The Ultimate Guide to B2B Customer Journey Mapping

Learn how to create a customer journey map for the benefit of both your customers and your company. This guide is the definitive resource for anyone looking to improve their B2B business’s customer experience and set up a customer-centric, foolproof strategy.

What is a Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map illustrates the touchpoints from start to end of your customer’s buying journey. This could be simply buying a product online or speaking directly to a Customer Service team member on the phone.

There are various pathways a client might take, whether they are wholly online, somewhat offline, or both. So, because your customer journey may not always take the same shape, you need to be able to identify the different ways in which customers source and buy your products so you can deliver a personalised experience.

B2B customer journeys tend to be more complex than B2C due to longer sales cycles and more stakeholders involved in the decision-making process. This means that understanding the journey your customers take is crucial to delivering the best experience.

A thorough understanding of the customer journey enables you to pinpoint consumer pain points, take appropriate action, and replicate successful strategies. By doing this, you’ll enhance your clients’ entire experience, which will benefit your company’s performance.

In fact, a study by McKinsey outlines that maximising satisfaction with customer journeys has the potential not only to increase customer satisfaction by 20%, but also lift revenue up by 15% and lower the cost of serving customers by as much as 20%.

Benefits of customer journey mapping

Some benefits include:

• Understand your customers: see your customer journey from a different perspective and adapt your processes to suit their needs.
• Identify pain points: mapping out your customer journey helps you identify pain points that are imperceivable otherwise.
• Use patterns to predict outcomes: when you’re familiar with your customer’s journey, and the typical outcome, you can predict the likelihood of customer conversion and anticipate customer churn.

How to Create a Customer Journey Map

1. Build a buyer persona

Before attempting to create your map, create buyer persona profiles for each core customer you expect to purchase from you, to ensure your journey map addresses their requirements.

It’s very likely that your organisation serves more than one customer segment. Additionally, it’s likely that distinct segments will have customer journey maps that are either significantly different or entirely different.

Here’s an example of a buyer persona:

2. Identify your touchpoints

Note down all the points throughout your customer journey where a customer will interact with your business.

Examples of this include:

• Product demonstrations
• Sending out a product sample
• Liaising with Sales Reps
• Requesting a quote
• Browsing your company website

3. Evaluate your pain points

Evaluate your processes - is there a certain point in the sales pipeline that leads are typically lost? Identifying your weaknesses helps you build out the ideal customer journey that will eliminate these pain points.

For example, if you have low click-through rates in your marketing campaigns, it might be the case that you’re targeting the wrong leads and need to adapt your customer journey to cater to your ideal customers.

4. Utilise your reporting tools & analytics

Using a reporting tool, such as CRM reporting, you can analyse common buying patterns along your customer journey. Using data-driven insights, evaluate which sales channels are succeeding and which are making you lose customers.

5. Gather & listen to customer feedback

Asking your customers for feedback after a sale is one of the most effective ways to build and improve your customer journey map. Through the distribution of surveys or simply just reaching out to regular customers, you can gain a holistic understanding of your customers’ buying journey.

Now that your map is complete, it’s time to start putting a strategy together that will improve the experience you deliver to customers. Whether this is optimising your quote-to-order workflow, revising your sales pipeline, or implementing a CRM system, there are a number of ways to optimise your customer journey.

To confirm that the buyer personas, touchpoints, and audience demands are still accurate, it’s important to reassess each stage in your map every few months, and update as necessary. You can also use metrics and KPIs for each stage’s primary touchpoints to see if they’re performing as anticipated or if they require further development.

The Role of CRM Software in Improving Your Customer Experience

To truly represent your customer journey, the foundations of your map have to be grounded in data that fully encompasses the typical behaviours of your customers - software like CRM can play a crucial role in capturing these insights.

By tracking customer touchpoints from initial enquiry to after-sales support, End-to-end CRM Reporting empowers businesses to analyse every stage of the customer journey. Make use of standard report templates to seamlessly transform isolated data points into comprehensive, actionable insights that offer quick wins and inform smarter decision-making. Even capitalise on configurable entities to extract unique insights like Customers who bought X but not Y, or perhaps even explore customers by RFM segment.

A CRM with built-in RFM Analysis software is a powerful tool for B2B customer journey mapping. By regularly calculating the buying patterns of your entire customer base using an automated system, RFM Analysis evaluates customer behaviour across three areas; recency, frequency, and monetary value. From assessing who your most loyal customers are to who’s slipping away, your teams are given the visibility to tailor every touchpoint. So, whether you need to elevate your onboarding process to nurture customers into repeat buyers or remember to send timely re-engagement campaigns to prevent churn, RFM Analysis software pinpoints the common blockers along your customer’s journey. 

When your CRM integrates with your back-office accounting, inventory and ERP systems, you add a whole other depth to customer reporting. To put it simply, the more data your CRM can draw on, the more specific the insights. For instance, an integrated CRM can compile reports on financial transactions, pipeline health, inventory levels, and customer engagement. Having a 360-degree view of your customers allows you to understand not just how they engage with your company, but also why and when. So, the greater the context, the more accurate your mapping; in turn ensuring your business optimises its resources and service offering to increase conversions and improve lifetime value. 

Revolutionise Your B2B Customer Journey with Prospect CRM

Looking for a foolproof strategy to enhance your customer journey and in turn improve business performance?

Designed specifically for growing B2B wholesale, distributor, and manufacturing businesses, Prospect CRM integrates with your back-office systems to create a seamless buying experience – from accurate quotes to timely order fulfillment – that fosters trust and improves customer lifetime value.

With features like End-to-end CRM Reporting and RFM Analysis, Prospect CRM empowers your customer-facing teams to deliver quality service time after time. Gain visibility into key touchpoints and harness the power of predictive insights so you’re not just reacting to customer buying behaviours, you’re anticipating them.

Sign up for a 14-day free trial of Prospect CRM to start accurately mapping your B2B customer journey and develop a business strategy guaranteed for sales success.