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 blog, 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 their 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:
- Involve stakeholders from different departments to gain diverse perspectives and insights into the customer journey.
- Align your customer journey map with your sales and marketing strategies to ensure consistency and effectiveness.
- Regularly revisit and update the customer journey map to reflect changing customer expectations and market dynamics.
Don't miss an opportunity, again
Suppliers who are unaware of their customer or clients' needs and perspectives at critical stages risk losing out on valuable chances to drive sales and foster long-term relationships. That's why customer journey mapping is such a powerful tool. If you understand the stages and emotions experienced by your customers as they progress through the buying process, you can personalise your interactions and optimise the customer experience to help them buy from you.
That really is the key to B2B sales success. Know your customers, know their decision-making process, and be ready to assist them at every touchpoint in their journey, and you'll never miss an opportunity again.
Our Walking in Your Customer's Shoes support unlocks the potential that lies within your customer's journey
Want to really understand your prospects?
Want to increase sales and customer/client retention?
WORKSHOP
A ground-breaking approach to help you really understand your customers so you can develop better business relationships.
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.
WEBINAR
Missing out on business which you know should be winning?
- Spending a lot of resources on chasing complex sales which result in nothing?
- Feeling you're not connecting with your customers or clients when you know your product/service is good fit?
- Want to meet other organisations facing the same challenges as you?
You aren't alone, talk to us about joining a round table discussion and find out how walking in your customer's shoes could be the key to your next sales success.
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Chris Smith About Chris Smith - Chris has considerable experience of leading complex projects involving multiple stakeholders and third parties across public and commercial sectors. He is passionate about sales and business development and has the good fortune to have worked for, and with many of, the world’s leading technology companies. Chris has over 30 years of experience of wining and delivering innovative technology solutions into a variety of different industry sectors, ranging from £100k to £20m+. |
David Goosey Email: davidgoosey@jaconsulting.co.uk LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidgoosey About David Goosey – David is an experienced commercial leader with a track record of delivering growth and profit improvement in global markets. He specialises in B2B sales and marketing, strategy implementation and organisational transformation to drive revenue and help companies grow. David is fanatical about bringing new technology to market and turning strategic intent into work that people can do and take pride in. |
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And a final thought
At JA Consulting we help businesses and individuals take the theory of selling and put it into practice. We’re here to help you learn how to spot and grow business opportunities, how to develop strong and transferable selling skills and how to generate robust account management.
Look out for more hints and tips coming soon.
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