience must continue to meet customer expectations.

6. Growth and expansion

Upselling and cross-selling products and services can lead to customers not only  renewing  their agreements with your brand but growing their  relationship  with you into new areas.

Once customers have repeatedly returned to purchase or renew as a result of great experiences, their likelihood of advocating for your brand increases. This stage widens the customer pool and lends authority to the initial buyer journey stages for new customers.

Customers stop purchasing products and services for a whole host of different and very valid reasons. How you manage this process and the lasting impression this leaves can be key to determining whether they choose to return again in the future.

Download our free B2B CX for account management ebook

The post-sales customer journey

It can often be the case that companies focus solely on the initial steps to win a customer and ensure a purchase is made (the buyer journey ). However, the post-sales customer journey is often more important. Not only is it more costly to acquire customers than to keep them, but a  high attrition rate  makes brand growth harder too, which is why keeping your customers happy should be a priority.

Starting from the purchase stage and extending to the growth and expansion stage outlined above, the post-sales customer journey must provide positive experiences that meet and exceed customer expectations.

The following should be considered as vital steps in the post-sales customer journey to ensure customers stay:

Implementation

The initial delivery and implementation of a product or service is key for  ensuring customers are retained . In this step of the customer journey, the brand promises that the customer has been exposed to must be fulfilled to avoid disappointment. The implementation must be as the customer expected.

Not only should the product or service itself be as expected, but it should also be delivered and accessed in a way that’s convenient and simple for the customer. Onboarding may require guidance, training, or intensive personal support, particularly given that B2B sales are often dependent on developing strong customer relationships.

A key part of the customer journey is access to support. Whether providing digital support in the form of FAQs or self-service information centres or offering specific, personalised customer service options, this step is vital to get right to ensure issues are handled promptly and efficiently. Offering the right support option at the right time for the right customer can be the difference between renewal and departing for a competitor.

Customers who have had great experiences and have grown to trust your brand are more likely to renew. However, upselling and cross-selling products will require your team to understand specific customer challenges and pain points, rather than offering options that aren’t relevant. Taking customer data into account is vital for tailoring the options that you offer customers who are keen to renew.

Customer touchpoints

Mapping your customer journey can help you to detail precisely what your customers do, when, and why. It allows you to understand where customers might be losing interest, where the experience can improve, or how brands can make every experience as good as the next.

At each  customer touchpoint , your team should be considering:

• What is the customer likely to be thinking, feeling or doing at this touchpoint?
• What do we want them to think, feel or do, and how can we optimize their journey accordingly?
• What obstacles might cause customers to not engage with this touchpoint?
• How can we remove these obstacles?

By  gathering customer feedback , you can use data to further tailor these touchpoints to inspire the thoughts, feelings, and actions that you wish to happen. You can also include staff feedback and observations to pinpoint obstacles and resolve issues that might be holding customers back from progressing further through their journey.

Below are some examples of touchpoints that may influence the customer experience along their journey:

• News articles
• Online search results
• Social media posts

Consideration

• Case studies
• Comparative content such as blogs
• Testimonials
• Self-service contact center or FAQs
• Brand advocates (existing customers)
• Email marketing

Purchase & Delivery

• Customer support channels
• Sales team interactions
• Reseller or partner network interactions
• Delivery team or third party supplier interactions

Support & Retention

• Sales team interactions, such as account management calls or meetings
• Contact center interactions
• Digital support channel interactions – Web, app, chatbots

Growth and expansion

• Sales team interactions, such as upselling or cross-selling discussions
• Email marketing  

Optimising the journey

More than anything else, listening to customer feedback and taking action to continually improve the experience is how brands can optimize the journey, drive growth, and increase customer retention.

Map the customer journey

Mapping the end-to-end B2B customer journey can help you to better understand which touchpoints are causing pain points, what can be improved, and which steps should be taken to make it a seamless experience for every customer.

Use digital tools to support optimisation

Utilising digital tools such as a CX management platform can make taking action seamless and part of the day to day. Visualising customer and financial data alongside insights can make next steps clearer and help you to deliver the right experience to the right stakeholder every time.

Identify responsible teams, provide insights and take action

Ensuring that you identify the teams responsible for each stage of the customer journey and providing them with the insights they need to take action can significantly improve the results you see. Offering customer feedback data and clarifying the resulting actions that need to be taken can solidify the strategic direction that’s needed. Rather than leaving teams to perform by rote, offering guidance as to which steps will make the most impact will help make their work easier.

Take a holistic approach to the customer journey  

Often, the handling of different stages of the customer journey can be siloed across your organisation. Sometimes it’s even the case that multiple teams are working on the same process, but not communicating their insights or the actions they plan to take. Make sure you keep all teams in the loop on the insights you discover and actions planned and help them to build strong links between touchpoints to ensure the customer journey isn’t broken.

Understand the emotional resonance of each touchpoint

Though you may be dealing with several stakeholders at each stage of the B2B customer journey, your  customers’ engagement  can often depend on how each touchpoint makes individual stakeholders feel.

For example, if your customer’s implementation team finds your support center frustrating to use, they might be tempted to go elsewhere to find a better experience. Getting specific customer stakeholder feedback on particular touchpoints – not just on the overall customer relationship with your brand – can help you to better tailor experiences to the outcomes you desire.

Remember to nurture customers after a sale is made

It can be tempting to call it a day when a lead generation opportunity turns into a sale, but continual nurturing can be the difference between high customer churn and ongoing business growth. Getting your customers excited not only about the initial sale but for your other offerings or further developments can help develop steadier business outcomes.

Assess how well you consistently meet and exceed expectations

Internal and external perceptions of success can vary greatly. Taking the pulse of your customer relationship through relationship measurement tools can help to determine if internal views match how your customers see your brand. Exceeding customer expectations can significantly increase your likelihood of customers renewing – and your return on investment to flourish. Compiling data and viewing trends can help you to make educated decisions on how to optimize your customer journey, rather than relying on internal perception.

Use comparative measurements

  Comparing solely to your past successes or to industry benchmarks can limit your ability to progress your customer journey further. By  understanding what your top competitors are doing  effectively – and where you might be falling short – can help you to take strategic action to ensure your customers aren’t won over by your competitors.

Listen to customer needs

Often, providing the solution a customer will buy into comes down to listening to customer needs. Though your product might provide a solution for an initial issue, renewal and retention happen when you can anticipate customer needs and offer solutions to future problems. Regular evaluations of  customer sentiment  can help you to identify these needs and act accordingly.

eBook: B2B CX for account management

Related resources

Customer health scores 15 min read, win/loss analysis and optimisation 10 min read, b2b buyer journey 12 min read, b2b customer churn and retention 7 min read, measurement & benchmarking 2 min read, b2b customer feedback 6 min read, b2b customer service 10 min read, request demo.

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Simplifying the B2B Buyer Journey

The B2B (business-to-business) buyer journey has transformed significantly in the last few years. Traditionally face-to-face methods of B2B procurement have moved online, driven largely by the pandemic and a new influx of millennials in key decision-making roles.

These B2B buyers have come to expect simple, streamlined online experiences that mirror their B2C transactions. If your business is to stay competitive, it needs to adapt accordingly. Read on as we explore how you can utilize buyer journey mapping to optimize your  B2B e-commerce  offering.  

What is the B2B buyer journey?

This is the decision-making process a buyer goes through when purchasing from another business. It involves research, consideration of risks, price negotiation, and final product selection.

How is the B2B buyer journey different from the B2C buyer journey?

In B2B, the sale takes place between two business entities, while in B2C, goods and services are sold to a customer for their personal use.

The B2B buying journey is typically more complex; whilst B2C can be as simple as a customer ordering a product online, B2B may involve input from several departments within a business, and take in considerations including scalability and integration with existing systems.

B2B transactions also tend to have a greater element of personalization; prices are negotiable, and product assortment and catalogs are customized with unique segmentation to meet each business customer’s requirement.

Why is the buyer’s journey important?

Gartner forecasts that by 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers to occur in digital channels 1 . Despite this, research by Sana 2  found that 50% of B2B e-commerce sites are not fully meeting the expectations of buyers, whilst 94% of buyers report suffering from customer experience challenges when they buy online.

By understanding their buyers’ journey, businesses can deliver better experiences that will nurture leads through the sales tunnel. 

Streamlining the B2B Procurement Process

The  new generation of B2B decision makers  is shifting the procurement process. In fact, research by Gartner found that 33% of all buyers now desire a seller-free experience 3 , and have become increasingly comfortable placing even high-value orders via self-serve online.

Buyers want the experience they’re used to when shopping as a B2C customer: a user-friendly website with fast loading speed, clear and intuitive navigation, product recommendations, easy checkout (with minimal form entry), multiple payment options, and flexible delivery. 

What your business should consider

A self-service portal  where your customers can perform tasks and complete wholesale B2B e-commerce transactions independently. Shopify’s dedicated B2B e-commerce platform, for example, allows users to set up a profile to:

• View wholesale price lists
• Set custom payment terms
• Generate invoices for previous orders
• Invite other decision makers to the company profile

A powerful search function.  McKinsey surveyed key B2B decision makers across the world 4  and asked them  “what ways of interacting with a supplier would be most beneficial to you when researching/considering suppliers going forward?”  The most popular answer was onsite search. Without a sales rep to guide them, buyers visiting B2B e-commerce sites will instead rely on a powerful search engine to help them find what they’re looking for, so ensure you invest in this function accordingly.

Flexible payment methods.  Online buyers want a fast, seamless checkout experience and to pay via their preferred method. However, B2B payments are more complex than B2C; many wholesale customers pay after their shipment has been delivered, invoices are often required, and payment by check is still common.

That said, there are dedicated B2B e-commerce payment processors you can integrate to facilitate a seamless experience for your customers. Payment platform Stripe, for example, has developed online invoices with a built-in, electronic payment option. Customers can pay vendors directly, in the method and language of their choice. The company says that Stripe-hosted invoices get paid, on average, three times faster 5  than typical invoices.

B2B Buyer Journey Stages

To optimize your current B2B offering, it’s important to first understand the different stages of the buyer journey, and the factors which influence their decision making. 

1. Awareness

The buyer identifies a problem or need within their business, or an opportunity they want to pursue. They begin researching products, services or businesses that can provide a solution. They may consult reviews and referrals to help them.

2. Consideration

The buyer evaluates their options, comparing things like pricing and features. They may consult other teams within their organization (such as the operations department) to ensure the potential product’s specifications fulfil requirements.

3. Decision

The buyer makes a final decision and contacts the supplier to negotiate terms and prices. This interaction may be done face-to-face, but is increasingly conducted online.

How to Create a B2B Buyer Journey Map

By mapping out your business’s own unique buyer journey, you can see where it is falling short of meeting customer expectations. You’ll gain insights to optimize and improve your service and convert more sales. 

Step 1: Conduct customer research

It goes without saying that your customers will have the most useful insights about your current B2B service. Reach out and ask them what they like most about your brand, what works well, what’s lacking, and their biggest frustrations. You could send customers a survey by email, or invite feedback on your social channels.

Step 2: Simplify the process

90% of B2B buyers expect a DTC-style customer experience from B2B vendors 6 , so the goal is to streamline each step of the buyer journey.

List all the touchpoints a customer has with your brand, such as your website and contact forms. Then list all the actions they are required to take at each – e.g., registering an account or filling in details – and then identify how you can simplify the process. For example, this might mean allowing them to pay with an existing PayPal account rather than having to enter new payment details.

Step 3: Identify pain points

Further improvements can be made to your buyer journey once you understand their common frustrations. Customer feedback will provide some of these insights, as will your website data. For example, analytics may show that lots of customers abandon their purchases once asked to register an account which is where offering a “Guest Checkout” feature can help.

Step 4: Determine what resources you need

Once you understand your business’s pain points, you can research which new systems and technology you may need to invest in to make improvements.

Step 5: Measure results

After you have made changes, you can analyze your website analytics to track your progress. Look closely at where you are losing buyers to see where improvements still need to be made to optimize their journey.

Your B2B e-commerce journey starts now

As B2B buyers’ expectations of online procurement continue to evolve, so too should your business. By adopting the above strategies, B2B businesses can stay relevant in a fast-changing industry. The key is to deliver B2C-like experiences – fast, intuitive and seamless – which is where DHL Express experts can support your business. We can help you offer the key e-commerce features your customers will expect – including On Demand Delivery, tracking, order history, and automatic tax calculations for cross-border shipments.

1 & 3 -  Gartner, accessed 2023

2 -  Sana, 2022 

4 –  McKinsey, 2020

5 –  Stripe, 2022

6 -  Gartner, 2022

Similar Stories

Buying Signals Help B2B Organizations Reignite Revenue Interactions

Jessie Johnson , Principal Analyst

Buyer expectations for immediacy, relevance, and instant gratification have carried over from B2C to B2B and been amplified with Millennials and Gen Zers comprising more than half of the modern workforce. From their consumer interactions, digitally savvy B2B buyers are aware that they’re signaling their interests through their behavior, content consumption, and social interactions. In a post-digital world, these buyers expect that providers will use that information to deliver relevant content and experiences.

But what’s most relevant to these B2B buyers in the moment is in a state of constant motion, changing with each interaction based on past experiences, new information obtained, and new activity within the buying group. In this dynamic environment, linear tactic sequences are no longer effective. Marketers must choreograph the information requirements, interaction paths, and engagement styles of individual buyers, keeping rhythm with other buying group members as they move together through a purchase decision process, influenced by an almost even mix of digital and human interactions .

Fortunately, B2B buyers continuously transmit signals as they research, evaluate, purchase, adopt, and review solutions to business needs. They’re also responding to signals from the market, competitors, and brands that they do business with. B2B organizations must capture, connect, and contextualize these signals to deliver cohesive, valuable interactions across the customer lifecycle and drive revenue process transformation.

• Customer-obsessed growth requires interdisciplinary signal literacy. To succeed in today’s competitive landscape, B2B organizations need to know their customers inside and out. Signals that illuminate customer needs, preferences, perceptions, sentiment, and influences help go-to-market teams create more meaningful interaction experiences and develop a more accurate assessment of not only propensity to buy but also perception of value realization.
• Signals accelerate revenue process transformation. B2B marketing and sales teams must transition away from the marketing-qualified lead as the only indicator for propensity to buy and leverage as many signals as possible to identify target accounts in the market and engage active buying group members. Signals help revenue teams better anticipate, understand, and respond based on where a buying group may be in their buying process and the Forrester B2B Revenue Waterfall™.
• Lifecyle revenue marketing (LRM) orchestration is fueled by signals. LRM is an outside-in approach that breaks through silos, redefines audience engagement, and better aligns marketing programs to the full lifecycle of revenue opportunities. Signals are critical to supporting a variety of B2B buying motions and scenarios. Sensing and responding to buying signals helps frontline marketing teams better enable their audiences at any stage of the journey through personalized, role-based messaging delivered in context and at the right time.

Joining us at Forrester’s B2B Summit North America in Austin May 5–8? Add these seven sessions to your agenda to learn how you can harness the power of buying signals in B2B marketing and sales.

Related Links

• Harness The Power Of Buying Signals At Forrester’s B2B Summit
• Three Key Actions Help B2B Marketers Synchronize Buying Signals To Put The Customer First

Related Forrester Content

• The B2B Buying Signals Framework
• The Seven Signal Sets That Power B2B Customer Obsession
• Buying Signals For Demand Programs
• Use Buying Signals To Rev Up Revenue Development Team Performance
• B2B Vital Signs: Using Interaction Insights To Drive Engagement And Performance Optimization
• Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
• B2B Marketing
• B2B Research
• Customer Engagement

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4 Steps To Get Started With Generative AI in B2B Marketing

AI isn’t just for B2C companies. Learn how this technology can improve client relationships and help you grow.

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B2B marketers are used to wearing a bunch of different hats, from planning journeys to building out first-party data and account-based marketing (ABM) strategies. If that sounds like a lot, it’s because it is. Every marketer we know could use a personal assistant , but with budget restrictions and reduced resources, that’s not always feasible. The good news is that artificial intelligence (AI) in B2B marketing can deliver the productivity boost you need.

Our research has found that marketers estimate AI will save them an average of five hours a week. However, nearly 40% of marketers say they don’t know how to get the most out of new AI capabilities, especially generative AI . This means we are in a crucial time of learning and optimizing.

There’s one more twist. AI adoption is about organizational buy-in as much as individual training. We spoke with Jaime López, senior director of marketing operations at Aiven.io , about how you can set up your company and immediate team for AI success.  

4 steps for building AI in B2B marketing

• 1. Unify and prepare your data for AI
• 2. Start being your company’s AI leaders
• 3. Prepare your MarTech build for scale and flexibility
• 4. Build a scalable AI roadmap and a culture open to innovation

How Marketing Cloud Account Engagement can help AI in B2B marketing

See how ai boosts b2b marketing.

There’s no single trick to B2B marketing – there’s dozens. Freshen up on the fundamentals and learn more about how AI can help you through every stage of your funnel. 

Unify and prepare your data for AI

Sales and marketing alignment is the foundation of good B2B marketing . And data is the starting point for the alignment. AI models need to be trained to produce high-quality output and they can’t learn the right lessons without good data. This is a big concern for B2B marketers and revenue teams that have disconnected data systems. Before you can see an impact with AI in B2B marketing, you need to unify that customer data.

“Two thirds of marketers say their company’s data, the foundational layer, is not set up for generative AI,” López explained.

Disparate data streams often live in different tools, departments, or databases. This can make it very difficult to get a complete picture of customers, identify the value of accounts, and score or grade leads. It’s a recipe for a less-informed customer strategy.

This is why you need to prepare your data infrastructure for AI by unifying your data . Combining all your data on one platform gives your AI the most complete picture of your customers to work off. Simply put, you need this data to be clean (no errors or duplications) and complete (no missing info), so AI can interpret it and deliver useful feedback. 

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Start being your company’s AI leaders

The good news is that your marketing team has a great opportunity to set the tone for how AI is used across your organization. You’re closer to the customers than most other departments, and can show how adopting AI helps you be more efficient.

“Marketing ops professionals in particular have a very comprehensive view of the customer journey, they have access to a wealth of data, and they have the analytical skills to leverage it,” López said.

But marketing can’t do this alone. The entire organization needs to read from the same playbook. This starts by ensuring your organization has clearly documented AI policies and boundaries, and that those policies align with your wider business objectives. Making these training resources accessible to all departments – not just marketing – is critical to ensure everyone is using AI ethically and safely. Leading AI adoption across the entire organization can be overwhelming. You need to start small with narrow and impactful use cases. It’s tempting to deploy AI across all facets of marketing, but a focused approach with smaller, quicker use cases allows for deeper understanding, clear measurement of impact, and iterative learning. 

This could mean starting with AI-driven personalization in email marketing or predictive analytics for lead scoring, or taking advantage of generative AI capabilities to help scale content creation. Small wins help build momentum and support for more extensive AI applications.

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Learn the ins and outs of AI

Jaime López of Aiven.io walks you through how to use Marketing Cloud Account Engagement’s new generative AI features for better B2B marketing.

Prepare your MarTech build for scale and flexibility 

Before you start realizing the power of AI in B2B marketing, it’s essential to maximize the out-of-the-box capabilities of your existing stack, particularly your marketing automation and customer relationship management (CRM) platforms. 

If you’re not using a platform with built-in AI capabilities, the next step is evaluating your existing stack for AI compatibility. 

“Ask yourself: can your current tools support AI?” López said. “Will they support it in the future? And if not, what’s needed to get there? This step is crucial for building a roadmap that incorporates AI seamlessly.” Finally, choose technologies that will grow with your AI ambitions, accommodating future advancements without skipping a beat. AI will place a premium on scalability and flexibility. Your infrastructure must handle increased data loads and complex processing. The biggest benefit at the heart of almost every AI offering is “do more faster and better,” and you need to be sure that proposition holds as your teams, audiences, and goals grow. 

Build a scalable AI roadmap and a culture open to innovation 

You can’t finish until you start, so in some ways the most important step is to set the direction and make the initial, strategic move. That’s not to say you should rush into it, only that it’s time to get the engine running. You’ll also want to make sure you’re fueling the engine properly, and that really comes down to two things: culture and strategy. A data-driven culture is the foundation of successful AI in B2B marketing implementation. It’s not primarily about technical expertise, López explained, so much as curiosity and literacy. 

“This isn’t about becoming data scientists overnight, but ensuring everyone, from designers to performance marketers, has basic AI literacy to contribute meaningfully,” López said. “We owe it to our teams to give them that bridge to the future.” Ensure your decisions are backed by data, showing accountability across the team. In the world of AI, understanding and interpreting data is no longer optional — it’s essential. That may require skills assessments and training to ensure your team is properly set up for success. Ensuring everyone has AI literacy and can contribute meaningfully is crucial. 

As AI evolves, your strategy should scale and adapt to those changes, allowing for a smoother journey. This means setting clear milestones, from early adoption to full integration, ensuring that your journey is progressive and adaptable.

Experimentation is also vital – and the only proven way to constantly improve your results. Try new things, learn from failures, and celebrate successes. With the dramatic increase in scale that AI provides us, we can afford to test more, fail more, faster and at less cost. 

Lastly, promote diversity in your approach. This doesn’t just mean within our teams, but in the areas, scope and mission of your AI projects. Different perspectives lead to innovative solutions, and diverse project scopes ensure we’re learning and growing in all directions. 

If you have taken AI literacy seriously, your team members will be able to both innovate in their area of expertise and constructively challenge the decisions of the team at large. In the end, a successful AI takeoff is not led by only one or two people: it’s a true team effort. 

Once you have your data foundation in place, your AI can get to work. Let’s look at Marketing Cloud Account Engagement as an example. 

Its AI can help identify high-value accounts that are worth your team’s maximum time and effort and give recommendations about when, how, and how much to reach out to them. It can get as granular as using lookalike audiences and predictive AI to identify ideal send times, or creating personalized subject lines with generative AI.  

Here’s how Marketing Cloud Account Engagement’s AI capabilities can boost your AI in B2B marketing efforts. 

Content creation

Struggling to come up with an eye-catching email subject line, or need copy ideas for your landing page? With a human-in-the-loop approach , generative AI capabilities in Marketing Cloud Account Engagement can help.

AI can help you write:

• Email content
• Email subject lines
• Landing pages

While it’s still crucial to have a human guide these efforts (trust us: customers can tell), AI can be the marketing assistant you never knew you needed.

Segmentation

Now that you’ve broken down the silos in your data collection and have all your customer data in one place, Data Cloud’s AI capabilities can save time and money by segmenting that information. 

With customer data segmented, you can then build better campaigns targeted at specific audiences.

Lead and behavior scoring

As a marketer, you want to know how close your targeted accounts are to buying, so you can react with the appropriate content.

AI can provide a representation of the likelihood that your leads will purchase. Drawing from your unified customer data, you’ll have the insights to understand how your leads are engaging and the reason behind their behavior scores. 

Campaign insights

You don’t need to do manual data analysis to figure out what works and what doesn’t. That’s a powerful way to use AI in B2B marketing — letting AI surface those insights, so you can make more informed decisions. 

AI uses machine learning to find data related to engagement activity, content, and audience characteristics to provide in-depth insights about your campaigns.

Ultimately, building a strong foundation for AI is just as important as actually using it. Having the right framework will help you to get the most of AI. It will make you more competitive today and in the future – because the next big innovation is only an idea away!

Grow your B2B marketing with AI

See how you can use the power of AI to grow account relationships and bring all of your customer data into one place. Marketing Cloud Account Engagement can help you get to that next level.

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Megan Cohn is a Senior Product Marketing Manager for Salesforce Marketing Cloud, focusing on B2B marketing automation.

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