How Customer Journey Mapping Can Uncover Hidden Opportunities In B2B Sales

Are you leaving valuable opportunities untapped in your B2B sales process?

Many suppliers unknowingly miss out on key moments to engage with their clients and meet their needs, leading to lost deals and unrealised growth potential. However, there is a solution: customer journey mapping and it forms the basis of our exciting Walking in Your Customer’s Shoes initiative. If you know how to do customer journey mapping effectively, you can identify those crucial touchpoints in the buying process where opportunities lie hidden and even create your own opportunities.

In this post, we show you how to do customer journey mapping so you can harness its potential and elevate your B2B sales game.

What is customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping is the process of visually representing the steps and touchpoints that customers go through when interacting with your business. It provides a holistic view of their experience, from initial awareness of their need or problem to final purchase and beyond.

By mapping this journey, you will gain deep insights into the customer’s perspective, needs, and pain points at each stage of their buying journey. And, it also allows you to identify the complexities and challenges faced by your customers throughout their buying process. With this knowledge, you can then:

Align your sales strategies and interactions to meet their expectations effectively,
Improve your customer experience (making it as easy as possible for them to buy from you), and;
Uncover valuable opportunities for growth.

Walking in your customer’s shoes and understanding their buying journey is absolutely essential for driving B2B sales success, as outlined in our first two articles below. This is why you need to know how to do customer mapping, as this is the tool that will help you take full advantage of those sales opportunities throughout the process.

Read:

Driving B2B sales success: why understanding your customer’s journey is key.

12 People, 7 Stages: Navigating the Complex B2B Buyer Journey.

How to do customer journey mapping

Missed opportunities can often be traced back to a lack of understanding about what customers or clients are truly thinking and wanting at various points in their buying journey. So that’s why you need to know how to do customer journey mapping.

You need to really take a deep dive into your customers, what their needs and perspectives are at critical stages, so you can organise your resources and tailor your sales process to make it easy for them to engage with you.

Remember, we all take the path of least resistance, so making the buying process easy for your customers is key.

Here is how you map a customer’s (or client’s) journey:

1. Identify Your Target Customer

Before diving into mapping the journey, it is crucial to have a clear understanding of your target customer. Define their characteristics, needs, and preferences to ensure your mapping efforts align with their expectations.

2. Define Stages and Touchpoints

Break down the customer journey into distinct stages and identify the touchpoints where customers interact with your business. Common stages may include awareness, research, evaluation, purchase, and post-purchase.

3. Gather Customer Insights

Collect both qualitative and quantitative data to gain a comprehensive understanding of your customers’ experiences. Conduct surveys, interviews, and data analysis to gather insights about their motivations, pain points, preferences, and decision-making factors.

4. Map the Customer Journey

Create a visual representation of the customer journey, using flowcharts, diagrams, or other mapping techniques. Illustrate the flow from one stage to another and map out the touchpoints at each stage. Include key people who are involved at each stage, customer emotions, motivations, questions they have, and crucial actions from you along the way.

5. Identify Pain Points and Opportunities

Analyse the customer journey map to pinpoint pain points, areas of friction, and potential opportunities for improvement or innovation. Look for gaps in information, bottlenecks, or moments of dissatisfaction that could be optimised for a better customer experience.

6. Prioritise and Take Action

Prioritise the identified pain points and opportunities based on their impact and feasibility. Develop actionable strategies to address them, aligning them with your sales and marketing efforts. Consider involving cross-functional teams to implement necessary changes and monitor the outcomes.

Need more help with how to do customer journey mapping?
See more about our “Walking in Your Customer’s Shoes” immersive workshop below.

Some quick best practices and tips

We’ve helped so many of our clients understand and enhance their customer or client experience, which inevitably leads to increased satisfaction and higher conversion rates. So we know a thing or two about harnessing the potential of B2B complex sales.

While the steps above outline how to do customer journey mapping, here are a few of our golden nuggets to maximise its effectiveness:

1. Involve stakeholders from different departments to gain diverse perspectives and insights into the customer journey.
2. Align your customer journey map with your sales and marketing strategies to ensure consistency and effectiveness.
3. Regularly revisit and update the customer journey map to reflect changing customer expectations and market dynamics.

Don’t miss an opportunity, again

Chris Smith
Director and Sales Excellence Lead

LinkedIn:
www.linkedin.com/in/chrissmithperborough

David Goosey
Senior Consultant

LinkedIn:
www.linkedin.com/in/davidgoosey

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To equip businesses with the skills necessary to execute a sales process that delivers consistently, we offer an invaluable workshop coined “Walking in Your Customer’s Shoes.”

Choose to hold a Walking in Your Customer’s Shoes workshop and we take you on a deep dive into your customer’s buyer journey and who is involved, identify gaps between customer expectations and their current practices, and develop strategies to bridge those gaps.

Participants will come away knowing everything they will need to when it comes to B2B complex sales, along with a detailed action plan of the processes and systems they need to implement to deliver what their customers or clients want.

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