B2B customer journey key stages and mapping guide

The customer journey is the series of steps a customer takes when interacting with your brand. It starts the moment the customer learns about your business and extends well after they’ve made a purchase.

The customer journey basically defines the customer experience (CX). And CX, in turn, influences how customers perceive your brand. Moreover, it determines how likely customers are to come back and recommend your brand to others.

Streamlining the customer journey, by extension, improves the CX. And doing so boosts customer retention, repeat business, and brand advocacy.

Improving the customer journey should be a top priority for a B2B business. B2B businesses thrive by forging long-term relationships with clients. A seamless customer journey is the basis for growing your customer base, building trust, and cultivating brand awareness.

However, directing the B2B customer journey is not always easy. How do you personalize the customer experience for every client at scale? How do you leverage the customer journey for business growth?

What is the customer journey in B2B?

Let’s look at an example of a typical B2B customer journey. For the purposes of this example, your business sells subscriptions to a business management software.

1. The customer finds out about your business, maybe from an ad, peer recommendation, or own research.
2. They’re interested in your software and want to learn more.
3. The customer contacts your business via email, phone call, or web chat.
4. You arrange a consultation to discuss the customer’s needs.
5. After the consultation, the customer has no doubt that your software would be a good fit for their business.
6. The customer signs up for a free trial just to be sure and to show it off to stakeholders.
7. After some time, the customer is ready to buy a subscription.
8. You help the customer set up and integrate the new software.
9. Everything works out without a hitch, and the customer agrees to a monthly billing plan.

That’s it. Those nine steps are the B2B user journey. Customer journeys, of course, vary widely between customers and businesses. And in the real world, the B2B customer journey is often much longer and more nuanced than that.

In a nutshell, the B2B customer journey is the end-to-end process businesses follow when engaging with your business or its offerings. It starts, as we mentioned earlier, when the client learns about your business. In the beginning, the customer is just a prospect or lead. It’s your job to design a customer journey that turns that lead into a buying customer.

With that in mind, your B2B customer journey must align with your sales and marketing efforts.

But the journey doesn’t end with a purchase. You want the customer to keep buying from your brand and to tell others about it. So, you must build a long-term business relationship. That makes customer relationship management a big part of the B2B customer journey.

Take our earlier example. If you’re selling software subscriptions to businesses, you want them to commit. But they must see value in the subscription and in your brand to keep renewing the service.

B2B vs. B2C customer journey

But why?

Well, for one, B2B customer journeys are longer. On the other hand, B2C interactions are brief and involve fewer sales funnel stages.

Most B2B relationships are long-term and involve long sale cycles. And remember, you’re not selling to just one person but to a team, a department, or the organization as a whole. So, a single purchase may involve several decision-makers.

Also, every purchase must be thoroughly scrutinized for its economic merits. Businesses do not just buy stuff for the sake of buying. The product or service must bring tangible value to the business. And crucially, it must be the right fit in terms of cost, compatibility, and effectiveness. In short, B2B purchases have a lot riding on them, so there’s usually a lot of careful consideration, bargaining, and back-and-forth before any decisions are made.

In contrast, B2C sales are less involving. You only have to convince one individual at a time to buy. And it may not be a product or service that they need anyway. So, there’s not much in the way of deciding to buy. In most cases, customers buy with their heart rather than their mind. A customer journey that appeals to emotional purchase behavior works great for B2C businesses.

The stages of the B2B customer journey

Interestingly, most buyers progress along the B2B customer journey behind your back. Up to 90% of the customer journey may be complete before a prospect even contacts your company.

As the seller, you still have a role to play in the customer lifecycle. Here’s a breakdown of the B2B customer journey to help you understand your place in it:

Stage 1: Awareness

The B2B journey starts when the buyer becomes aware of your brand, services, or product. How this happens is mainly up to your B2B marketing efforts. This stage relies heavily on your outreach and lead generation strategies.

Effective B2B lead generation strategies include event marketing, email campaigns, content marketing, thought leadership, and social media marketing. Word-of-mouth referrals also generate high-quality leads.

The goal here is to make your brand or offering stand out as a valuable business solution. Ensure your marketing efforts and online/social media presence demonstrate the value you bring to the table. Also, make it as easy as possible for your target customers to find and learn about your business.

Stage 2: Consideration

At this stage, the prospect begins to actively consider your products or services. They’ll probably compare different solutions to see which one best aligns with their unique needs and goals.

The best thing you can do here is provide clear and detailed information to help the customer reach a decision. We’re talking insightful product descriptions, demos, case studies, customer reviews, etc.

Stage 3: Decision

This is also known as the purchase stage. If all goes well, the business makes a purchase.

Given that every purchase involves multiple decision-makers, landing a B2B sale is not always easy. Seventy-seven percent of B2B buyers reported to Gartner that their latest purchases were very complex and difficult. And 95% of buyers would revisit their decision after new information emerged.

Here’s how you can streamline the buying process for your B2B customers:

• Offer personalized proposals.
• Open the table for negotiations.
• Invite various stakeholders to consultations.
• Allow businesses to sample your offering on a trial basis.
• Facilitate smooth procurement processes.

Stage 4: Retention

Did you know that the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%? New prospects, on the other hand, are only 5-20% likely to buy. It’s also cheaper to keep an existing customer than to acquire a new one.

After a successful purchase, focus on retaining the customer. Customer retention is especially important in B2B businesses dealing in renewable services or products. As much as 73% of your sales could come from your existing customer base. Besides revenue, customer retention sustains long-term business growth.

Find ways to keep your customers happy and eager to buy again and again. Here are a few tips to get you started:

• Provide excellent customer service and support.
• Leverage renewal, cross-selling, and upselling opportunities.
• Create a loyalty program.
• Keep in close touch with your customers.
• Create personalized customer experiences.
• Leverage targeted marketing for repeat business.

Stage 5: Advocacy

The last stage of the B2B customer lifecycle is turning satisfied clients into brand advocates.

The simplest form of brand advocacy is positive customer feedback. Encourage your customers to leave reviews and testimonials. These, along with case studies, establish social proof, which is crucial in encouraging others to buy.

You could also set up a referral program to incentivize your customers to bring other businesses on board. Word-of-mouth B2B marketing is by far the most effective way to generate and convert high-quality leads.

The post-sales customer journey

What happens after a B2B sale? Actually, most B2B sales are not complete without some post-sale services or perks. Depending on what you’ve sold, the post-sale part of the customer journey might look something like this:

• Implementation

Implementation is about integrating the services or products into the client’s business. Depending on what’s being onboarded, this stage can take a few hours to several months. It may involve reworking some business processes, training employees, installing hardware and software systems, etc.

• Support

Ongoing support is crucial for building and strengthening long-term B2B relationships. It cultivates loyalty, trust, and commitment. But you have to go beyond the regular help-desk support. Check in on your clients regularly. Encourage them to share their pain points and experiences with your offering.

• Renewal

If your company deals in renewable offerings, such as service subscriptions, it’s up to you to keep the sale cycles rolling. Find clever, non-intrusive ways to persuade customers to keep renewing their purchases. And not only that, push for upgrades and other offerings too.

B2B customer journey mapping

Customer journey mapping means visualizing the customer’s end-to-end experience with your business. It’s a way to gain insights into every stage of the customer journey. Mapping helps you understand the intricate processes involved in the customer journey and the factors that hinder or motivate progress.

Below is a step-by-step guide on how to draw a B2B customer journey map:

1. Define customer personas

Start by defining your ideal buyer. You do that by creating a buyer persona—a representation of your ideal customer answering the following questions:

• What sort of businesses would be interested in your products or services?
• Why do such businesses need your offerings?
• Who are the key decision-makers involved in the various purchases?
• What other options does the buyer have?

2. Identify customer touchpoints

A customer touchpoint is any type of contact where the buyer interacts with your business across the customer journey. B2B customers can interact with your business either directly or indirectly. Direct touchpoints may include your website, marketing resources, referral links, sales team, consulting panel, etc. Indirect touchpoints are things like reviews, forums, and social media handles.

Customer touchpoints are well within your control. This is where you can start to optimize or enhance the customer journey and CX.

3. Determine customer emotions and pain points

Make efforts to understand the customer’s pain points and challenges along the buyer’s journey. Find out what they feel about every stage of the customer experience. This is the only way you can identify speedbumps in the customer journey and areas needing improvement.

To do this, you have to look at the customer journey from the buyer’s perspective. Surveys, interviews, and data analytics can provide clear insights into the customer’s emotions and pain points.

4. Align internal processes with the customer journey

Ensure that your marketing, sales, and customer service teams work in sync to support the customer journey. A smooth customer journey calls for close internal collaboration between various departments.

For instance, the marketing team reels in new leads, the sales team converts incoming leads, and the support team turns one-time buyers into long-term partners.

Everyone has a role to play in pushing a customer further along their journey. Without everyone’s input or the drive toward a common goal, you’ll have counterproductive gaps in the CX.

5. Use data to refine the journey

With modern data analytics tools, you can easily leverage data to visualize and improve the customer journey. In fact, intelligent data analytics is quickly becoming a crucial part of B2B customer journey mapping.

Data generated from marketing, sales, customer feedback, and customer support is a valuable source of actionable insights. Once processed, the data can reveal hidden patterns and paths in the customer journey.

Key touchpoints in the B2B customer journey

Much of the B2B customer journey is completely out of your hands. So, you must make the most of what little part of the journey you can control. The only components of the CX within your control are the customer touchpoints.

Key B2B customer journey touchpoints can be divided into four categories:

Marketing touchpoints 

These are all the customer interactions in the context of marketing. Your marketing efforts must align with your target buyers. That way, you can be sure to attract the right businesses.

Marketing touchpoints are multifaceted. They can have different goals, from spreading brand awareness and establishing thought leadership to generating leads. These include:

• Blog and LinkedIn articles
• Webinars
• Case studies
• Advertisements
• Events such as trade fairs

Sales touchpoints

Sales touchpoints help the buyer reach a purchase decision. They include:

• Live product demos
• One-on-one consultations
• Contract negotiation
• Product/service customization
• Trial runs

These touchpoints should appeal strongly to the decision-makers. To do that, they must demonstrate your brand’s value and how your solution solves the prospect’s business challenges.

Support touchpoints

These are interactions between the customer and your customer service or support team. Support touchpoints include onboarding/integration support, technical assistance, and help-desk support calls. Such touchpoints are essential for improving the customer experience before and after a purchase.

Post-purchase touchpoints

As the name suggests, these are any interactions with the customer after they’ve made a purchase. Post-purchase touchpoints include customer success meetings, renewal discussions, and product updates.

They are meant as a way to cultivate lasting B2B relationships. You’re essentially checking in on the client to make sure your solution hits its KPIs. The touchpoints also present cross-selling and upselling opportunities.

Challenges in mapping the B2B customer journey

While mapping the B2B customer journey helps streamline the customer experience, it’s not without its challenges. Let’s look at some of the difficulties you might encounter when managing customer journeys and how to solve them.

Multiple stakeholders

Most business purchases involve more than one decision-maker. In some cases, it takes multiple departments and leaders to agree on procuring an asset or service. The different stakeholders will also argue about who to buy from. Understandably, businesses want to associate with suppliers and service providers who align with their vision and goals.

It can be quite challenging to convince multiple stakeholders who might have conflicting needs, priorities, or agendas.

Do your best to bring everyone on board. Get to the root of each stakeholder’s concerns and explain how your solution addresses them.

Lengthy sales cycles

It can take months and countless interactions to close a B2B deal. The long sales cycle can quickly become complex and entangled. The client’s priorities, needs, and points of view can change drastically over time. It’s easy to see how you can lose track of where you are on the customer journey.

Careful and detailed documentation is the best way to solve this problem. Luckily, with modern CRM systems, you can keep tabs on multiple clients without any tedious paperwork.

Data silos

A data silo is a data repository that’s only accessible to a particular team or department. That’s a critical internal data management problem that hinders company-wide collaboration. And remember, you need all hands on deck when it comes to B2B customer journey mapping.

Take a long, hard look at your data estate. Ensure that no department, team, or individual hoards data for themselves. This might take some doing in terms of rebuilding your data infrastructure and reviewing data management policies.

Changing customer expectations

Growing businesses have evolving needs. Changes in the business environment and tech landscape, too, can change a business’s needs and goals.

The question is, what happens when your customer’s expectations change, especially during the purchase or post-purchase stages of the journey?

Well, you have to roll with the punches. Update your services or products to meet the customer’s new expectations. In some cases, revisiting the initial contract is the right move this late in the customer journey. Just make sure your offerings are flexible enough to accommodate abrupt or drastic changes.

Tools and techniques for optimizing the B2B customer journey

What does it take to create a seamless and effective B2B customer journey?

Here are some tips and best practices to help you get started on mapping and optimizing your B2B customer journey:

• Understand your customers—what they want from you, their challenges and pain points, purchase behavior, and decision-making processes.
• Gather as much customer feedback as possible via reviews and testimonials. Then, use that feedback to overcome any hurdles in the customer journey.
• Utilize digital CRM tools to automate customer journey mapping. These tools will keep detailed tabs on your customers in real-time.
• Enhance customer interactions and experiences using AI data analytics. Intelligent data analysis can help you track customer behavior and journey performance.
• Ensure the buyer’s journey is customer-centric. Design touchpoints that always put the customer first.
• Where possible, tailor the customer journey to each business. Keep in mind that not every customer will take the same path.

Final thoughts

Streamlining the B2B customer journey improves the customer experience, boosts sales, and raises retention rates. It positions your business for agility, competitiveness, and growth. But to do that, you must first have a clear picture of the customer journey and all the customer touchpoints along the way—that’s called B2B customer journey mapping.

However, customer journey mapping can be quite challenging, especially when done manually. Luckily, digital tools, such as CRM platforms and data analytics, can automate and simplify customer journey mapping. Professional help may come in handy too.

Nov 27, 2024