Drive growth with proper customer journey mapping  

It all starts with a customer journey map (CJM). It’s a document or a flowchart that depicts all the interactions and touchpoints between you and your clients. With a CJM, you have more in-depth insight into what happens before, during and after the transaction. How is that helpful?

In short, you can optimize every single stage and element of your customer journey so that it works towards one goal – closing as many deals as possible. This is particularly important in B2B because customer journeys are almost never linear here. On the contrary, they can be very complex and stretch out for weeks. Having full control over them is nothing but beneficial.

4 reasons why you need a customer journey map in your company

1. Focus on the most profitable sales and marketing channels

One of the recipes for success in B2B is to understand how clients discover your brand and what marketing/sales channels are typically in use. That’s one of the first stages of a well-designed customer journey. Of course, it takes some effort (research and analysis) to find out the answer to the question about the most effective sales channels, but once you do get them, you know where to concentrate your efforts to maximise sales. As a result – your revenue goes up.

According to a study published some time ago by McKinsey, mapping customer journeys can increase your revenue by up to 15%.

2. Streamline clients’ decisions

In B2B, there are many factors influencing the final decision on who to work with or which service to use. You can make it easier for your potential clients to decide to work with you when you provide them with personalised communication and well-thought-out marketing activities. Another report, this time made by Gartner [1], states that over ¾ of B2B buyers say their last purchase was complex or difficult. Partly, that’s because of a lack of good communication and understanding. A CJM will help you with both these elements. As a result, many clients will be more willing to cooperate with you.

3. Optimise costs

Analytics is a large part of every customer journey. This way, you can see which elements of your customer journey and offer work well, and which require some tweaking or optimising. Moreover, it is likely that you will discover areas that can be improved cost-wise, e.g., because they are excessive and only generate unnecessary costs. In other words, you get a more in-depth view of everything related to sales in your business, can eliminate everything that doesn’t work and improve everything that does.

4. Grow customer retention

We all know maintaining a client is cheaper and easier than getting a new one. With a proper customer journey map, you concentrate not just on potential clients but also on the current ones. And they also have their needs and requirements that should be fulfilled, correct? When your clients see that you are more eager to help them in the best way possible, they will be more likely to stay with you, thus building the stability of your business.

Increase sales with a well-designed customer journey map

In this post, we showed you four essential reasons why you need a customer journey map. In fact, when it comes to B2B, it’s the best way to take your company to a higher level, both marketing and sales-wise. At this point, you are probably interested in how to design such a map. Good news; some time ago, we published an article just about that. You can read it here: How to create an effective B2B customer journey map.

Inside, you will discover the whole process leading to creating a customer journey map for B2B clients. You have to be patient, though. If you’ve never used such a tool in your company, it will take at least several weeks to finish your all-new map. But trust us, it’s definitely worth the effort.

Of course, we are happy to assist you in designing a B2B customer journey map for your organisation. We have experience in creating such documents for clients representing many market sectors and industries. Would you like to find out more? Contact us today!

(1) https://www.gartner.com/en/sales/insights/b2b-buying-journey