b2b customer journey map examples

Customer Journey Maps: How to Create Really Good Ones [Examples + Template]

Updated: April 17, 2024

Published: May 04, 2023

Did you know 70% of online shoppers abandoned their carts in 2022? Why would someone spend time adding products to their cart just to fall off the customer journey map at the last second?

The thing is — understanding your customer base can be very challenging. Even when you think you’ve got a good read on them, the journey from awareness to purchase for each customer will always be unpredictable, at least to some level.

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While it isn’t possible to predict every experience with 100% accuracy, customer journey mapping is a convenient tool for keeping track of critical milestones that every customer hits. In this post, I’ll explain everything you need to know about customer journey mapping — what it is, how to create one, and best practices.

Table of Contents

What is the customer journey?

What is a customer journey map, benefits of customer journey mapping, customer journey stages.

• What’s included in a customer journey map?

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

Steps for creating a customer journey map.

• Types of Customer Journey Maps

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

• Customer Journey Design
• Customer Journey Map Examples

Free Customer Journey Map Templates

Free Customer Journey Template

Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free templates.

• Buyer's Journey Template
• Future State Template
• Day-in-the-Life Template

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The customer journey is the series of interactions a customer has with a brand, product, or business as they become aware of a pain point and make a purchase decision. While the buyer’s journey refers to the general process of arriving at a purchase, the customer journey refers to a buyer's purchasing experience with a specific company or service.

Customer Journey vs. Buyer Journey

Many businesses that I’ve worked with were confused about the differences between the customer’s journey and the buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey is the entire buying experience from pre-purchase to post-purchase. It covers the path from customer awareness to becoming a product or service user.

In other words, buyers don’t wake up and decide to buy on a whim. They go through a process of considering, evaluating, and purchasing a new product or service.

The customer journey refers to your brand’s place within the buyer’s journey. These are the customer touchpoints where you will meet your customers as they go through the stages of the buyer’s journey. When you create a customer journey map, you’re taking control of every touchpoint at every stage of the journey instead of leaving it up to chance.

For example, at HubSpot, our customer’s journey is divided into three stages — pre-purchase/sales, onboarding/migration, and normal use/renewal.

1. Use customer journey map templates.

Why make a customer journey map from scratch when you can use a template? Save yourself some time by downloading HubSpot’s free customer journey map templates .

This has templates that map out a buyer’s journey, a day in your customer’s life, lead nurturing, and more.

These templates can help sales, marketing, and customer support teams learn more about your company’s buyer persona. This will improve your product and customer experience.

2. Set clear objectives for the map.

Before you dive into your customer journey map, you need to ask yourself why you’re creating one in the first place.

What goals are you directing this map towards? Who is it for? What experience is it based upon?

If you don’t have one, I recommend creating a buyer persona . This persona is a fictitious customer with all the demographics and psychographics of your average customer. This persona reminds you to direct every aspect of your customer journey map toward the right audience.

3. Profile your personas and define their goals.

Next, you should conduct research. This is where it helps to have customer journey analytics ready.

Don’t have them? No worries. You can check out HubSpot’s Customer Journey Analytics tool to get started.

Questionnaires and user testing are great ways to obtain valuable customer feedback. The important thing is to only contact actual customers or prospects.

You want feedback from people interested in purchasing your products and services who have either interacted with your company or plan to do so.

Some examples of good questions to ask are:

• How did you hear about our company?
• What first attracted you to our website?
• What are the goals you want to achieve with our company? In other words, what problems are you trying to solve?
• How long have you/do you typically spend on our website?
• Have you ever made a purchase with us? If so, what was your deciding factor?
• Have you ever interacted with our website to make a purchase but decided not to? If so, what led you to this decision?
• On a scale of 1 to 10, how easily can you navigate our website?
• Did you ever require customer support? If so, how helpful was it, on a scale of 1 to 10?
• Can we further support you to make your process easier?

You can use this buyer persona tool to fill in the details you procure from customer feedback.

4. Highlight your target customer personas.

Once you’ve learned about the customer personas that interact with your business, I recommend narrowing your focus to one or two.

Remember, a customer journey map tracks the experience of a customer taking a particular path with your company. If you group too many personas into one journey, your map won’t accurately reflect that experience.

When creating your first map, it’s best to pick your most common customer persona and consider the route they would typically take when engaging with your business for the first time.

You can use a marketing dashboard to compare each and determine the best fit for your journey map. Don’t worry about the ones you leave out, as you can always go back and create a new map specific to those customer types.

5. List out all touchpoints.

Begin by listing the touchpoints on your website.

What is a touchpoint in a customer journey map?

A touchpoint in a customer journey map is an instance where your customer can form an opinion of your business. You can find touchpoints in places where your business comes in direct contact with a potential or existing customer.

For example, if I were to view a display ad, interact with an employee, reach a 404 error, or leave a Google review, all of those interactions would be considered a customer touchpoint.

Your brand exists beyond your website and marketing materials, so you must consider the different types of touchpoints in your customer journey map. These touchpoints can help uncover opportunities for improvement in the buying journey.

Based on your research, you should have a list of all the touchpoints your customers are currently using and the ones you believe they should be using if there’s no overlap.

This is essential in creating a customer journey map because it provides insight into your customers’ actions.

For instance, if they use fewer touchpoints than expected, does this mean they’re quickly getting turned away and leaving your site early? If they are using more than expected, does this mean your website is complicated and requires several steps to reach an end goal?

Whatever the case, understanding touchpoints help you understand the ease or difficulties of the customer journey.

Aside from your website, you must also look at how your customers might find you online. These channels might include:

• Social channels.
• Email marketing.
• Third-party review sites or mentions.

Run a quick Google search of your brand to see all the pages that mention you. Verify these by checking your Google Analytics to see where your traffic is coming from. Whittle your list down to those touchpoints that are the most common and will be most likely to see an action associated with it.

At HubSpot, we hosted workshops where employees from all over the company highlighted instances where our product, service, or brand impacted a customer. Those moments were recorded and logged as touchpoints. This showed us multiple areas of our customer journey where our communication was inconsistent.

The proof is in the pudding — you can see us literally mapping these touch points out with sticky notes in the image below.

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Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free customer journey map templates.

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• Home > Publications > Customer Journey Mapping in B2B Markets: A Comprehensive Guide

Customer Journey Mapping in B2B Markets: A Comprehensive Guide

Customers are organizations’ biggest asset – without customers to buy products and services – there is no business at all. In recent years, customer experience has become a focal point for organizations, to encourage customers to spend more, pay a premium for that service, and recommend the supplier based on the experience it delivers. There is a strong correlation between poor customer experience and switching suppliers for better experience and service, and therefore understanding the journey that customers go through, and where improvements could be made – is now commonplace in many organizations.

What is Customer Journey Mapping?

To understand the current customer experience, it is essential to map the touchpoints that customers go through with the supplier. Through doing this, we can then build an understanding of where the customer might be facing points of delight or frustration, which can help organizations to drive improvement for customers.

A customer journey map is a visual representation of these customer interactions with an organization. To effectively build the map, it is crucial to step into the shoes of the customer to try and understand how our processes impact on the experience that the customer has with the supplier. That is – not only what might encourage the customer to make a purchase, but what emotions they are feeling at each stage of their journey with a supplier, as we know that emotions are a top driver of loyalty to a brand (even over aspects of the journey like ease of business).

It is a blueprint for the journey taken by the customer, marking all touchpoints. It should extend from touchpoints designed to raise awareness and interest – including advertising and marketing efforts, PR, etc. – through to the touchpoints associated with usage e.g. sales reps, accounts teams, support services complaints handling, etc. It should also extend to the cessation of the relationship with the company e.g. closing a bank account, switching to an alternative provider, etc. as the handling of this stage can be critical in turning around experiences and inviting future return to usage.

A Customer Journey Map (CJM) should therefore include:

• A flowchart or diagrammatical representation of the journey which customers take.
• All interactions and interfaces (touchpoints) between the customer and the company/brand
• Likely “pain points” in the journey i.e. areas where the customer is likely to experience difficulties or negative emotions.
• Key “moments of truth” i.e. areas where there is the opportunity to “make” or “break” the relationship.

Once maps have been developed, it is also common to then populate them further, to include:

• Identification of departments, regions, and people responsible for the delivery of the customer experience at each touchpoint (e.g. customer service, technical support, HR, sales and marketing, etc.)
• Linkages between touchpoints
• Emotions elicited and desired in the customer at each touchpoint.
• Importance ratings for each touchpoint. This can include looking at the internal perception of importance compared to customer measures.
• Performance of the company/brand at each touchpoint. As with importance, the gap between the internal and external perception can be identified.

Customer journey mapping is evolving to be more sophisticated in driving action. The use of AI in customer journey mapping is on the horizon, to allow us to more accurately predict customer behavior based on past data – which can in turn help organizations to improve customer experience and satisfaction through anticipating what the customer will need. It is certain that customer journey mapping will be even more relevant to drive customer satisfaction and retention in the future.

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Why Conduct Customer Journey Mapping?

Most large corporations operate in ways which separate different functions of the service delivered to its customers e.g. ordering, technical support, complaint handling, warranty claims, general inquiries, etc. This is generally felt to be necessary to build expertise and manage operations. However, unless the various functions are joined up, the customer can feel this disconnect or even fall between departments or functions. By tracking and describing the customer’s experience at each stage of this ‘journey’, a company is able to:

• Deliver seamless, streamlined products and services that cut across departments within the company.
• Tailor services to meet the needs of both customers and the business.
• Understand the experiences, thoughts, and feelings of customers.
• Develop compelling propositions.

Customer journey mapping has obvious advantages within a company, not least in developing a customer culture and the internal buy-in with the brand. Customer experience journey mapping exercises focus the business on the customer. Simply by spending the time considering what the customer’s lifetime experience is with the company highlights the strategic positioning the customer has within the company, the customer culture, and the degree to which the customer is considered in service design and delivery. This can help to unite siloed departments or teams on improving the overall experience of the customer, and how they can work together to do so.

In recent years, we have become more attuned with the importance of empathizing with customers’ emotions throughout the customer journey, as positive emotions and feelings towards suppliers are directly related to future purchases from the supplier. Customers with a stronger emotional connection to the supplier as well as strong satisfaction, are more profitable for suppliers. Along the customer journey, we should think about ways to measure and enhance the customer’s emotional connection with the brand.

To do this, we might want to include on our CJM:

• The baseline emotional state of the customer
• Examples of what could enrich the experience at each stage (resulting in a more positive emotional response)
• Examples of what would be a poor experience at each stage (resulting in a more negative emotional response)

Many brand strategies are developed in the absence of the customer and yet it is the customer who lives the brand. Their perception of the brand comes not only from the messaging, imagery, and promotions, but also from the experience they have with the company and its products. Whilst this philosophy can now be seen in the imagery of the mass promotional campaigns of some leading brands, it must be backed up by the experience delivered when interacting with the supplier. A company that understands the customer journey in detail is able to design “ideal” experiences and orientate the operations and the people delivering these to engage its customers with the brand and build loyalty.

Moreover, we have seen that in recent years, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic, that customers’ expectations of the brands that they work with have increased. This has resulted in a gap between what the customer expects from the brands they are working with, and what can realistically be delivered by the supplier. To narrow this gap, it is critical to highlight where the gaps are largest between expectations and experience when customer journey mapping – organizations need to be prepared to meet expectations as closely as possible to avoid this ‘customer expectation gap’ growing larger.

Figure 1: The customer expectation gap

Problems and Pitfalls with Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping and touchpoint analysis is not without its problems. Knowledge and perceptions, both internal and external, are required to develop the Customer Journey Map, particularly in more complex B2B markets. Pitfalls which can be experienced when embarking on the process can include:

• Getting buy-in from senior management.
• Getting co-operation from staff who are responsible for the various elements of the customer journey (and aligning on actions based on customer journey mapping)
• Availability of resources to undertake the process, and drive action based on research findings.
• “Blank sheet syndrome” – having difficulty getting started.
• Lack of understanding of customers’ emotional connection with the brand and how to tap into this.
• The complexity of customer journeys – every customer can take a different journey, so maps can be complex!

Types of Customer Journey Maps Used in B2B Markets:

Customer Journey Maps can take several forms, depending on the needs of the business and the extent to which business processes are incorporated into the map.

Typical customer journey mapping:

A map that provides a strategic overview of the stages of the B2B customer journey, along with the component B2B touchpoints where a customer can interact or engage with the company at each stage of the journey.

Tactical customer journey mapping:

The tactical B2B customer journey map focuses on a particular touchpoint (or cluster of B2B touchpoints) to highlight the journey that the customer goes on at that stage. This is particularly useful when looking at an important (or painful) touchpoint where performance needs to be at a high standard. Tactical maps can also be a useful tool for training teams that are responsible for a particular stage of the customer journey.

The performance map is similar to the tactical journey map, though it goes into more detail about the performance at each step of a process, and provides key recommendations at each stage. These are invaluable when identifying “pain points” and “bottlenecks” for the customer, and identifying how processes impact on customers. Therefore, they can be very useful for circulating information to those responsible for making the improvements on a day-to-day basis. These maps can also be helpful to design touchpoint research or surveys, to measure performance trends at the ‘painful’ touchpoint.

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

A customer journey map details all the individual touchpoints and interactions that customers have with a specific business.

Whilst all customer journey maps are unique to a business and its different customer groups, the process in creating these journey maps is broadly the same. If an end-to-end customer journey map has not been created, then it can be useful to map this out starting with how a customer becomes aware of a business or brand (such as through the website or a word-of-mouth recommendation), right through to service delivery and ultimately, what happens at the point at which a customer wants to exit the relationship or indeed, return and continue doing business. It might even be useful to consider the emotions and the processes that the customer goes through before they start to research brands (e.g., what problem(s) would the product or service be solving?).

Alternatively, a business may want to instead focus on one part of the customer journey (rather than the end-to-end journey) to understand this better and to explore this in more detail. As an example, if a business is happy with the sales process upfront but is more concerned about understanding the after-sales customer experience, then it may wish to build a map to explore specific interactions that occur at this point in the journey to examine where they are performing well, where there are potential problems or customer “pain points” and which departments are responsible for owning each of these specific customer interactions or experiences.

A key point to bear in mind is that the focus should always be on the customer, i.e. the customer journey map must be produced through the lens of a customer. In other words, it should represent the interactions the customer sees and experiences, rather than the internal processes that may occur behind the scenes within a business, which the customer does not see. For example, a customer may order a product for delivery, but they might not see how that order is specifically processed by the organization internally.

Creating the customer journey map

Depending on the industry in which a company operates, the range of its operations and the type of products and services it offers, the starting point will be to define the different groups of customers and to establish how different their “journey” with the company can be. Typical approaches to customer experience journey mapping here are to segment B2B customers on firmographics (i.e. classifications which make them different such as geography, age, SIC code), behaviors (i.e. what they buy) or needs (what they are looking for). This exercise is required before any journey mapping can take place. It may even be the case that these customer groups are overseen by different departments within the organization; in some cases, it makes sense to create multiple customer journey maps to avoid data overload.

The next step is to map the journey of each of the customer segments from end to end, detailing all the customer touchpoints with the company, and the customer responses to these.

The key overarching stages of the customer journey form the “spine” of the customer journey map. Under each key stage of the “spine” is where you list all the individual touchpoints or interactions a customer may have at that stage. Touchpoints may have connections with different stages of the “spine”, depending on the journey that the customer is taking.

As an example, under the “awareness” stage of the spine, the individual interactions a customer may experience in becoming aware of the brand may include some or all of the following:

• The company website
• Social media
• Trade publications
• Word-of-mouth recommendations
• Branded vehicles or delivery trucks
• Seeing the brand at sponsored events

Post-it notes and flip charts (or similar) are useful for capturing all this information. We would always advise that one post-it note is used for each touchpoint, as when doing this as an internal group exercise, then you will likely want to add or remove individual touchpoints, or potentially move these around or group them together. The key here is to keep reminding yourself that these touchpoints should all represent experiences through the eyes of the customer and so if a customer does not experience it (i.e. it’s an internal process they do not see), then it should not be included.

Heat-mapping performance

With multiple touchpoints and interactions mapped against each key stage of the “spine”, a customer journey map can shed light on the hundreds of specific interactions a customer can have with a business. Knowing what these are is a vital basis for formulating a plan or allocating resources appropriately towards effectively managing the customer experience across these different interactions.

However, a useful exercise in helping a business understand where attention is required, is to heat-map performance of these touchpoints. Once again, it’s important to put yourself in the shoes of the customer and then decide (either in groups or individually) which touchpoints can be classified into the following:

Customer pain points: Those touchpoints where there are challenges faced by the customer or where a business feels it fails to meet customer needs and expectations now. This point is important given how crucial customer emotion and brand connection is for customer retention.

Moments of delight: On the flip side, those touchpoints where a business feels that it delights customers by doing a good job or exceeding their needs or expectations.

Moments of truth: The touchpoints which are the most important or critical because they have the most impact on the longer-term loyalty of a customer. These points in the journey map can simultaneously be pain points or moments of delight.

When heat-mapping, it is not necessary that every single touchpoint is classified into one of the above and some may be left blank because they could be somewhere in the middle – neither a pain point nor a moment of delight. Equally, it is ok if some touchpoints are marked as a pain point and a moment of delight as well as a moment of truth, since this might represent that this touchpoint is important, but there are extreme inconsistencies in the experience of the customer here.

Of course, this exercise captures an internal perspective only, so it’s important to also test this out by speaking directly to customers. By doing this, it can be a powerful catalyst for change to conduct gap analysis on what we think internally versus what customers feels in practice. These insights can be used to help a business prioritize its resources on where these are needed most and where these could have the most positive impact on longer-term customer loyalty.

To overcome the barrier of the mapping exercise being based on internal views only, validating the customer journey map by speaking to customers allows us to better understand the sentiment that customers feel at the various stages of the customer journey, as well as giving us the ability to understand variations in the decision-making unit at different points in the customer journey. We can ask customers about changing dynamics in the decision-making unit throughout the journey, as well as when something goes wrong, for example. Customers may not travel through a linear customer journey map, so it is useful to understand discrepancies and variations in the customer journey taken, and the impact of these on the customer.

The role of internal employees and customers in customer journey mapping

Customer experience journey mapping can be done using a variety of methods which engage stakeholders involved in the process, and ensures their input into the development of the maps. A combination of workshops, staff interviews or focus groups, and customer interviews are normally used. These are then validated externally with customers (current, potential, and sometimes lost) to ensure the maps encapsulate the customer experience, and no critical touchpoints are missing.

Sessions can be conducted either in-person or virtually, so that we can capture as much knowledge as possible, even when teams are spread across the globe. We can use virtual whiteboards to map the journey, and encourage participation from everybody in the session. There is often some debate on what the journey looks like when sessions are conducted, whilst teams try to align on what the experience of the customer looks like, how they experience the journey, and which touchpoints are painful, positive or moments of truth.

Internal workshops (usually senior management) can help to:

• Establish a high-level view of the customer journey
• Establish buy-in at senior level
• Start thinking about things from the customer’s point of view

Internal interviews (usually departmental) can help to:

• Validate the high-level map
• Ascertain more touchpoints at particular stages
• Understand pain points and important touchpoints

Customer (current and/or lost) input – interviews and focus groups can help to:

• Validate the journey both in terms of stages and touchpoints
• Understand important touchpoints for customers
• Understand pain points for customers
• Understand gaps in internal vs. external perception
• Highlight expectations so we can estimate the customer expectation gap
• Understand feelings at each stage of the journey (when things go right, and when things go wrong)
• Demonstrate how decision-making units can change throughout the customer journey

Visualizing the Customer Journey Map

As customer journey maps can be complex, it is critical to design a clear visualized map that can be understood and used across departments.

There are a variety of ways to design the customer journey map to make the data simple, clear, and actionable. You may choose to use:

Large posters which can be placed in offices or other places of business to encourage engagement of all staff in the customer experience

Booklets which can focus on different personas or customer types through the customer journey

Excel spreadsheets or detailed tables of the customer journey (especially for customer experience teams who need the detail to drive improvement in the customer journey)

Digital outputs such as interactive infographics or videos, which can be shared across teams and/or regions. These outputs are especially useful now with online and hybrid working being common practice – staff can still be engaged in customer journey and experience improvement without being in a physical workspace.

The Value of Customer Journey Mapping & Challenges in B2B Markets

Customer journey mapping is just one stage in the move towards a customer centric approach. It marks the starting point; placing the experience of the customer at the heart of what the company does and how it operates. It provides a single overview of how customers interact with the business, focusing the company’s thinking on the customer and how the service appears from an external perspective. It is all too easy for large corporations to think in terms of departmental tasks, and so it facilitates cross-departmental working to understand the impact on the journey for the customer, and consider the “desired” emotional response from the customer at each point (as well as the impact if this desired emotional response is not achieved).

However, customer experiences, rather than being neat and linear, are often convoluted and complex, particularly in B2B markets where tendering, multi-site requirements, and technical product and service requirements often define journeys. These complexities can confound the customer journey mapping team, resulting in maps which are either overly complex or overly simplified, failing to capture the most important B2B touchpoints from the customer perspective and the emotional response to these from the customer. Resultant actions can then be process- rather than experience-driven.

The outputs from customer experience journey mapping deliver a tool for identifying outstanding and problematic areas, as well as “delight” and “choke points” in the journey. Using the customer experience management (CEM) process cycle (see below), the next stages are to design the “ideal” experience, put in place the processes and people addressed to deliver it, and develop a feedback mechanism to measure progress. As a result, valuable resources can be targeted where they will have the greatest impact for the customer coupled with efficiency for the business.

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

Customer journey mapping is an excellent tool to help an organization redesign its customer experience. It can help an organization piece together the current structures and processes affecting the customer and, by listening to customer feedback, identify gaps from the ideal experience. However, customer journey mapping is not an easy process, and getting it wrong can ultimately leave you with a lack of direction. Below are 5 tips to ensuring a successful project:

What does success look like?

You need to be upfront and clear about what your true objective is for undertaking the project, and this needs to be aligned within the business. This makes sure that the customer journey mapping work stays focused. Customer journey mapping can capture a wide range of information, and therefore it is important that the ultimate goal is kept in mind during the initial planning stages.

Identify complexities early

You need to think about your business and whether any intricacies in the way you operate will affect the journey mapping process. For example, different product groups or different customer segments may have different journey maps. The journey mapping exercise needs to take these into account, and it could be appropriate to design different journey maps to take these into account. Think about your customer segments before mapping starts!

Preparing for the workshop

Ahead of the workshop, enough groundwork needs to be done to make the customer journey mapping exercise run smoothly. You may want to hold stakeholder conversations ahead of the workshop to make sure there is internal alignment. You also need to ensure all of the right people are going to be present at the workshop – a healthy cross-section of different teams who are knowledgeable about the customer. You also want to have the right exercises in place that will ensure your output contains everything you were looking for. An interactive online whiteboard can be a useful tool to collaborate and get some ideas floating around before the customer journey mapping workshop itself.

Validating the customer journey map

As well as gathering the internal view, it is important to speak with customers to learn more about the processes from their experiences. It is often only necessary to do a small number of depth interviews to achieve this. Again, looking back at ‘what does success look like’ will inform the design. You may only need to speak to customers about a certain element of the journey, or speak to certain types of decision-makers to gather an understanding of customer sentiment, and identify where improvements can be made.

Visualizing the output

We would recommend that much consideration is given to the final output. Ultimately this is what you and your colleagues will be using to improve the customer experience. There are many creative ways that the map can be visualized – from giant posters, booklets, excel spread sheets or videos. It needs to be easy to understand, easily shared and can generate the actions you want.

Closing Thoughts

As a key element of Customer Experience Management, customer journey mapping is a “step back” exercise, and one which affords the opportunity to design truly innovative experiences which differentiate. It has real value in engaging staff at all levels within a business with its customers and their experience of the company and brand.

Customers are the greatest advocates of a brand or specific product or service: they tell stories and they make recommendations. They have the power to infect others with their enthusiasm for adoption, but also have the ability to influence against adoption, and hence focus on them is essential for long-term strategic growth.

Increasing customer expectations mean that it is more important than ever to understand customers’ emotions, behaviors and needs throughout the customer journey, to avoid increasing the gap between their expectations and what suppliers can realistically deliver. Understanding the customer journey in detail means that customers’ behaviors and next steps can be anticipated, and an experience can be designed to delight the customer.

Learn More About Customer Journey Research >

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Customer Satisfaction Surveys & Research: How to Measure CSAT How to Determine the Strength of Your B2B Brand A 5-Step Framework for Driving Action and Seeing Results from your CX Programs

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Customer Success

B2b customer journey map: starting guide + templates.

• November 27, 2023

What is even customer journey mapping, right?  It is the process of visualizing the road your users use while becoming promoting advocates for your product.  And I am going to teach you what you need to know about it.

Think of this article as your map for creating a map – a bit meta, I know, but stick with me . In this article, you are going to explore 11 proven steps, packed with insights and practical tips.

By the end of this, you’ll have a clear understanding of how to chart your customer’s journey, making your B2B customer interactions smoother and more effective.

• Recognize the impact of a well-defined customer journey map on customer decision-making and  retention
• Align your journey map with specific business objectives, whether focusing on quick sales or long-term relationships.
• Develop detailed personas to better understand and meet customer needs.
• Determine crucial moments in the customer journey that impact customer experience and decisions.
• Use analytics tools and  CRM  for informed decision-making.
• Regularly evaluate key metrics to assess the effectiveness of your journey map.
• Ensure all departments align with the journey map insights.
• Keep your map up-to-date with changing customer needs and market trends.

Before we dive in deep, let’s start with the basics of b2b customer journey. Let’s refresh our memory and ensure we’re all on the same page.

What is a customer journey?

In simple terms, a B2B customer journey is the process that a business goes through when interacting with your product or service. It’s the path they take from the moment they first become aware of your business, through the purchasing process, and beyond into customer retention and loyalty.

This journey is not linear, but rather a complex web of interactions and touchpoints that can vary greatly depending on the specific business and its needs. B2B customer journeys are often more complex than B2C journeys due to the larger number of stakeholders involved, longer sales cycles, and higher stakes in decision-making.

Understanding this journey is the key to creating a successful B2B customer journey map. It allows you to visualize the path your customers take, identify potential pain points, and find opportunities to enhance the customer experience.

Now that we have a clear understanding of what a B2B customer journey is, let’s move on to discussing what is a customer journey map.

What is a customer journey map?

A B2B customer journey map is a strategic tool that provides a visual representation of the customer’s experience with your product or service. It outlines the steps that a business customer takes from the initial discovery of your product or service, through the decision-making and purchasing processes, and into the post-purchase phase where customer retention and loyalty are established.

A B2B customer journey map is the predicted steps your customers might take after they decide to sign up for your tool. Knowing what steps they will take helps you guide them better, and determine the best times to promote upgrades, or surprise them to make them love you even more.

This map serves as a guide to understanding your customers’ needs, motivations, and pain points at each stage of their journey. It enables you to identify opportunities for improvement and innovation, and to align your marketing, sales, and customer service strategies to deliver a seamless and satisfying customer experience.

In essence, a B2B customer journey map is like a roadmap that helps you navigate the complex terrain of B2B customer relationships, making it an invaluable asset in your customer-centric business strategy.

5 Stages of B2B Customer Journey

In the world of B2B SaaS, knowing the steps customers go through is really important for success. These steps show how customers move from realizing they need your product, to starting to use it, to using it regularly and finally deciding to keep using it.

Each step is a chance to make the customer’s experience better, which can both improve customer retention and make them more loyal and likely to stay with you.

Next, we’ll look at each of these stages of customer journey closely to help you really understand the B2B customer journey.

“ Need for Business Solution ” starts when a company discovers a gap or difficulty in its operations that demands a new business solution.

After choosing a solution, “ Onboarding ” begins. B2B onboarding includes educating the whole account, which might include several users from various departments.

“ Ongoing Use ” means the company uses the product regularly after onboarding. This stage is for using the service for maximum efficiency and productivity.

“ Support ” is necessary because problems in B2B can have serious consequences. 

“The last step is “ Renewal “, deciding whether to keep using the tool. B2B companies don’t just buy something once; they think about how much the tool has helped them.

In other terms, it’s about painting a clear picture of their experiences, expectations, and interactions with your brand, helping you to strategize and align your services for maximum impact and efficiency.

What would happen without it? Well, you might still succeed, but the chances would be lower.

Crafting a Customer Journey Map in 11 Steps

Creating a customer journey map is crucial to understanding your customers’ experience with your product or service. It’s a strategic tool that visualizes the process a customer goes through from the moment they discover your product to the point of purchase and beyond.

This guide will walk you through the 11 steps to create an effective B2B customer journey map. These steps are categorized into four main sections

Identifying and Understanding Your Audience

Defining key stages and touchpoints, data gathering and research techniques.

• Analysis and Application of Your Customer Journey Map.

By the end of this guide, you’ll have a comprehensive understanding of how to create a customer journey map that will help you improve your customer experience and ultimately grow your business.

1. Understanding the Importance of Customer Journey Mapping in B2B Contexts

Let’s make a quick list to visualize the effects of having a clear customer journey map:

• Your B2B customers are comparing lots of competitors . If you aren’t clear with the path you provide them, they will not even start considering your solution as an option.
• 55% of customers  don’t bother to understand a product that they couldn’t understand at first glance.  Your signup page, onboarding, help modules, surveys, and referral programs are all a part of the journey, and these are most of the elements that the user needs to understand your product.
• By mapping out this journey, you gain valuable insights into the pain points, motivations, and decision-making processes of your customers.  This understanding is essential for coming up with tailored strategies and solutions that resonate deeply with your customers. 
• The customer journey map will also help you come up with more solid strategies.  The journey map will divide the user journey into steps. Assigning different metrics for each step will allow you to have a better look at how your customers are doing.

2. Goals Setting: Tailoring Your Approach to Your Business Model

Setting goals for your journey map means you are customizing your strategy to align seamlessly with your specific business model.

Are you aiming for long-term customer relationships, or is your focus on quick, efficient sales cycles?  Understanding and setting these goals will help you in creating a journey map that’s not just a “map”, but a strategic tool.

➡️ If you are looking for quick sales, then keep the pre-onboarding process shorter and promote referrals at an earlier stage.

➡️ If you are looking for long-term customer relationships, then tailor the sales and onboarding processes, and keep them a bit longer (if necessary).

Well, a “customer journey map” couldn’t exist without a “customer”. That’s why you have to  know who “ your customer ”  is and what they want.

Here are the easiest steps to achieve that goal:

3. Segmenting Your Customer Base: The Foundation of an Effective Journey Map

Not all your customers are the same. Especially in a B2B context where the number of customers is lower, but the value is much higher. After all, you aren’t selling 50$ sneakers, but an experience, and value for their business instead.

Back to our topic,  segmenting your users based on certain criteria and creating a custom journey map according to each type’s needs is crucial.  It involves categorizing your customers based on specific criteria like industry, company size, or buying behavior. 

Effective segmentation leads to a more focused and impactful customer journey map, paving the way for personalized marketing strategies and improved customer experiences.

4. Creating Detailed Customer Personas

Some people love the  idea of customer personas , and others hate it much more than they hate their enemies.  My take on the subject is that as long as the customer persona represents a real user type and not a hypothetical being.

Your journey will bend and shape according to your customer profiles and personas anyway. Whether you see it or not. 

Therefore, if you create the ideal personas first and map out the ideal customer journey, accordingly, you will have the advantage of getting them to love your product at the first interaction anyway.

Ask yourself:

• What is the problem they are facing and why did they choose you to solve it?
• What alternatives were considered, or were alternatives considered?
• What do your customers love about your tool?
• What are the users’s aspirations?

Finally, we are at the customer journey itself. This is where you start to meet customer expectations and define the steps of the customer journey – which will affect your whole onboarding and retention strategies.

5. Mapping the Customer Journey Stages in B2B

There is a huge load of different stages that you “need to follow” while creating your customer journey map. Well, in reality, you have done most of the work I will list out below, so, feel free to pick and choose which ones you haven’t done yet and need to do:

• Touchpoint analysis:  Find all the touchpoints where your customers interact with your product. More information on this topic is below.
• Collect data:  Once you have your touchpoints, collect data about them. Which ones are more frequently used, what is the difference between different personas, and so on?
• Visualize the map:  Create the first draft of your map. While doing so, get help from the research you have done in the previous steps.
• Highlight pain points:  Figure out what the most challenging steps or transitions between steps are. You will have to find ways to smooth these steps out.
• Implement and Monitor:  Put your proposed improvements into action and continually monitor the results, adjusting your strategy as necessary.
• Add value:  Once you start to generate some data from this journey map, figure out what and where you can make improvements.
• Get feedback:  A simple “How was your onboarding?” or “How can I help you better?” will make a customer think deeply about your product and evaluate it further. So while you are getting your feedback, they are putting more thought into you! (Aww…)

6. Identifying Crucial Customer Journey Touchpoints

Identifying crucial customer touchpoints is all about recognizing the key moments that significantly affect the customer’s experience and decision-making process. PS. You can use Miro to create visually appealing maps.

In the B2B landscape, these touchpoints could range from:

• the first website visit,
• interaction with marketing content,
• sales calls,
• product demos,
• after-sales support,
• and feedback mechanisms.

Understanding these touchpoints allows you to optimize each interaction, ensuring they are as effective and engaging as possible. 

7. Research Approaches Unique to B2B Markets

The research methods and priorities for B2B and B2C aren’t the same. A B2B business needs to dive deeper into each customer and know how to customize. It focuses on understanding complex business needs, industry-specific challenges, and decision-making hierarchies within organizations.

Don’t swim on the surface, dive deep.

💡 Have interviews with key figures in your industry.  Bonus points if you use this interview as a base for your customer profiling.

💡 Ask others.  I bet you are in a few Slack or Facebook groups, or a LinkedIn community about your job. Ask those people.  If you are just starting and aren’t on any groups, just ask Quora or Reddit!

💡 And lastly, look out for patterns.  Since your customer base will have the same problem, there will be certain groups that want to solve it your way. Analyze their patterns and  use this data in your segmentation.

8. Using Resources for Informed Insights

It is already post-pandemic and I just know for a fact that you are using other 3rd party tools to figure out your product. That’s only natural.

And I also bet that you have at least one analytics tool and one CRM integrated. 

That is amazing news because the information that those tools provide will be your best friend at all obstacles.  The key is to integrate and analyze this information to gain a comprehensive understanding of the market landscape, customer behavior, and emerging trends.

Listen to your 3rd party tools and try to detect changes in behavior depending on the customer journey. If the numbers are mostly consistent, you are on the right path.

But if the numbers are too inconsistent to understand anything, you might want to go back to step 5.

Analysis and Application of Your Customer Journey Map

9. measuring and analyzing the success of the customer journey.

Measuring and analyzing the success of your B2B customer journey map is like conducting a health checkup for your business strategy. It includes using customer feedback data and evaluating key metrics – such as customer satisfaction, conversion rates, and retention rates – to understand how effective the journey map is for the customers.

Tools like UserMotion are invaluable here because they allow you to see what customers are actually doing and feeling during their onboarding process at the account level.

This kind of tracking helps you understand the story behind the numbers, revealing customer behaviors and activities that are essential for shaping a successful journey and leading to long-term paying customers.

10. Synchronizing Insights Across Teams

This step is about ensuring that marketing teams, sales, customer service, and product development teams are all aligned and informed about the insights gathered from the journey map.

Creating this map isn’t the job of one specific person, it is a collective process. Without understanding the different views of users from different departments, your journey map will be incomplete.

So, whether you do a big call or a shared document, make sure that all teams are content with the map, especially the steps that regard their input.

11. Regularly Updating Your Journey Map

Everything will change. Your business, your customers, their needs, and even the whole market.

That’s why you need to regularly update your journey map to keep up with the trends.

You may need to change your linear map into one that has more flows, or your simple journey map into one that is more in-depth.

Creating a working customer journey map is not too difficult since all you need is the customer data, that you should already have for your positioning, GTM, marketing, and overall customer journey success efforts.

All you need to do is look at the data from a different perspective and bring the users into the process.

Once you invest enough time into having a solid journey map, all those will become easier:

• Onboarding,
• And segmentation.

[EXTRA] Customer Journey Map Templates

Creating a customer journey map from scratch can seem daunting. Luckily, there are numerous online tools that offer templates and examples to simplify this task.

These platforms offer user-friendly interfaces and a diverse range of templates, allowing you to construct an effective B2B customer journey map.

Additionally, these tools allow you to export your completed map in various formats, such as Excel, Word, PDF, and more, facilitating easy sharing and collaboration.

Miro is a collaborative online platform that provides a variety of templates for creating customer journey maps. It’s a great tool for visualizing and understanding your customer’s experience.

👉 https://miro.com/templates/customer-journey-map

Canva offers a wide range of free templates for customer journey map designs that you can easily customize and share. There are countless options to choose from, including designs made by our creative community. These templates are designed to make your task easier and more efficient.

👉 https://www.canva.com/templates/s/customer-journey-map/

Mural is an excellent tool for creating interactive, collaborative customer journey maps. It’s a digital workspace that allows teams to visualize the customer’s experience, making it easier to identify opportunities for improvement.

👉 https://www.mural.co/templates/customer-journey-map

Final Thoughts

Creating a B2B customer journey map is an essential step in understanding your customers’ experience with your product or service. It allows you to visualize the path your customers take, identify potential pain points, and find opportunities to enhance the customer experience.

Remember, the journey map is not just a static document, but a living tool that should evolve as your business and customers change. Regularly updating your journey map will ensure it remains relevant and effective.

By following the steps outlined in this guide, you’ll be well on your way to crafting a comprehensive and insightful B2B customer journey map. This will not only improve your customer experience but also increase customer retention and contribute to the overall growth and success of your business.

Zeynep Avan

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How to create a customer journey map — a step-by-step guide with examples

Learning more about client experience is the best way to understand and improve it. As you are reading this article, you already know that 😉 

Here, you will find a detailed step-by-step guide on making a customer journey map (CJM), examples, expert tips, templates, and a PDF guide to download and save for later.

• 1 What is a customer journey map?
• 2 Benefits of client journey mapping
• 3.1 Step 1: Define your persona
• 3.2 Step 2: Set customer journey stages
• 3.3 Step 3: Define journey map sections
• 3.4 Step 4: Set customer goals
• 3.5 Step 5: Define touchpoints
• 3.6 Step 6: Processes and channels
• 3.7 Step 7: Problems and ideas
• 3.8 Step 8: Emotional graph
• 3.9 Step ?: Be Creative!
• 4 Customer journey map examples
• 5 A customer journey mapping checklist
• 6 The free guide to download

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is the final output of the collaborative visualization process called customer journey mapping. This process lets you reveal typical experiences the customers have over time when interacting with your organization, service, or product. A finished map provides insights into their actions, processes, goals, needs, channels, emotions, and many other aspects shaping the customer experience. 

Journey maps can be of different scopes. For example, a broad-scope map would include multiple customer journey stages like ‘Awareness’, ‘Decision’, ‘Purchase’, ‘Support’, and ‘Renewal’. In contrast, a map with a narrower focus would look at a few specific stages like ‘Decision’ and ‘Purchase’.

CJMs focusing on the current experience are AS-IS maps, while journey maps visualizing the future, desired, state of the experience are called TO-BE maps.

There’s also a similar technique, customer experience mapping, which is often used interchangeably with journey mapping. Experience maps are variations of CJMs, but they typically cover a wider range of interactions and contexts beyond a specific consumer-business relationship. 

Benefits of client journey mapping

Why make journey mapping your tool of choice? There are plenty of reasons, the major of which include:

• Gaining a deeper understanding of your customers 

For instance, a high-end fashion retailer may discover that its younger customers prefer online shopping, while older customers enjoy the in-store experience.

• Getting a single view of your customer within the organization

Journey mapping will help you turn a fragmented vision of the customer experience into a unified, organization-wide one. It will have a massive impact on the decision-making process, encouraging you to consider how your actions will affect your clients and become customer-focused.

• Breaking corporate and cross-department silos 

To make the way toward delivering a great customer experience, you will need to collaborate with others. Understanding why this collaboration is essential, departments and employees will be more inclined to participate in conversations and collaborate.

• Improving customer experience, retention, and loyalty

While working on a map, you will discover customer pain points at different stages of their journey with you. Fixing the most crucial one as quickly as possible will do you a good turn by eliminating the reasons for leaving you. If fixes take much time, look for quick wins first. 

For instance, adding details about your shipping policy on the website will take a developer half an hour, while it will set the right expectations among customers. They won’t be expecting the delivery the next day anymore, bombarding your customer support team with frustrated messages. Another example is a subscription-based video streaming service that can personalize content recommendations to keep subscribers engaged and less likely to cancel their subscriptions.

• Better conversion and targeting of your target customers

Sometimes, it makes sense to focus on a specific segment or, talking journey mapping terms, specific personas. Customer journey insights will help you with this endeavor by giving you a glimpse into these people’s minds and ensuring the higher effectiveness of your marketing.

How to build a customer journey map

Although there is no gold standard for creating a customer journey map, we’ll try to create a somewhat generalized map. So that you can use it as a reference when making maps of your own.

We’ll be using our CJM Online tool along the way for two reasons. Because it’s easy to use and lets you create a CJM fairly quickly without wasting time setting up the environment. Oh, and there's a Personas building tool that comes with it 😉

We’ll take a pizza restaurant as an example of business and learn how to make a customer journey map together.

Step 1: Define your persona

Creating personas is a crucial part of customer experience service and journey mapping in particular. We won’t go into details — you can find them in this post about defining personas .

Let’s just say that our persona’s name will be Eva Moline — 29, works as a journalist and loves pizza. Eva is not really tech-savvy, and she tries to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

Step 2: Set customer journey stages

Stages are the steps customers take when interacting with a business. The easiest way to identify them is to think of all the actions the person has to take throughout their journey, organize them into logical groups, and name these groups. These will be your map stages. 

The number of stages varies from business to business, but we’ll take 8 for this example:

💡 Expert tips: 

• If you’re unsure about the order or names of the stages, don’t worry about that. You can change both at any time when working on the map.
• If your stages are complex, you can break them into smaller ones. Read this blog post about defining customer journey stages to learn more.

Step 3: Define journey map sections

Sections are horizontal rows with data that, together with the stages you defined, make up a customer journey map.

When picking sections for a map, your choice will depend on your journey’s type and purpose. 

As for UXPressia’s Journey Map tool, it offers a set of more or less universal sections for all kinds of maps. 

We’ll use some of the sections in the current example.

Step 4: Set customer goals

Setting customer goals at each stage is great for multiple reasons:

• It helps you understand how your business goals align with the goals of your customers.
• You can meet your customers’ needs better, gaining their loyalty by helping them achieve their goals at each stage.

Above, you can see some of the goals we set for Eva. They are self-explanatory, so there’s no need for extra details.

Step 5: Define touchpoints

Touchpoints are encounters that happen between your business and customers. In the pizza restaurant example, touchpoints happen:

• At the Awareness phase, when Eva is actively looking for a pizza place nearby. She is asking around, searching locations on Google Maps, etc.
• At the Research phase, when she is trying to find out what people say about the place by asking her friends and reading online reviews.
• At the Arrival stage, when Eva searches for a parking spot and enters the restaurant to get seated after parking the car.
• At the Order stage, when she makes an order and waits for it.
• Time to eat! At this stage, touchpoints occur when Eva is being served and when she is eating her meal.
• At the Leave stage, Eva interacts with the waiter, pays for the meal, etc.
• At the Feedback stage, she goes to the pizzeria’s website and drops a few lines on Instagram.
• At the last stage, Eva gets a promo email from the restaurant with discounts or other special offers.

Defining all the touchpoints is critical because each touchpoint leaves some impression, and your main goal is to keep it up to the mark.

You can also have a separate section to describe the actions your persona takes:

Step 6: Processes and channels

Now, you may want to add some processes and channels to the map. Just to see what channels your persona uses and what types of processes are in their journey. Luckily, our tool lets you do it in the most awesome way. Processes can be linear, non-linear & time-based, cyclic, or bi-directional. In UXPressia, you can specify up to 10 channels per process.

Step 7: Problems and ideas

It’s time to explore problems Eva might have when using our service. It could be a lack of info about the pizza house. Few reviews and ads do not show how our pizza differs from others.

Upon arriving, Eva may struggle with locating the place due to unclear information on signboards or just because of a hard-to-find location.

When making her order, Eva may look for detailed info on dish ingredients to learn whether it contains peanuts she’s allergic to. Descriptions may not be as detailed as she’d want them to be.

While waiting for the pizza, Eva may want to check out the place. Finding a restroom can turn into a nightmare if you don’t have clear signs showing what’s where in the restaurant.

Once you’re done with problems, it’s time to find solutions to these problems. Brainstorm for some ideas on how this or that problem can be solved. Here’s what we brainstormed for Eva’s case:

Step 8: Emotional graph

Never underestimate the power of visualization. And our Customer Journey tool is all about it. We added an emotional graph to see where our service example shines and where it stinks. Plus, we filled text boxes with Eva’s thoughts:

There’s also a special section ( “Think & feel” ) to put personas’ thoughts.

Step ?: Be Creative!

This is a good start, but the map is far from being complete. So, keep exploring Eva’s journey to find more insights and then add all of them to the map.

If you use our tool (which we highly recommend you to do), check out other CJM sections:

• Image section for screenshots, photos, or any other relevant imagery. You can even turn it into a storyboard , describing the journey from beginning to end with your images or those from our library.

• Charts section for communicating data in a visual and meaningful way, just like we did it in the persona:

• Video and document sections for journey-related videos and documentation (e.g., an annual marketing report).
• Personas section for visualizing different personas’ interactions within the same journey.

💡 Expert tip: The section with the persona’s questions works like a charm for marketing and content purposes. So be sure to add one 😉

Customer journey map examples

There are also a whole lot of free CJM templates for all sorts of journeys in our library. Here are three examples we picked for you.

• Example 1: a mobile user journey

This user journey map template covers the digital experience of the persona who discovers a new mobile app, installs it, and uses the app for some time before deleting it.

• Example 2: a client journey map for a corporate bank

This free template is an example of a multi-persona, B2B customer journey. The key persona is a newly opened company looking for a bank to run their business. The CJM also visualizes interactions between the personas involved. 

• Example 3: a digital customer journey

This customer journey map example shows the digital journey of three customer personas who want to buy a new pair of sneakers online. They go through the same stages, but if you look at the map, you will be able to see the differences in customer behavior, goals, and actions. It’s also a multi-persona journey map .

A customer journey mapping checklist

As a quick recap, here is a checklist with key steps to follow when creating a customer journey map:

• Do research

To represent real people, your real customers, and visualize their journeys, you must base your personas and journey maps upon actual data.

• Define your customer persona(s)

Identify your target personas. Create detailed profiles focusing on information relevant to your journey mapping initiative. Include such details as background, customer needs, motivations, channels, etc. 

• Specify journey map stages

Determine the stages you want to have on your map and come up with their names.

• Decide on the map sections

Determine which sections to include in your map (e.g., actions, touchpoints, emotions, channels).

• Set customer goals for each stage

Make sure that it is your customers’ goals, not your business goals.

• Identify touchpoints between the persona(s) and your organization, product, or service

Consider both online and offline interactions.

• Map out processes and channels

Visualize the journey-specific processes and the channels your customers use at each stage. Include both digital and physical channels.

• Highlight problems and look for opportunities

Identify any pain points and issues customers might encounter. Brainstorm potential solutions and quick wins to improve the experience.

• Add details about the emotional experience

Visualize the persona’s emotional journey. Include thoughts and feelings where it’s relevant.

• Use more sections

Include illustrations, images, and charts to make the map visually engaging and easy to understand. Enrich your journey map with more data, like KPIs related to journey stages.

Feel free to tailor this checklist to the specific context of your business and your project's needs.

The free guide to download

As a bonus, download our free customer journey mapping guide. Fill in the form below to get a PDF file as an email.

Related posts

The post was originally written in 2017.

Rate this post

first of all, excellent example and I’m very happy to I could understand how to create user journey map, due to for a long time I can’t understand it and how, many thanks for your efforts 🙂 I have some question about ser journey map. I hope to open your chest for me,

1-no there are rules for user journey map? 2-I need another example ?(for example Uber)?further understand 3-have I create user journey map without customer?

Hello, Karim!

I am very glad that this article helped you understand customer journey mapping 🙂

In regards to your first question, I would say that journey maps differ from business to business. However, they tend to have the same structure give or take. So no matter what industry you make a CJM for, you will end up having several stages and a bunch of sections we mentioned in this post.

If you’re looking for CJM examples of Uber customers, here is one: https://www.mindomo.com/doc.htm?d=92be818b774d422bad7eab790957ebc0&m=7d286174ccf1450bbb77c921a609ff65 Plus we have a lot more on our template page: https://uxpressia.com/templates

As for your last question, yes. You may have a journey map without a customer (persona) and use target audience segments instead (or have a generic map without personas at all, though I don’t recommend the latter as in this case it will be hard to empathize with real people). So you will certainly have to introduce a customer down the road to gain a deeper understanding of the journey.

many thanks for your reply to me and again I have some questions

1-why you don’t use in your example? user experience, empathy maps such as use goal touch point, and how to create it 2-As for the previous example (Uber) very confuse for me not as your example

Could you please rephrase your first question? And as for the Uber map, well, that’s all I managed to find. 🙂 But again, here you can find a hundred of map examples of all stripes and colors: https://uxpressia.com/templates

welcome again, my question is? what’s different between Aware and Research

The differences come from the names.

At the aware stage your client realizes that there’s a need for a service/product. Or they find out that your company exists and offer a desired service.

While at the research stage they either do research on your business (e.g. visit your website or ask their friends if they used your service) or they research what is out there on the market that can help them.

Makes sense? 🙂

Thank you for this,

I am wondering , Have you done examples on B2B services. I work in Accreditation & Certification, this seems to be the least visited topic in marketing platforms and blog sites.

We have some B2B templates in our Template Library . Type B2B tag in the search placeholder and you will see all categories with the fitting templates. You can also explore the B2B mapping guide here .

Good luck and happy customers!

Great article, well articulated and detailed. I am starting off with service design and was wondering if I could get some advice mapping out a customer journey for a specific project. I was mapping out how do one approach to repair services?

Hi Shreya, glad you liked the article!

If you’re dealing with home repair, I might suggest our pre-filled template for an interior design agency customer journey: https://uxpressia.com/templates/real-estate . Templates can be a great starting point even if they’re not a 100% match to your use case.

Other than that, you will need to create a persona. If you don’t have any research data yet, do it based on your assumptions. Then, try to visualize what their experience across all stages and interactions with the repair service might be. Once you have the first draft, you can proceed with validating it and adding more data as it comes in.

If you have more context on the project, I can look into it and come up with specific tips 🙂

I very delighted to find this internet site on bing, just what I was searching for as well saved to fav

Thank you for sharing, it was something I researched.

Hi Rok! Happy mapping 🙂

B2B Customer Journey: Creating a B2B Customer Journey Map

Customer journey map is a versatile tool that allows businesses to walk in their customer's shoes and get a better understanding of how and why customers interact with the business. In long-term B2B relationships, customer journey mapping is essential.

In this blog post, we’ll discuss the importance and intricacies of B2B customer journey mapping. We’ll also provide a list of the key B2B customer touchpoints and walk you through the process of creating a B2B customer journey map.

B2B Customer Journey Map 

Customer journey is a holistic representation of all the interactions a customer has with a company, from discovery to purchase and post-purchase. A customer journey map is a visualization of the entire customer journey from beginning to end. 

In B2B, a customer journey map highlights all the touchpoints a client has with a company, which allows the sellers to get an insight into the customers’ decision-making process, identify pain points, and optimize customer experience, which ultimately leads to more sales and revenue. The B2B customer journey starts with the customer acknowledging a problem or an unmet need and ends with post-purchase support or ongoing relationship management. 

Customer journey B2B vs B2C

While B2B and B2C customer journeys involve similar stages, B2B customer journeys are more complex and multifaceted. Firstly, B2B purchases involve multiple decision-makers that participate in different stages of the decision-making process and have unique expectations. For example, executives might want the most affordable solution that the team might not find as convenient. Secondly, the order value in B2B is usually much higher, so every customer is valuable and can make a big difference for the company. Lastly, the B2B buying journey is more complex and may last for several weeks or even months. 

The Importance of B2B Customer Journey Mapping

For B2B relationships, customer journey mapping is particularly important. Here’s why. 

Customer centricity 

Businesses often make the mistake of focusing too much on their product and not having a deep enough understanding of the customers and their buying process. Customer journey mapping allows businesses to get a bird's eye view of the customer journey and stay focused on customer needs and expectations. A well-crafted customer journey map can help the seller see its product from the buyer’s perspective, provide proactive support, and optimize customer experience . 

Understanding complex purchase process

B2B customer journeys are not as straightforward as customer journeys in B2C. While that makes customer journey mapping more difficult, it is also more important and effective when done right. In B2B, you need to impress different employee segments with unique priorities and needs. By creating a customer journey map, you can identify which touchpoints are working in your favor and which ones need improvement. 

Personalization

B2B customers expect you to have a deep understanding of their businesses and provide a high level of personalization. By mapping the customer journey, sellers can identify opportunities to deliver tailored experiences, address specific needs, and provide relevant information at each stage. With a detailed customer journey map, you can make sure you’re not neglecting any touchpoint or actor and provide seamless customer experience throughout the customer journey. 

B2B Customer Journey Touchpoints

B2B customer touchpoints are the various interactions that occur between a business and its customers throughout different stages of the customer journey. Here's a breakdown of the typical stages in the B2B customer journey and some examples of touchpoints that may occur during each stage. Remember that touchpoints can vary depending on the industry, target audience, and business model. 

• Industry conferences and events
• Trade shows and exhibitions
• Online advertising and display ads
• Social media presence and engagement
• Content marketing (blog posts, whitepapers, e-books)
• Search engine optimization (organic search results)
• Consideration
• Webinars and educational events
• Case studies and success stories
• Product demos and free trials
• Comparison charts and feature matrices
• Vendor websites and online product information
• Third-party review sites and testimonials
• Sales presentations and proposals
• Pricing and negotiation discussions
• Customized product demonstrations
• Technical documentation 
• References and referrals
• Competitor analysis and benchmarking
• Order placement and invoicing
• Contract negotiation and signing
• Procurement and purchasing processes
• E-commerce platforms or online ordering systems
• Vendor management and due diligence
• Post-Purchase
• Onboarding and implementation support
• Customer training and workshops
• Account management and relationship building
• Help desk or customer support services
• Feedback surveys and satisfaction measurement
• Renewal reminders and upselling/cross-selling opportunities

B2B Customer Journey Map

Creating a B2B customer journey map involves visualizing the entire customer journey, from initial awareness to post-purchase support. Here's a step-by-step guide to help you create a B2B customer journey map:

1. Identify your customer personas

Start by defining the different types of customers or buyer personas you’ll be interacting with. When you understand their characteristics, pain points, goals, and motivations, you can tailor the journey map to specific customer segments .

2. Outline the stages

Identify the main stages in the customer journey based on your typical sales process. Typically, that includes stages like awareness, consideration, evaluation, purchase, and post-purchase but ultimately depends on your specific business model.

3. List customer actions and emotions

For each stage, identify the key actions your customers are likely to take and the emotions they may experience. These actions can include researching solutions, attending webinars, evaluating proposals, making a purchase, etc. Emotions can range from frustration and confusion to excitement and satisfaction.

4. Identify touchpoints

Map out the interactions that customers have with your business at each stage. This includes online and offline touchpoints such as website visits, social media engagement, phone calls, meetings, etc. Consider all possible channels and customer touchpoints throughout the journey.

5. Capture customer goals and pain points

Understand the goals your customers have at each stage and the pain points they encounter. Goals can be things like finding a solution to a specific problem or streamlining their operations. Pain points may include budget constraints, complex decision-making processes, or lack of information.

6. Evaluate customer expectations

Determine what customers expect from your business at each stage. This could be timely and relevant information, personalized assistance, quick response times, or a seamless purchasing experience. Understanding these expectations will help you deliver the right experience.

7. Analyze gaps and opportunities

Compare the customer expectations and goals with the actual touchpoints and experiences you provide. Identify any gaps where customer needs are not being met to find opportunities to enhance customer interactions, streamline processes, or address pain points.

8. Visualize the customer journey map

Create a visual representation of the customer journey map. This can be a flowchart, infographic, or any other format that helps you visualize the stages, touchpoints, customer actions, and emotions. 

9. Refine and iterate

Regularly review and update the customer journey map as you gain more insights and feedback. Continuously iterate the map to align with changing customer expectations, market dynamics, and business goals.

B2B Customer Experience Best Practices 

Follow these tips to optimize your B2B customer experience. 

Measure loyalty and retention

To determine whether your customer relationship management efforts are successful, you need to constantly measure and analyze customer retention and loyalty. By calculating metrics like Customer Retention Rate or Net Promoter Score, you can gauge customer satisfaction and identify areas for improvement. 

Understand the emotional reasoning

While B2B decisions are less emotional than B2C decisions, it’s important to consider the emotional motivations of your customers. For example, an executive may express that they are looking for a cheap solution because they want to find the most cost-effective tool for their business. If you can demonstrate that investing in a more expensive tool could lead to more sales and higher revenue, the executive might realize that the more expensive tool is actually more cost-effective. 

Optimize processes with AI

Using AI-powered tools can help you make the customer experience more convenient and improve your B2B customer retention. Whether your customers are businesses or individuals, every improvement and update should be based on customer feedback. After the purchase, B2B customers are usually interested in continuing and improving their relationship, so they are willing to provide more qualitative feedback. By analyzing that feedback with Essense, you can get valuable suggestions for your business and optimize your B2B customer journey. Powered by AI, Essense turns unstructured data into actionable insights in just a few clicks. 

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The emlen Guide to Building a B2B Customer Journey Map

You know how frustrating it is to put effort into a prospect only for them to vanish. But what if you could be proactive about improving customer retention, personalizing interactions, and boosting conversions? A customer journey map is the key to making that happen.

Let's explore how to use your resources to get the best results and avoid wasted effort. First, we'll cover the basics of B2B customer journey mapping.

Fundamentals of B2B Customer Journey Mapping

A B2B customer journey map visually represents the steps your potential customers take as they interact with your business. It offers insights into customer motivation, needs at each stage, and potential roadblocks.

Why is this so important? Think about it this way:

→ Deeper audience understanding

B2B buying decisions aren't made by individuals. Understanding the roles of everyone involved—decision-makers, important stakeholders, end-users—is key to tailor your approach. Journey maps force you to get specific about who you're serving .

→ Identify areas for improvement

A B2B SaaS customer journey map can shed light on pain points where things are stuck , points of confusion, or places where customers abandon the process. This lets you address pain points before they cost you leads.

→ Strategic advantage

Having a clear journey map lets you prioritize initiatives and resources toward making the biggest impact. It aligns marketing, sales, and the customer service team , ensuring everyone is working together toward the same goals.

Key Components of a Great B2B Journey Map

• Customer personas: Detailed profiles of your ideal customers. These help you empathize with your buyers and understand their goals, challenges, and motivations.
• Stages of the journey: The typical steps your customers go through, such as awareness, consideration, decision, and (hopefully!) becoming a loyal customer.
• Touch points: Every interaction a customer has with your brand, including seeing an ad, attending a webinar, or speaking to a salesperson. Consider adding these B2B customer journey touch points to your map.
• Emotions and pain points: Acknowledge how customers feel along the way. Where might they become frustrated, overwhelmed, or delighted? This information is incredibly helpful for optimization.

Here’s an example:

Imagine a potential customer who sees a LinkedIn ad for your project management software. A solid B2B customer journey map template will not only note this as the 'awareness' stage but also capture what motivated them to click that ad, how smoothly they transitioned to your website, and what obstacles they might face as they research your solution.

Create a comprehensive B2B customer journey map in 3 steps

Mapping out your ideal customer journey might seem overwhelming at first, but it's a game-changer for improving your B2B sales and marketing! Think of it as creating a detailed roadmap for understanding how your ideal customers find you, interact with your brand, and ultimately decide to buy. Here's a step-by-step guide to get you started.

Step 1 - Define your ideal customer(s)

You wouldn't start a road trip without a destination, right? The same goes for your customer journey map for B2B. Start by building detailed customer journeys and personas. This means going beyond basic demographics and digging into things like…

→ Industry and company size

What specific sectors and types of companies do you serve best?

→ Job titles and roles

Identify both the key decision-makers and the people influencing the purchase (they're not always the same!).

→ Pain points and needs

What problems keep your ideal customers up at night? How can your product or solution make their lives better?

→ Goals and motivations

What are these individuals and their companies trying to achieve, both short-term and in the bigger picture?

Step 2 - Identify Key Touchpoints

Now, let's chart the potential routes your customers might take. List out every way they might encounter your brand, from the obvious (like ads and your website) to the less direct (like word-of-mouth or online reviews). Some key touch points to consider include:

• Social media: What platforms are your customers on? What kind of content resonates?
• Content: Whether it’s your blog, whitepapers, or case studies, make sure this content offers value in your B2B customer journey.
• Events: Webinars, conferences, or local meetups?
• Sales interactions: Demos, consultations, etc.
• Customer support: Negative interactions can potentially shape how customers view you!

Step 3 - Craft Your Map Visual

There's no single right way to create the map itself. Here are some B2B customer journey map examples:

• Simple timeline: Especially useful for linear journeys with a straightforward sequence of steps.
• Matrix structure: Great if you have different personas involved at various stages.
• Customer experience chart: This maps out touch points but also dives into underlying customer thoughts, emotions, and opportunities at each stage.
• Tools and templates: Many software solutions and platforms provide customizable visual templates and features to assist with the mapping process. A B2B customer journey template can help get you started!

Important Note: Don't just map your actions. Think about what customers do on their own, too – reading reviews, seeking peer advice, etc. Tools and templates are fantastic, but the core goal is understanding the full buyer journey.

Analyzing B2B customer journey maps

A well-crafted digital customer journey map is much more than a cool graphic to stick on a wall. To drive actual business results, you need to actively analyze it for trends, bottlenecks, and opportunities.

Here are three ways to extract the maximum value :

1. Spotting pain points and moments of frustration

Pay close attention to sections in your map where negative emotions pop up for customers. Confusion, long wait times, or finding irrelevant content all raise red flags. 

Ask yourself the following questions…

• Are there common points where customers seem to drop off? Why might that be?
• Do any parts of the journey take particularly long (ex., the time between a demo request and it actually happening)?
• Where are customers forced to jump between departments or repeat information?

2. Highlighting positive experiences

It's equally important to look for the bright spots! Look for touch points that consistently evoke excitement and clarity or make the customer feel understood. Understanding why those moments work well can help you amplify that kind of experience across the entire customer's journey.

3. Leveraging analytics and customer feedback

Data is your friend when analyzing a journey map. Supplement your observations with:

• Engagement metrics: Analyze click-through rates, time spent on your website, or social media performance to see which touch points are the most effective.
• Customer feedback: Surveys, testimonials, and interactions with support teams uncover the "voice" of the customer, enriching your map analysis.
• Tools for analytics: Here's where emlen comes in with its buyer engagement analytics features. For example, seeing what content customers dwell on in your digital sales room tells you which pain points, or features have their attention at which stage in their journey.

Imagine your map flags 'lack of personalization' as a frustration point. You might dig deeper with customer surveys to reveal which channels tend to feel overly generic. Armed with that insight , you could focus on tailoring website recommendations or providing curated content at that stage.

Beyond the Map

Don't underestimate the value of anecdotal evidence or individual buyer stories. They might point out problems a broader analysis misses, enriching your buyer persona journey map over time.

Optimizing Touch points across the customer journey

A beautiful customer journey map on its own won't get you far. You’ll start making real progress when you dig in and analyze it for those make-or-break moments. This is how you find pain points to fix, positive customer experiences to replicate, and those hidden opportunities that could lead to major growth.

Think of your map like a treasure hunt , but instead of gold, you're looking for red flags! Pay close attention to areas where customers seem frustrated, confused, or simply disengage completely. 

But it's not all about fixing problems. Look for those moments on your map where customers seem to feel excited, understood, or delighted. Why do those moments work so well? Understanding this will help you create a more consistently positive experience.

Your observations on the map are a great start, but data adds that crucial layer of certainty. Here is how you can do that…

Engagement metrics

Where are customers clicking, spending time, and interacting meaningfully?

Customer feedback

Surveys, reviews, and even recorded support calls offer customer insights you can't get anywhere else.

The emlen advantage

Buyer engagement analytics tells you not just if customers look at content but how it shapes their decision-making.

Here's a quick scenario:

Imagine you’re a company selling manufacturing software. Your map shows a drop-off after the free trial phase but also high engagement with your 'ROI Calculator' tool.

This suggests customers are interested but might be struggling with justifying the cost internally. You could respond by offering case studies with hard numbers, or a sales consultation focused on building a business case.

The impact of digital transformation on the customer journey

Digital technology isn't just about tweaking your customer journey – it's a major shake-up! B2B buyers today have different expectations , and the businesses that adapt quickly will be the ones that thrive. 

Put yourself in your buyer’s shoes and imagine you’re on a tight deadline. You're not going to wait until Monday morning to call a sales rep, and you might not even want to during regular business hours. You want answers NOW. This means ensuring your company offers:

→ Intuitive websites and content

‍ Can customers easily find what they need, whether it's product specs, a support article, or a case study showcasing results?

→ Knowledge bases and AI tools

‍ 24/7 access to troubleshooting guides and answers to common questions demonstrates you value your customers' time.

Gut feelings used to be a big part of B2B sales and marketing. Not anymore! Today, data is reshaping how we understand customer emotions and respond to customer behavior. How?

Predictive analytics

Don't just react to trends —anticipate them! Look for patterns in customer behavior to forecast needs and prepare before the market shifts.

Hyper-personalization

Say goodbye to blasting generic offers. Segment your audience and use data to deliver content and messaging that feels incredibly relevant.

Tracking ROI

Data doesn't just boost sales. It makes your whole company smarter about where to invest time and money.

New technologies pop up all the time, and although we can’t predict the future , some tech trends have a big effect on the B2B customer journey. For example, immersive tech like AR/VR could allow your buyers to experience your offerings remotely in ways that weren’t possible previously.

‍ Your sales teams could also adopt tools like emlen. Our digital sales rooms offer dynamic, content-rich spaces where sales reps can track prospect engagement for deeper insights. 

Go digital or get left behind

B2B businesses that adopt a "wait-and-see" approach with emerging technology risk getting stuck in the past. Instead, embrace experimentation , stay plugged into industry trends, and be willing to re-evaluate your existing customer expectations and journey map in light of digital innovation.

Customer journey: Getting company-wide alignment

A stunning customer journey map tucked away in a marketing team folder won't change your company. The real magic happens when everyone understands the customer journey and feels invested in optimizing it. But we all know how tough it can be to break down those internal silos! 

Here's how you can start:

Your customer journey map is the perfect tool for sparking collaboration, but only if it's shared widely. Think beyond static documents and embrace these tactics:

✔️ Create a shared knowledge base

The map, personas, and any insights should live in a platform everyone can access and contribute to.

✔️ Hold cross-functional workshops

Bring sales and marketing teams, as well as product development and even customer support, together to see how a seemingly small decision in one department impacts the big picture .

✔️ Create shared goals and metrics

Move away from department-specific targets. Create goals around improving the overall customer journey and experience (like reducing onboarding time) that motivates teamwork.

Now that you’ve looked at updated tactics, it’s time to make your customer journey map central to all initiatives. It needs to shape your company’s daily work. So now, you need to consider how it informs things like:

• Marketing messages: Do ads feel like generic sales pitches, or do they speak directly to customer pain points in a way that matches where they are in their journey? ‍
• Sales training: This can help tailor your team’s approach based on your buyer’s stage in the journey. Early on, it’s about education. Later, it’s focused on overcoming objections. ‍
• Product development : Let your buyer’s voice guide your product roadmap. This will reduce frustrations along the map.

You’ve centralized your tactics. But is your tool stack helping or hindering your success? Spreadsheets can only take you so far. For complex journeys, having the right tools can make all the difference. 

Think about combining the power of your CRM data with your map for a richer customer view through CRM integration. Or, let everyone contribute to the map with collaboration tools to draft those personas in real-time, with version control to avoid chaos .

If your map identifies a gap in your content resources during the 'consideration' phase, the marketing team shouldn't work alone to create new content . Collaboration with sales could reveal typical questions they get at this stage or with the product team to offer more in-depth technical comparisons as buyers get closer to a purchase decision.

✔️ Leadership matters

The leadership team of any organization has immense power to further improve customer retention and establish a customer-centric mindset. Emphasizing the impact of the customer journey on overall business goals and making customer satisfaction a central metric motivates cross-functional efforts long-term.

Capitalizing on analytics for dynamic customer journey mapping

Your customer journey map is a starting point, not a finish line. To truly stay ahead of the curve, you need to harness the power of analytics to continuously refine your understanding of how customers behave.

Customers don't always tell you directly what matters most. Data reveals the truth . Track these key things:

Website traffic and behavior: 

• Where do people click?
• Where do they abandon?
• What type of content keeps them engaged?

Social media engagement:

• Which platforms drive meaningful conversations?
• What formats do customers share the most with their networks?

emlen’s buyer engagement analytics:

• What sparks a buyer’s interest in your digital sales rooms?
• Who do they share content with?
• How does that influence decisions?

Analytics helps you identify trends and turn a mass of data points into actionable insights. You should look for patterns that can give you a sales and marketing edge.

💡Be aware of seasonal buying cycles. Do certain industries slow down during summer? Ramp up your outreach efforts or adjust content in anticipation. 

It’s not just industries that have changing needs but your buyers, too. Are your existing customers suddenly asking about that new feature your competitor offers?

You should be proactively addressing these kinds of issues to help keep them on your side of the fence.

But how can you be ahead of the game? With predictive analytics. Think of the most sophisticated analytics as a fortune teller for your sales team.

Predictive analytics can help you understand who is truly ready for a sales conversation or who needs more nurturing. 

You can also monitor your churn risk when you identify early signs that a customer might be jumping ship. Then, you can create strategies to make sure you keep them on board.

Also, you can use predictive analytics to see the types of content that will truly move your buyers based on previous behaviors.

⚠️ Note of caution: Analytics are incredibly powerful, but they remain tools—not a crystal ball . Always temper data-driven actions with common sense and your human perspective on who your customers are.

Use your customer journey map for tailored experiences

Blasting everyone with a generic pitch in B2B is completely out of touch. A solid customer journey map is your secret weapon for delivering exceptional, personalized experiences across every touchpoint. 

Here’s what you can do…

1. Stage-driven content and outreach

Think of your map as a guidebook to your customer’s mindset. What matters most to them changes along their buying journey, too, so your content and outreach need to evolve with them :

→ Awareness

Focus on the big-picture pain points and how you uniquely solve them. This isn’t the time for blasting your features.

→ Consideration

Dive deeper with case studies, comparisons (like battle cards), and technical resources. Show them that you’re not just an option but the best choice .

Now’s the time to emphasize ROI, offer implementation support, and tailor content to the specific priorities of their role. 

2. Segmentation for meaningful personalization

Personalization is more powerful when it’s targeted. Segmentation helps you deliver the right message to the right audience. Here are some things you should keep in mind…

→ Industry focus

Speak the language of the customer’s industry. A manufacturing client won’t care about the same things a healthcare company does.

→ Role-based personalization

A CFO or the site manager will have different motivations, even if they’re within the same company.

→ Behavioral tailoring

emlen’s analytics reveal which content resonates with an individual buyer. Use that data to tailor follow-ups.

3. The importance of consistent personalization

Don’t let amazing personalization moments be rare! To build trust, ensure a seamless experience with the following:

• Customer Data Platform (CDP): Every customer-facing team member needs a complete picture of buyer interactions and insights. ‍
• Real-time customization: Can your website, chatbots, or email marketing tailor content on the fly based on known customer data?

‍ Imagine an enterprise software solution catering to HR leaders. Prospects visiting from job boards could receive different initial prompts than organic search prospects demonstrating awareness of specific product features.

Those requesting a demo should see content catering to their industry's common implementation questions.

Ethical Considerations: Always approach personalization responsibly and be transparent about data collection. Customers may be impressed by how "well you know them," but a creepy overreach can backfire in an instant.

Preparing your B2B customer journey for what’s next

The B2B world moves fast. What worked yesterday might flop tomorrow. The key is building adaptability into the very core of how you approach your customer journey. 

Agility is essential. Be prepared to quickly adjust your map, resources, and messaging in response to economic shifts, new tech and trends, and competitor strategies. That just means you need to stay current but always be customer-focused . 

You should be following major shifts within the markets you serve and anticipate their impact on the needs of your customers. Make feedback a regular process , not a once-a-year survey! Always build regular check-ins with your buyers and sales teams with continuous feedback loops. 

Finally, future-proof your tech stack by considering scalability and integrations/APIs. Can the tools you’re using handle a surge in sales, and will they play nicely with your existing tools? 

How emlen enhances your B2B customer journey

What can emlen.io can do for your business? 💡

You've crafted a beautiful customer journey map. It's filled with insights about your ideal buyers, pinpoints pain points, and guides your content strategy. But now comes the hard part – turning all that knowledge into actions that drive sales. This is where emlen makes the difference.

Think of emlen as your bridge between the theoretical and the real world. It gives you both clarity and the tools to execute. Instead of guessing about what customers might do, emlen's analytics show you what they're actually doing within your sales rooms. 

Which content sparks excitement? Who are the hidden influencers in a buying group? Are certain slides making buyers tune out? This intel is pure gold!

emlen isn't just about optimizing content. It's about empowering your sales team to strike while the iron is hot. Real-time collaboration features mean reps can see who's forwarding content, engaging deeply, or suddenly going radio silent.

Now, your reps can tailor their outreach, personalize follow-ups, and act on those crucial moments of buying interest that can be easy to miss in the traditional sales cycle.

Why emlen is the smarter choice

• Actionable insights: Go beyond data points to understand exactly which parts of your content strategy succeed and where optimizations are needed. ‍
• Personalized and efficient: Deliver sales experiences that cater to individual needs without overwhelming your internal team. ‍
• Enhanced revenue outcomes: Turn customer understanding into more closed deals with insights fueling proactive engagement throughout the B2B buyer journey .

Start building your B2B customer journey map

You now have the knowledge to transform how you understand your B2B customers. You've learned the fundamentals of journey mapping, the importance of personalization, and how to leverage data to make those maps even more powerful.

But the true value comes from taking action. Start by sketching out a basic map, gathering feedback from your team, and refining it over time. Don't let the pursuit of perfection become the enemy of progress.

Remember, the best customer journey maps are living documents that evolve alongside your business and your customers' ever-changing needs. Tools like emlen can streamline this process, providing insights that elevate your sales engagement from generic to truly personalized.

The B2B world moves fast, and those who understand their customers best will be the ones who win . Don't get left behind – empower your teams, delight your customers, and unlock the growth potential a strategic customer journey map can bring.

Marc is co-founder of emlen and responsible for the go-to-market strategy and execution that convinces today's modern B2B buyer.

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B2B Customer Journey Maps – How To Create Them & Make The Best Out Of Them

• December 9, 2023
• Tags: B2B marketing , Customer journey maps

This article was originally published in the Elevate Your Marketing  newsletter and has been repurposed and republished here with the author’s permission. Here is the  link  to the original article. 

Ooophh! One more article on customer journey mapping? I know. The world doesn’t need one more blog post that has regurgitated content on a topic thousands have already written about.

But here is the sad reality about B2B customer journey maps – they go unutilized by many businesses once constructed. So, in this blog post, we will focus more on how you can make the best use of customer journey maps for the growth of your B2B business.

To set the context right and consider readers unfamiliar with the concept, we will first look at what a B2B customer journey map is, why it is important for B2B businesses, and how to create it for your business.

That said, let’s roll.

What is a B2B customer journey map?

Simply put, a customer journey map in B2B visually represents all your customers’ and prospects’ interactions with your business. It considers all touchpoints and actions of customers at different stages of their lifecycle.

In its simplest form, a customer journey map can be compared to a marketing funnel, only that the former dives deep into customer interactions to understand their intent, preferences, and emotions.

Here is a customer journey map designed by HubSpot that explains the concept:

Customer Journey Map

The B2B customer journey is split into awareness, consideration, and decision stages. At each stage, we analyze the customer’s intent, actions, information sources, and how to take him/her seamlessly through the entire experience.

It is to be noted here that the journey doesn’t end with the customer making a purchase. Customer engagement and retention activities are also part of the journey map.

Further, the journey might not be linear and as simple as shown in the above diagram. Again, parallels can be drawn from what we discussed about the  multi-dimensional marketing funnel in one of the previous blogs. Customers have multiple entry and exit points with an almost always non-linear journey.

To take this into account, you can further divide each stage into multiple steps and map out each activity against them (we will talk more about this when we discuss the process of creating a customer journey map in an upcoming section).

Why is a customer journey map important for B2B businesses?

One common misunderstanding is that a customer journey map is required only for B2C or e-commerce businesses. But this is far from the truth. B2B businesses need it as much to:

• Understand how customers interact with the company through various touchpoints.
• Figure out the channels that are working the best for the business.
• Learn more about customer preferences regarding placing queries, responding to emails, answering phone calls, using the website, etc.
• Create better positioning, messaging, and targeting based on customer behavior across touchpoints.

There are more benefits to using a customer journey map. But you get the point here. These maps sometimes even help uncover insights businesses would have otherwise not discovered.

How to create a B2B customer journey map

You have already seen what a basic customer journey map looks like. As mentioned, the key is to break down the various stages into individual activities.

You can do this in multiple ways. One of the ways is to visualize each stage as separate maps.  Here is a template  you can use to do this. It is an expanded version of the map we discussed above.

To prepare a map using the template, you need to follow the below steps:

• Identify your target persona.
• List down your target persona’s pain points and needs.
• Determine all the channels and touchpoints customers and prospects have (or could potentially have) with your business.
• Figure out all the actions each target persona performs at each step (you can even think about having separate customer journey maps for each persona for a better visual representation).
• Identify all the marketing campaigns and content assets your customers are interacting with.
• Create the map – this is obvious. You can consider using a workflow tool like UXPressia or Microsoft Visio to create the journeys

I don’t wish to get into the details of the process involved in creating a customer journey map. Here are a few useful resources you can refer to learn more about this:

• How to Create an Effective Customer Journey Map [Examples + Template]
• 7 Interesting Real Life Customer Journey Map Examples
• Customer journey map: The key to understanding your customer

How to make the most out of B2B customer journey maps

Now we have come to the core of today’s topic – how to use customer journey maps to grow your business. The fundamental idea here is to leverage all the insights from the customer journey map to fine-tune your marketing and growth activities.

How to make the most out of customer journey maps

We need to look at this topic along the following lines:

• Funnel design and analysis
• CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization)
• User experience
• Marketing channels
• Content marketing analytics
• Product/service marketing
• Marketing technology

1. Funnel design and analysis

Not every company has a similar customer journey. Depending on how customer interactions happen, the funnel stages might also change. Deeply understanding the customer journey map will help you modify and optimize the funnel for better results.

For example, as you create the customer journey map for your business, you identify a certain step in the awareness stage – say recommendation on a community (the prospect hears about your products or services in an online community conversation). You probably didn’t know about online communities impacting your business before. Based on the new information, you can go back and add this new step into your marketing and sales funnel and design a customized path for prospects who hear about you in online communities.

2. Conversion Rate Optimization in B2B customer journey map utilization

This is pretty straightforward. Knowing customer interactions is one of the best ways to optimize your landing pages, hooks, thumbnails, etc., for higher conversions. You can take the help of A/B testing tools if you wish.

3. User experience

I believe the real power of customer journey maps lies in using them along with complementary marketing tools and tactics.

What do I mean by that?

Look at what we discussed in the previous section – conversion rate optimization. CRO is complete only when you marry customer journey maps with A/B testing.

Similarly, user experience is a function of multiple parameters, of which customer journey maps also play a key role. You might have to deploy other tactics (like heatmap analysis) to draw a complete picture of user experience.

Journey maps help you identify specific touchpoints and interactions where you need to ensure that user experience has been taken into account. Such touchpoints include website, conversations with your customer support team, sales interactions, email exchanges, and more.

You need to look at user experience from a holistic standpoint. Usually, when marketers discuss user experience, they only consider the website. But even for marketers, understanding every step in the customer journey map and making efforts wherever it is relevant to enhance user experience is critical.

4. Role of marketing channels in B2B customer journey maps

Read this along with #1. Customer journey maps are a great tool to identify the different marketing channels your company is using.

But wait, you may ask, wouldn’t a company itself know the channels it is using?

The answer is, not necessarily in all cases (Think about the online community example I mentioned earlier). Creating a customer journey map involves collecting data points on everything a customer ‘touches’ related to your business. The reality is that many founders and marketing leaders do not know all their customer touchpoints. Some channels and touchpoints that you think are not contributing to the topline of your business could very well be making a great impact.

5. Content marketing analytics

Customer journey maps can be an excellent tool to:

• Map out all the content items that your customers and prospects are consuming.
• Dive into the details of which content performs well (by analyzing content-related data).

This is possible because the exercise of creating customer journey maps pushes you to list down all the content assets you have. This sometimes leads to you spotting age-old content items resting on your site – or any other channel – without being relevant or adding value to your customers or the business. This is one of the ways in which B2B customer journey maps contribute to content marketing analytics.

To learn more about content marketing analytics and how to build a system for it, please have a look at the below article:

Content Marketing Analytics – What It Is And How To Build A System For It

6. Product or service marketing in a B2B customer journey map

One of the key responsibilities of a product marketing team is to make sure the company’s value proposition is conveyed to its target audience the right way. But how do you know whether your messaging is resonating with your ICP?

It is by analyzing how they are responding to your content and copy. This can be a combination of some or all of the following touchpoints:

Product or service marketing 

• Social media content
• Website copy
• Sales presentations and proposal discussions
• Demos (if your offering involves showing a demo)

There is more I need to add to the list. But the idea is to understand whether your target audience responds positively to your messaging.

The next natural question is, how do you determine if the messaging resonates across all these channels?

It requires a two-pronged approach – quantitative and qualitative analyses. Quantitative analysis involves analyzing the effectiveness of your messaging content in each touchpoint (for instance, you can use the content marketing analytics approach to analyze everything content). The qualitative approach is about collecting feedback from written reviews, social media comments, client emails, sales conversations, analyst organizations, etc (for analyzing sales conversations, you can consider using a sales intelligence platform like Gong or Chorus AI).

Once you gather all the necessary insights, the cycle completes only when you go back to your marketing drawing board and make changes from what you learned from the customer journey map.

7. Marketing technology

This is more operational in nature. A customer journey map reveals all the technology underlying customer interactions. When it comes to martech, you need to ask the following questions in the context of a customer journey map:

• Is my tech stack serving the needs of my customers and prospects?
• Can the tools offer a seamless user experience across all the touchpoints?
• Are there any redundant tools in the stack unnecessarily adding costs to the marketing department?
• Is it possible to pull in data without hassle from all these tools to easily create a full view of the customer journey?

By analyzing the state of your martech stack for the above, you will be in a better position to determine whether you need to make any changes.

Final words about B2B customer journey maps

Customer journey maps are one of the most overhyped yet underutilized marketing tools. What I tried to change through this blog post is the tendency to create and forget about it afterward. Many companies invest a significant amount of time into this exercise, only to end up not using them.

As I mentioned before, everyone talks about how useful customer journey maps are and how to create them. But not many discuss what’s next. I hope I was able to throw some light on that aspect of the concept.

One more thing to note here is that customer journey maps evolve. Many assume that once a customer journey map is created, other marketing and sales processes need to follow it. In fact, you need to do the opposite. Don’t change your systems to fit into your old customer journey. Rather, let how customers interact with your business define your systems and processes.

About the author

Naseef KPO is the Founder and CEO of Skalegrow. He comes with rich experience across multiple areas of B2B marketing including content marketing, demand generation, SEO, account-based marketing, marketing analytics, revenue attribution, marketing technology, etc. He writes thought-provoking and relevant articles on  The Skalegrow Blog  and his weekly LinkedIn newsletter  Elevate Your Marketing .

Prior to starting Skalegrow, Naseef led large marketing teams in multi-million dollar B2B organizations where he made significant contributions to the topline growth of the business. He has also appeared on numerous podcasts where he shared his thoughts on trending marketing topics such as the application of AI in marketing, startup marketing, ABM, and B2B content marketing, just to name a few. Being the founder of Skalegrow, he is currently focusing on helping its clients stay ahead of their competition by using innovative yet practical marketing tactics.

You can connect with Naseef KPO on  LinkedIn.

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Mapping the B2B Customer Journey

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It’s obvious; people who have a positive customer experience will be more likely to spend more with that supplier, pay a premium price for the service, and recommend it to others. 

B2B marketing – often seen as B2C’s boring corporate sibling – is starting to prioritize this, building better experiences for its customers.

Why? Because customers are their biggest asset. And on or off the clock, they crave a purchase journey that answers their questions, delivers on promises, and demonstrates a brand’s true value.

Creating an impactful B2B customer journey comes down to knowing who your audience is, mapping out their touchpoints, and delivering the right message at every stage.

From product-led to brand experience

Above all, customer journey mapping is about improving the customer experience.

B2C marketers have focused on creating an unforgettable experience for their audience segments with products that will change their lives for the better. 

In contrast, B2B marketers have largely tended to hammer home product features, highlighting ROI and other business advantages to drive purchase intent. 

While it’s important for the B2B customer (perhaps a mid-level employee without the power to make the final purchase) to be able to demonstrate a product’s value to internal stakeholders, B2B data sets reveal the wider factors that come into play. 

For example, our work data reveals there’s more that drives businesses to purchase than value alone: 

This data highlights the need for a more rounded experience –one that taps into the wide range of purchase triggers and pain points, and resonates with the buyer at their individual stage of the journey.

Digging further into data points like this and segmenting by target market , industry and region will pinpoint exactly what your customers are looking for at each stage. 

Treat your customer like a friend. Seek to understand, guide and help them.

The next step is building out your customer journey map. The best place to start is  with a basic framework.

B2B customer journey map framework

The B2B purchase journey is considered to be comprised of 7 stages, sometimes more or less depending on the product or sector. These can be active or passive on the part of the customer, but each touchpoint is an opportunity for customer contact: 

It’s important to note: 

The vast majority of the purchase journey (around 80%) takes place without direct support from suppliers. These are known as ‘silent stages’.

In the B2B customer journey, stages 1 to 4 are mostly understood to be ‘silent’; when the buyer seeks out freely accessible, credible advice from owned and earned media to help them make an informed choice.

It’s important you know your audience well enough to deliver the content they need at these stages, as there’s no direct contact.

For the remaining stages, the customer makes themselves known to the supplier.

The rise of sector-specific customer journey mapping

Each industry has different purchasing patterns, and many B2B companies have more than one target sector.

While the framework gives a sense of the path to purchase, really knowing what your consumers want at each stage requires a deep understanding.

For example, project management software may be just as applicable to a large financial services company as it is to small agencies, but the internal structure, demands and purchase journey will be different.

Mapping out the purchase journey by sector will help increase the speed and efficiency of the buying process.

Here’s how this is achieved using B2B data.

Building out a B2B customer journey

As a hypothetical example, let’s focus on one product and sector, mapping the journey using our data.

The percentages below are taken from our survey of 2,127 workers in the financial services sector.

Stage 1: Problem 

The professionals in financial services most likely to highlight a business need:

• Senior management (50%)
• Middle management (45%)
• Junior or administration (27%)

Top reasons for purchasing new products or services: 

• To improve efficiency / processes in the company (30%)
• Benefits of product / service justify the cost (25%)
• To cut costs in the company (25%)

Stage 2: Awareness 

Top awareness drivers: 

• Conferences / trade shows / events (34%)
• Recommendations from colleagues / friends / contacts (33%)
• Recommendations from industry analysts (32%) 

Attitudes to purchasing new products:

• I prefer to buy from a provider I’ve heard of before but will consider others (40%)
• I will only buy from a provider I’ve heard of before (22%)
• I am open to buying from any provider that meets my needs (14%)

Stage 3: Research

Influential research channels for new products:

• Recommendations from industry analysts (69%)
• User reviews (68%)
• Recommendations from colleagues / friends / contacts (68%)

Purchase influencers financial services employees consider very important (relevant also in the purchase phase):

• Improving productivity / efficiency (45%)
• Security (e. g. that data is protected and encrypted) (45%)
• Value (44%)

Stage 4: Testing

Preferred method of contacting vendors:

• Email the provider (43%)
• Call a sales rep (34%)
• Fill out a buyer/contact form on their website (23%)

Factors encouraging an upgrade to the paid version of a tool:

• Better customer support (32%)
• Increased storage (32%)
• Customized features and functionality (30%)

Stage 5: Pricing and negotiation

Where they typically find the information needed to compare prices:

• Search engines (30%)
• Provider / supplier websites (30%)
• Recommendations from industry analysts (30%)

Stage 6: Stakeholder management

People who have influence in the purchasing of technology, IT, telecoms or software products and services in the financial sector:

• Senior management 91%
• Middle management 51%
• Junior level or administration 23%

Stage 7: Purchase

Departments involved in purchases (remember this may not be the researcher or end user) :

• Finance (35%)
• IT / data security (29%)
• C-suite management / leadership team (26%)

Purchase influencers financial services employees consider very important:

Key takeaway

The perfect B2B customer journey map involves looking deeply into each stage, understanding who you’re talking to, what their motivations are, and how best to reach them. 

Once in place, it forms the guiding light for your content marketing strategy, and even informs internal structuring, so you’ve got the teams in place to deliver the right message, at the right time. 

While the motivations of the B2B buyer may differ from those of the B2C consumer, they still require a compelling, well-defined customer journey. 

What makes the B2B customer journey more nuanced is that the purchaser may not be the problem identifier, or indeed the researcher. All the more reason to be clear on who is at what stage, and what the need is.

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7 Interesting Real-Life Customer Journey Map Examples

Creating a customer journey map is vital for any business to optimize its sales and marketing processes.

According to Salesforce , “among high-performing teams, 88% say a customer journey strategy is critical to the success of their overall marketing.”

An effective customer journey map will include each customer touchpoint a shopper interacts with on the way to making a purchase.

If you’re looking to create this document from scratch or looking for ways to improve your map, below are some customer journey map examples from highly successful companies.

Customer Journey Map Examples

When doing customer journey mapping, you should think deeply about your business and the customer experience. On that note, let’s dive into some real-life customer journey mapping and walk you through what makes customer journey maps so valuable.

Consumer SaaS Customer Journey Map Examples

Customer journey maps are essential to B2C companies in the SaaS space. It can be expensive to acquire a new customer and each month that you’re able to keep a subscription active deepens your ROI and ROAS.

Understanding each customer interaction, pain points and customer needs is vital for maximizing value throughout the customer lifecycle - and a user journey map will help identify these areas.

Spotify is one of the world’s most popular audio streaming services. When Spotify wanted to improve the music-sharing experience for its customers, it hired a marketing firm to create a customer journey map .

The goal of this user journey map was to determine where music sharing features the best fit into the customer experience .

In this example, we see the user experience mapped out from the moment the user first opens Spotify on a mobile device, all the way through to whether they like a song that a friend has shared.

Also Read: Effective Customer Journey Design

Throughout each stage and every touchpoint, the brand lists what a customer is engaging with, doing, thinking, and feeling (something that's commonly done with an empathy map ). The agency used data research and customer surveys to better understand how users felt at each touchpoint in the customer journey to collect this information.

Based on the customer journey map, Spotify was able to identify pain points for users and address those pain points so that the music sharing experience is smooth and seamless, encouraging more users to share music -- and to do it more often. \

This journey map is excellent because it identifies key areas of customer engagement, takes into account customer behavior , and has the goal of making the customer experience as enjoyable as possible.

The end result is significantly higher customer satisfaction, which can have several key benefits, including a smoother buyer journey, greater customer loyalty, and in many cases, existing customers becoming brand advocates.

2. TurboTax

Turbo Tax is a leading online software package for preparing taxes. When the TurboTax team was ready to launch a new product called Personal Pro, they created a customer journey map to better understand the overall customer experience with this new product.

The team used a mix of data research, customer surveys, and key conversations with tax professionals to understand how the product fits into the lives of those using it.

TurboTax’s customer journey analytics exercise starts when someone enters the website and is in the consideration phase through to the completion of the tax filing.

This customer journey map is great because it allows the team to see each customer pain point experienced and, therefore, address these pain points to make the customer experience smoother and more satisfactory.

Ecommerce Customer Journey Map Examples

The Ecommerce space is highly competitive in almost every niche these days. To maximize profit margins while keeping pricing competitive, it’s important to convert as many shoppers that visit your site as possible.

Also Read: Customer Journey Template

In addition to converting first-time customers at high rates, it’s important to have up-sell and cross-sell touchpoints in your customer journey as well. This increases the lifetime value of your customers and drives up the ROI against your acquisition costs.

Customer journey mapping is a vital exercise that can help E-commerce businesses skyrocket conversion rates from all online shoppers and achieve higher customer success.

1. Columbia Road

E-commerce agency, Columbia Road, created this map template for a fictitious online grocery shop . Here the agency demonstrates the core activities, goals, touchpoints, and experiences that a customer will go through during the decision-making process to place an order.

In this customer journey mapping exercise, the Columbia Road team went one step further than others by also including Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and which department is responsible for ensuring a customer has the best experience possible at each stage within the user journey.

Including KPIs is important because it lets you know if your customer journey map template is effective or if it needs to be adjusted to better serve your shoppers.

Amazon is one of the largest E-commerce shops in the world, with its own technology and custom systems in place for moving a customer through the sales journey. Its customer journey map is one of the most complex around and would take most people days to read through and understand each customer journey stage.

The good news is that the map can be broken down into several more digestible parts for analysis.

Here we can see Amazon’s customer conversion funnel and how the customer journey is enabled by its own products that push users through the sales funnel to maximize customer engagement.

Most interesting here is how Amazon includes its success metrics for each stage of the customer journey. These are the same success metrics that just about every E-commerce shop should be monitoring:

• Impressions
• Add to list
• Add to cart
• Purchase assists
• Conversion rate
• Subscriptions
• Repeat purchase rates

When conducting your customer journey mapping exercise, be sure to include these key metrics to monitor your success and gain deeper insight into the overall customer experience.

3. A More Common Scenario

If looking at the Amazon customer journey map feels overwhelming to you know that you’re not alone. Most E-commerce businesses will have a much less complicated customer journey to map out.

Here's a customer journey map template for the checkout process for online shops.

For instance, you see the most important stages of the checkout process, including the technology involved, common customer frustrations, and space to include solutions to make the process smoother.

For example, if a customer finds creating an account to be a barrier to checkout in the very first step - then offering a guest checkout option would be one solution for improving the customer experience.

Start your E-commerce customer journey mapping exercise using the above customer journey mapping template as an outline and then customize it for your own needs.

(If this isn't a good fit for your company, check out these other customer journey templates .)

B2B Customer Journey Map Examples (SaaS)

In the B2B customer journey , the sales cycle can vary significantly based on price point and the buy-in from stakeholders needed to make a business purchase.

When it comes to a B2B SaaS purchase for something reasonably inexpensive like Hootsuite’s social media management platform or the MailChimp email marketing platform, most of the customer journey will happen digitally with minimal to no involvement from a sales representative.

In this case, customer journey maps might be made using a simple Excel spreadsheet.

Because there are few high barriers to conversion, the customer sales journey can happen quickly and easily as long as the right digital touchpoints are in place.

The journey map example above shows that touchpoints can all be online assets from social media for awareness, to blog posts for research, to case studies or webinars for consideration. Finally, there might be a personal touchpoint at the very end if someone has a question right before or after purchasing.

If your customers go from Awareness to Purchase (or even Free Trial purchase) quickly, a simple user journey mapping might work for you.

If a B2B SaaS company has a longer sales cycle with a more highly considered product or service, the customer journey map should be more complex and done differently.

Below is an example from HubSpot. The first part of their customer journey map includes the various stages of the journey throughout each customer touchpoint:

Because this is an example of a journey with a longer sales cycle, it also breaks down the stages into substages to dig further into the mindset of a potential customer.

Under the Awareness Stage would be the Stranger. Under the Consideration Stage would be the Subscriber/Lead and MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead). And under the Decision Stage would be the Opportunity and the Deal Closed/Handoff.

As a customer moves from, say, Subscriber to MQL in the Consideration Stage, they will experience different emotions and require different touchpoints to move through the sales funnel.

For example, a blog subscriber or newsletter subscriber might not even be able to afford your product or service, so it wouldn’t make sense to assign them a sales rep and waste that rep’s time.

However, once a subscriber becomes an MQL, and you know they fit your customer profile you can start treating this person as a real potential customer by dedicating more time and resources.

This also makes for a more relevant experience from your customer’s perspective. No one likes to be hassled to buy a product they can't afford.

In the overall customer journey, the subscriber and the MQL are both still in the Consideration Stage but they should be treated in a different way which is why it’s important to break the journey down into smaller stages if you have a longer sales cycle.

What Makes a Good Customer Journey Map

Above we walked through several interesting examples of customer journey maps and discussed the pros and cons. Now, as you get ready to create your own map, let’s talk about key elements to keep in mind for best practices.

1. It Should Be Based on Market Research Plus Real Customer Data

According to a study from Ascend2 in partnership with Ansira, enterprise marketers are using customer feedback surveys (53%) and customer journey marketing research (47%) to build journey maps.

This is a great combination because it includes work based on theory as well as the real-world experiences of shoppers. And having this mix is critical for constructing effective journey maps and ultimately optimizing the customer experience.

Why is this combination key?

Customers don’t always know what they want or what they would prefer if they have never experienced a new product or feature before.

Therefore, it’s up to the business to continuously innovate and present ideas to shoppers. These new products and features should be workshopped based on a customer persona and user research.

Then, once the product or new feature is created, to make it as beneficial to the user as possible, feedback should be collected so improvements can be made.

Because customer journey maps need to take into account the thoughts and actions of users, compiling a document that includes a combination of market research and customer feedback surveys is the best way to get the data you need to make an effective journey map for your ideal buyer persona.

2. It Expands Beyond Your Marketing Funnel

A common pitfall for many companies when customer journey mapping is making a storyboard of the marketing funnel or marketing plan.

The marketing funnel is a good basis for creating a skeleton of the marketing portion of experience maps, but the user journey map should go well beyond marketing.

What does this mean?

The marketing funnel can be broken down into customer journey stages , just like your customer’s journey. It starts with awareness with your target audience and ends with a purchase from your ideal customer persona in the most basic sense (we often like to take this beyond purchase to gaining a loyal customer and getting a repeat purchase).

This means in the awareness stage of your marketing funnel you may talk about social media, Google Ads, and other forms of awareness building.

Then in the interest section, you may discuss email marketing, webinars, and other forms of content that increase interest. And in the consideration phase, you may talk about the UX design of your website, sales demonstrations, customer service, and so on.

A good marketing funnel will detail basic activities that should be carried out at each stage of the funnel for your user persona.

The Customer journey maps goes well beyond these basic activities and also lists out what a customer is thinking, feeling, and doing at each stage of the marketing funnel.

Think of it as a marketing funnel on steroids! It’s a much stronger and more powerful document than just your basic marketing funnel or marketing plan.

Additionally, any customer experience mapping needs to go beyond the marketing funnel. It should include the entire user experience with the product or service, each step in the sales cycle, and the touchpoints a person may routinely have with customer service.

3. It Includes KPIs

Good customer journey maps will include the various stages of the sales and marketing cycle as well as the thoughts, feelings, and actions of the user at each stage. Great customer journey maps will include KPIs for each stage.

Including KPIs is important so that the map can be evaluated by each customer touch point and adjusted when necessary.

Also, note that a customer journey map isn’t a document that is set in stone. It should be updated when new information is learned about:

• Customer behavior
• Customer needs
• Customer goals
• Customer expectations
• Customer satisfaction
• Customer support
• Customer service

It should also be evaluated and adjusted if overall sales and marketing goals are not being met.

Because the world is always evolving, so is the entire customer journey.

Whether you’re using a basic platform like Google Analytics or something more advanced like Woopra that’s specifically designed with the customer journey in mind, it should be capable of tracking all essential KPIs.

Get Started Creating Your Customer Journey Map

There's no better time to start laying the foundation for your customer journey mapping process than today.

By creating a visual representation of the buying process, you’ll gain valuable insight into the customer experience and reasons why customers do and don’t buy from you.

Once you’ve identified customer pain points you can make improvements at the necessary customer journey touchpoints, as well as optimize your customer service blueprint to position your business for sales success.

Remember, the whole goal is to put yourself in your customer’s shoes to create the best possible shopping experience for customer retention!

End-to-End Customer Journey Analytics Tool

Acquire and retain more customers with advanced analytics. Woopra is your single source of truth for tracking your customers.

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Mapping the B2B Customer Journey: Key Stages and Touchpoints

The B2B customer journey serves as a compass for businesses navigating the complex realm of buyer interactions and decision-making. Understanding the intricacies of this journey is crucial for organisations looking to build lasting partnerships and drive exceptional business outcomes. 

A customer journey map helps B2B operators re-imagine their customer journey and deliver more personalised experiences. It presents a great opportunity to reinforce brand awareness and drive customer satisfaction.

This article explores B2B customer journey mapping, unravelling its key stages and touchpoints that pave the way to fruitful business relationships. 

Table of Contents

How B2B and B2C customer journeys are different

What makes an effective b2b customer journey map, why you need a b2b customer journey map, #1. awareness, #2. consideration, #3. decision-making, #4. implementation, #5. support and relationship management, #6. renewal and expansion, awareness stage, consideration stage, decision-making stage, implementation stage, support and relationship management stage, renewal and expansion stage, define buyer personas, conduct customer interviews, analyse data and metrics, collaborate with sales and customer service teams, conduct journey mapping workshops, analyse competitor journeys, top gamification companies for employee & customer engagement, gamification in gambling and online casinos, 13 gamification tools to boost engagement and product adoption, how gamified websites are engaging their audience, what is the b2b customer journey.

The B2B customer journey refers to the process that business-to-business (B2B) customers go through, from problem identification to post-purchase. 

The process encompasses the entire lifecycle of a B2B buyer’s interactions with a company or brand. This includes their research, evaluation, purchase, ongoing relationship with the business and experiences along the way.

Consider a small business needing a scalable CRM (customer relationship management) solution, for example. There are many steps that it goes through before committing to a purchase. Even after the purchase, there are still post-purchase steps to cover, such as setting up the CRM system and providing after-sales services. That’s all part of the customer journey.

The B2B customer journey is characterised by multiple touchpoints across various channels. It is influenced by several factors, including industry-specific needs, organisational dynamics, and the involvement of decision-makers. Ultimately, the lasting impression of this journey is what defines the overall customer experience

Businesses and individual consumers approach the buying process quite differently. Understanding these differences is crucial for companies to tailor their strategies effectively to meet their customers’ unique expectations.

Some key aspects in which B2B and B2C (business to customer) journeys differ include: 

• Target audience — As a B2B operator, you rarely buy or sell to one person. More likely, you’ll transact with businesses, organisations, or a diverse group of individuals composed of stakeholders, senior management, and end-users
• Complexity —  B2B customer journeys tend to be more complex and involve longer sales cycles compared to B2C journeys. For example, B2B purchases typically involve higher stakes and larger investments, so there are often multiple decision-makers and longer negotiation processes.
• Decision-making factors — B2B customer journeys prioritise factors such as ROI, efficiency, scalability, and alignment with organisational goals. On the other hand, B2C journeys are frequently influenced by emotions, lifestyle preferences, and individual satisfaction.
• Relationship duration — B2B customer journeys typically involve longer-term relationships compared to B2C. This often necessitates continued engagement and support beyond the initial purchase. With B2B transactions, you look at ongoing partnerships, term contracts, or retainer arrangements.
• Personalisation approach — B2B journeys often emphasise customisation to meet the specific requirements of the purchasing organisation or target market segment. B2C customer journeys, on the other hand, may prioritise personalisation based on individualised experiences.
• Communication channels — B2B customer journeys typically involve multiple touchpoints across various channels, including direct sales interactions, professional networks, and industry-specific publications. B2C customer journeys rely heavily on digital channels such as websites, social media platforms, and online marketplaces.

What is the B2B customer journey map?

Simply put, the B2B customer journey map is a framework for capturing the customer experience. This visual representation illustrates customers’ pain points and their internal perception of the company throughout the business relationship. 

Source: apizee.com

These insights help the business identify areas to optimise to design and deliver more positive customer experiences.  

Mapping the B2B customer journey requires a business to step into the customer’s shoes to see how its processes impact its purchase decisions.

The customer journey map is a blueprint for the journey the customer takes. This means it should be comprehensive enough to cover all the important touchpoints — from initial awareness to post-sale.

Depending on the type of business relationship, customer journey maps should also cover the cessation of the relationship with the company. How a business handles this stage can be crucial to minimising churn and encouraging future relationships. 

Generally speaking, effective customer journey maps should include the following:

• A detailed flowchart of the customer journey showing the various interactions between the customer and the company
• Clearly outlined customer pain points or issues that may get in the way of a positive customer experience
• Identified areas where the company can take action to improve overall customer satisfaction 
• Details about what departments or people are responsible for moving the customer relationship forward at each touchpoint 
• Well-defined linkages between touchpoints
• The company’s performance at each touchpoint

Mapping the B2B customer journey gives businesses a powerful way to understand and cater to their customers effectively. 

Here are the key reasons to design a B2B customer journey map:

• Enhanced customer understanding —  A customer journey map provides valuable insights into the needs, motivations, pain points, and behaviours of your B2B customers. It helps you better understand their challenges, preferences, and decision-making processes.
• Strategic decision-making — A customer journey map helps businesses make data-driven decisions about their marketing, sales, and customer service strategies. It allows them to identify areas of improvement, optimise touchpoints, and align resources better to serve customers at each stage of their journey.
• Personalised experiences — A customer journey map enables a company to deliver tailored experiences to its B2B customers. This ultimately fosters stronger relationships and dramatically improves customer satisfaction.
• Alignment across teams — A customer journey map is a common reference point for different teams within an organisation. Marketing, sales, customer service, product development, and other departments can become more aligned and collaborative. This ensures consistent, cohesive customer experience across all touchpoints.
• Continuous improvement — Mapping the B2B customer journey is an iterative strategic process. It provides a framework for ongoing evaluation and optimisation of the customer experience to drive better business outcomes.

Key Stages of the B2B customer journey

The B2B customer journey typically consists of the following stages:

In this stage, the B2B vendor aims to raise awareness about what their business offers. The B2B customer, on the other hand,  becomes aware of a need or problem they want to address. For example, the company might be planning to attend an industry event in another state. So one of the first things they’ll need to sort out is the transportation for their staff. 

Now they’re aware of the need, so they start researching potential solutions and exploring available options.

As the name implies, this is where the customer “considers” their options. In the consideration stage, the B2B customer narrows their choices and evaluates different vendors or providers. 

Here, they delve deeper into the features and benefits of each option. They may compare the prices offered by the shortlisted vendors and consider payment options, flexibility, and customisation. At the end of the day, it’s about arriving at an informed decision about who they will purchase from.

Having narrowed down their options, it’s time for the B2B customer to decide what B2B vendor to contact to initiate the buying process. 

This is a pivotal moment in the B2B buyer journey. For one, it represents a successful conversion for the vendor, and is a sign that their lead nurturing methods are sound.

After the decision is made, the customer moves into the implementation stage. This involves the buying process, onboarding, and installation/configuration. 

Depending on the product or service being provided, this stage may also include special training for specific staff within the B2B customer’s organisation. Once everything is properly set up, the customer integrates the chosen solution into their existing business processes.

With the solution fully implemented, the customer enters the support and relationship management stage. For instance, they might require ongoing technical support or they might be assigned an account manager to handle post-purchase concerns and requests.

This is the B2C equivalent of customer loyalty. In this stage, the B2B customer evaluates their experience with the vendor and decides whether to continue the relationship. Additionally, there may be opportunities for upselling or expanding the scope of services provided to the customer.

It’s important to note that the B2B buyer journey is not strictly linear. This means it’s not uncommon for buyers to move back and forth between stages based on their specific needs and circumstances.

Touchpoints in B2B customer journey mapping

The customer journey mapping process includes several critical touchpoints that occur before, during, and after a sale. Touchpoints are the various customer interactions or moments of engagement with a company throughout the customer journey. 

Each one provides an opportunity for the company to leave an impression on the customer and ultimately impact their decision-making process. That’s why optimising touchpoints to deliver a consistent and personalised experience is essential in building strong relationships and fostering customer loyalty.

Source: salespanel.io

These touchpoints can occur through various channels, both online and offline, and are crucial in shaping customer experiences. 

Customer touchpoints can occur at different stages of the buying journey. Here are some examples:

• Industry events and conferences — These events are great for learning about new trends, technologies, and potential solutions.
• Online research — Conducting searches on search engines and exploring industry publications and social media communities are great ways to facilitate customer interactions.
• Word-of-mouth referrals — Seeking recommendations and feedback from colleagues, industry contacts, or trusted sources make for great customer touchpoints.
• Company website and landing pages — Visiting the company’s website and landing pages to explore detailed information about potential solutions.
• Product demonstrations or webinars — Participating in live or recorded demonstrations and webinars to gain insights into the functionality and benefits of the offerings.
• Case studies and success stories — Reviewing real-world examples and success stories that highlight how the product or service has helped other businesses.
• Consultations — Engaging in meetings or consultations with sales reps to discuss requirements and solutions.
• Proposal and pricing discussions —  Collaborating with the B2B vendor on contract terms and negotiating proposals that align with the B2B customer’s requirements.
• Reference checks — Seeking references from existing customers to validate the company’s reputation and track record.
• Vendor presentations or pitches — Attending presentations or pitches by vendors to assess their expertise and how well they understand the business’s challenges.
• Onboarding and training sessions — Participating in onboarding sessions and training programs to learn how to use the solution effectively.
• Technical support and guidance — Seeking technical support and advice during the implementation stage to resolve any issues that arise.
• Documentation and user manuals — Accessing comprehensive documentation, user manuals, and resources to support the implementation process and user adoption.
• Dedicated account managers or customer success representatives — A designated point of contact is great for nurturing current customers. 
• Helpdesk or support ticket systems — Utilising helpdesk or support ticket systems to log and track support requests, ensuring timely resolutions. This is a key part of modern B2B customer expectations and is a leading factor in increasing customer retention.
• Surveys and feedback mechanisms — Providing feedback through surveys or related mechanisms to help the vendor improve their offerings and sales process.
• Contract renewal discussions — Engaging in discussions with the B2B vendor regarding contract renewal terms and potential adjustments based on changing business needs.
• Cross-selling and upselling opportunities — Exploring opportunities to expand the relationship by considering additional vendor offerings.

Mapping the B2B buyer journey

Customer journey mapping requires a thoughtful approach to design truly innovative experiences tailored to the B2B context. 

It’s important to look for common pitfalls that typically accompany a journey mapping exercise. 

Some businesses make the mistake of overgeneralising the buyer’s journey. This results in them creating a one-size-fits-all customer journey map that doesn’t account for the unique needs of different customer segments. 

Another common mistake is focusing primarily on the sales stages and neglecting other key touchpoints of the buyer journey. This makes it difficult to capture the nuances of the buying experience truly.

The ideal customer journey map takes into account all the key stages of the journey with the view to achieving repeat business. It must also contain all the major elements necessary to improve customer touchpoints.

Check out the B2B customer journey map template below for an idea of the mapping process. 

Source: slideteam.net

Here are some techniques you can use to map the B2B customer journey:

Start by developing detailed user personas that represent your target B2B customers. The most effective way to create personas is first to identify the pain points, motivations, and decision-making criteria of various customer segments. 

This helps you understand their needs and tailor the customer journey map accordingly.

Engaging in one-on-one interviews with existing customers is a surefire way to gather insights about their experiences and interactions with your company.  You can also collect customer feedback data through the usual tools — customer satisfaction surveys, feedback forms, focus groups, etc. This helps identify areas of improvement and shape the customer journey map.

Leverage data analytics tools to analyse customer behaviour, engagement metrics , conversion rates, and customer journey progression. This data provides a quantitative understanding of the customer journey and helps identify bottlenecks or areas of improvement.

Involving your sales and customer service teams in the B2B customer journey mapping process is important. They have valuable insights into customer interactions and can provide detailed accounts of the pain points at each journey stage. 

Additionally, this collaboration can help buoy your marketing efforts and drive quicker outcomes.

Conduct workshops involving cross-functional teams from all relevant departments. Encourage brainstorming and collaboration to gain different perspectives.

Study the customer journeys of your competitors in the B2B space. Identify areas where they excel or fall short and use that knowledge to differentiate your own customer journey mapping. 

Keep in mind that the B2B customer journey is not static, so regularly review your customer journey map. There will always be new customer insights, market trends, and changing customer expectations to incorporate down the line. This ensures your customer journey map remains accurate and relevant.

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Mapping the B2B customer journey is an essential practice for businesses seeking to understand and optimise their interactions with customers. By comprehensively mapping the key stages and touchpoints, businesses can gain valuable insights into customer behaviour, preferences, and pain points. 

Understanding the B2B customer journey enables companies to align their efforts to deliver a seamless and satisfying experience at every touchpoint. Ultimately, an effective B2B customer journey map serves as a roadmap for success, guiding businesses towards delivering exceptional experiences.

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The B2B Customer Journey: Back to The Basics

The B2B customer journey is a complex matter, packed with a host of different touchpoints that affect customer experience. Understanding that complexity is essential in planning your customer service and marketing strategies. 

So, how can you analyze your journey and go about improving it in the right way? We’ve come up with an essential guide to help you do just that.

• Definition of B2B customer journey
• B2B customer journey stages
• Difference between B2B and B2C journeys
• Building a customer journey map
• Improve your B2B customer journey

Let’s get started.

What is a B2B customer journey?

The B2B customer journey is the collection of touchpoints and interactions a customer has with a B2B company, from their very first encounter, all the way through to post-purchase. 

Consider a B2B buyer who becomes aware of a SaaS software company that can address their particular needs, for example. There’s a whole load of other steps to go through before committing to a purchase. And even after purchasing, there’s still the setup, making sure they're getting the most out of it, and so on. That’s all part of the customer journey.

It’s the lasting impression of this journey that creates the all-important customer experience .

The B2B customer journey stages

The B2B customer journey stages consist of five main areas: awareness, consideration, conversion, loyalty, and advocacy. The exact stages may be broken down further or vary depending on the specific type of business (for example, some companies may require onboarding, or have multiple points of purchase).

Incredibly, throughout this whole journey, most B2B buyers spend only 17 percent of their time actually talking to you, according to Gartner's 2019 Future of B2B Buying Journey Report.

The rest of the journey happens "behind your back" — mostly researching and discussing with their team. That means that quality content is of paramount importance to give buyers access to the information they need to move through the stages. 

The table below provides a general overview of how the B2B customer journey could look.

Difference between B2C and B2B journeys

The difference between B2C and B2B customer journeys is essentially that B2B customer journeys are more complex. And of course, they’re selling to different audiences.

That means that although the overall structure, running from awareness through to advocacy, is similar in both, behavior is guided by different motives in B2B.  We can therefore make a number of distinctions. The table below shows some of the most important.

These differences impact how a B2B company goes about its business.

For example, in the case of selling to multiple people, when you’re talking to a non-decision-maker, it might make sense to talk about how user-friendly your service is, and try to give them the tools they need to make a business case to the decision-maker. 

On the other hand, if it’s the actual decision-maker you’re talking to, you might want to think about a strategy that is much more focused on business results and KPIs.

6 Steps to building a customer journey map for B2B

Creating a customer journey map for B2C helps chart the stages your customers go through. It is a crucial first port of call in improving your customer journey, because it allows you to find touchpoints you had neglected before or bottlenecks that appeared. Here are six steps to help you create your B2B customer journey map.

1. Analyze typical buying groups

In a B2B environment, there are often multiple people involved, all with different roles and responsibilities. In fact, the typical buying group for a complex B2B solution involves six to 10 decision makers according to Gartner. And they’ll all have different requirements you’ll have to take on board. Make sure you understand their level of influence on buying decisions, too.

2. Understand your customers’ goals

What needs are your buyers trying to fulfill or what problems are they trying to solve? Take the time to get a handle on their motivations so you can better understand the value you’re going to provide.

3. Leverage data and analytics

Analytics is an extremely useful tool in your B2B customer journey arsenal. It can help you move away from making subjective decisions and ensure you instead deal in cold, hard facts. Use data from multiple sources like your CRM or customer experience platform to get a holistic view of the journey.

4. Build out the B2B customer journey stages

As mentioned previously, your precise customer journey map for B2B will depend on your business’ exact processes. To make things easier, it might help to start from a generic template (you can use the generic stage layout above), and then split that out into more complicated components as you go. It helps to put yourself into your customer’s shoes (perhaps assuming one of your buyer personas) and try to go through the B2B customer journey stages as an experiment.

5. Lay out the different touchpoints

Many B2B touchpoints, for example websites, blog content, and organic search, are shared between B2B and B2C. Others, however, are more specific to B2B. Demos, sales meetings, onboarding — you need to map all that. A digital customer journey may be more commonplace now, but don’t forget to take into account analog channels like print media, too.

6. Define your own goals

It’s useful to keep the end results you want in mind as you go through the process as well. Ultimately you’re going to want results in areas such as retention and customer satisfaction . Gather customer feedback and cross-reference your business analytics to see if you hit these goals.

Note : Depending on your company’s processes, it may make sense to have one customer journey map per major B2B client.

How to improve your customer journey for B2B

According to Gartner’s 2019 report, 77 percent of B2B buyers feel that making a purchase is very complicated and time-consuming. And, ultimately, that is bad for business. To minimize complications, make sure you optimize your B2B customer journey the right way. Here are some ideas to get you going:

• Create buyer personas. When we buy a product, what we’re really doing is ‘hiring’ it to help us do a job, according to Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen. A good place to start then is with a list of your customer’s jobs . What is it that they need to do? Consider factors like your contact’s position in their organization, their business needs, and their role within the decision-making process. These days, 60 percent of all B2B tech buyers are millennials (2 percent are even Gen Z) so this is definitely something to take into consideration.
• Stay focused on content creation. More than half of all B2B buyers view at least eight pieces of content during the purchase process, and 82 percent of buyers viewed at least five pieces of content from the vendor prior to purchase, according to Forrester. Make sure each piece of content is aimed at improving the customer journey and sets up the next action you want to see from your buyers to move prospects along the journey. Structure content around the issues that are most important to your customers. 
• Identify and remove roadblocks. Make targeted interventions to remove friction and improve results by working backward to pick out anything from your customer journey that could get in the way of a sale. Factors nearest to the purchase point are often the lowest-hanging fruit. 
• Qualify your leads properly. Don’t take any old form-fill to be a qualified lead. At the end of the day, pushing a lead through the process when they’re not ready is going to be damaging for everyone, your business included. 
• Get onboarding right. Make sure your onboarding process is as smooth as possible. It will help you stand out from the crowd and lay the path for customer success. 
• Stay front of mind. Nurturing current customers is crucial. Keep in touch so they stay engaged, update them on how things are going, and give them access to useful reports. And when it comes to renewal dates, make sure you send out timely reminders.

Learn from the B2C journey

Customer journeys tend to be thought of in terms of B2C. In fact, the reality is that in B2B, buyers are not only looking for but expect a buying experience like that of a B2C customer. And if there’s one thing B2C does well it’s personalization. 

Yet, can you think of a time you’ve had a truly personal B2B interaction? To really stand out from the crowd with your B2B customer journey, always keep in mind that behind every brand logo are actual human beings.

What are your thoughts about the B2B customer journey? Let us know with a comment.

Looking to better manage your customer experience and gain greater insight into your customer journey? See what the Acquire platform could do for you by booking a demo with our team of experts.

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The B2B Customer Journey: What It Is and Why You Should Care

Ron Sela / Last updated: January 14, 2022

The B2B customer journey is one of the best tools you can use to understand your customers. A good customer journey map will help you understand your customers and the thought processes they face when buying your product, from pain points and bottlenecks where they leave to good interactions and services that keep them coming back.

Understanding your customer’s journey from when they first become aware they have a problem to post-product satisfaction will help you optimize your processes to create satisfied customers who advocate for you.

A good customer journey map can be the difference between business growth and a high customer churn rate . B2B customer journeys are more complex than B2C customer journeys, making mapping their journey all the more important for your business.

Table of Contents

Key Takeaways

• A B2B customer journey map visually illustrates the entire process a customer undergoes before, during, and after purchasing a product, highlighting key pain points and opportunities for process optimization to enhance customer experience.
• The complexity of B2B customer journeys, involving multiple decision-makers and a longer decision-making process compared to B2C, underscores the importance of mapping these journeys to effectively cater to both buyers and users, ultimately facilitating business growth and reducing customer churn.
• Creating a B2B customer journey map involves identifying and understanding the seven key stages (awareness, consideration, conversion, delivery, support, loyalty, and advocacy) and using customer feedback and data analytics to refine business processes and improve overall customer satisfaction.

What is a B2B Customer Journey Map?

A B2B customer journey map is a visual representation that shows all the processes your customer goes through before, during, and after buying your product.

The customer journey should include pain points and bottlenecks where your customers may decide to go to one of your competitors. However, the most essential function of a customer journey map is to show you how to optimize your processes and decrease those pain points, creating a more positive customer experience .

Why B2B Customer Journeys Are So Important

The B2B customer journey is far more complicated than B2C customer journeys. That’s because in B2B journeys there’s more than one buyer, and the buyers might not be the same as the users.

The buyers are usually the senior management while the users are typically lower-level employees. This matters because you’ll have to find a way to market and appeal to both of them. Knowing what each segment wants will help you market and support them more efficiently.

Moreover, it takes far longer for businesses to come to a decision on whether to buy your product or service. Months longer than the typical B2C customer, and they typically perform a lot more research than B2C customers as well. Ultimately, B2B customer journeys are longer, more complex, and as a result, much harder to chart accurately.

A customer journey map can show you where they feel like they should drop you, where they need more support, and in general help, you see where you need to focus your resources to keep more customers and make sure they’re happy.

Why Does Customer Journey Mapping Work?

You probably already have a good idea of what your customers are thinking, right? Wrong. You feel that you know what your customers think when they buy your product. Your company’s internal perspective on what customers think and feel is often wrong.

The reason journey mapping works is because it is data-based. Data gathered from customers who’ve enjoyed your product and are happy and those who decided to drop you for something else.

Those who dropped you are especially vital as they indicate processes you can improve that could keep future customers like them.

What Makes B2B Different From B2C?

They both start with a problem, seek a solution, and either end up satisfied or go somewhere else. That’s where the similarities end.

In B2B transactions, there are frequently many decision-makers in the business that decide whether to go with your product.

The B2B customer journey includes many different people, from the buyers to the users, to the buyer-users, and they all have different pain points, needs, and experiences.

Trying to map all this out can be complicated, but the result is worth it. A good B2B customer journey map will give you a comprehensive view of your buyers and how you can optimize your business processes for them.

How a B2B Customer Journey Map Can Benefit You

Now that you know what it is, why do you need one? Well, understanding your consumer is vital for any business. Visual representation of how customers move through your company processes is invaluable for marketing and sales . They’ll know how to target the customer and when.

This understanding is also valuable for fulfilling your customer’s needs and supporting them. It lets you know what to expect when your customers contact you for support, how you can make complicated processes such as delivery and conversion easier for them, and just in general, improve your customer’s journey with your business.

Benefits of a B2B Customer Journey Map

●     create a high-level view of the customer journey, ●     establish buy-in on the senior level, ●     help employees understand the customer’s view and needs, ●     increase employee engagement, ●     curate a better customer experience, ●     increase advocacy of your brand, ●     better results in generating and acquiring leads, ●     lower churn rates, ●     boost customer retention, increasing lifetime value, ●     all-around business growth, how can i create my own b2b customer journey map.

All customer journeys have seven steps, awareness, consideration, conversion, delivery, support, loyalty, and advocacy.

1.    Awareness

The first step in the customer journey is awareness. Being aware of your customer’s needs will help you with this. The beginning of the journey is when customers realize they have a problem and actively seek out a solution. The best thing you can do for this step is to rank high on search rankings so customers can find you swiftly and efficiently.

2.     Consideration

Consideration is when the customer researches your product and service and compares them to your competitors.

Having readily available materials is vital for this step, such as white papers, demos, videos, and other readily available online research materials. This step in the customer journey is crucial for the next step.

3.    Conversion

Conversion is everyone’s favorite step in the customer journey. The customer researched all their available options and decided you were the best. They’ve contacted you and are ready to pay up and buy your service.

The buying experience is vital to customer satisfaction, and having good business practices for their purchase is essential. The buying process should be painless and easy for the customer.

4.    Delivery

Delivery may be the most critical step in the B2B customer journey. Your company has to fulfill all of the promises made during the previous stages. Delivery of the product should be fully supported and easy for the customer.

5.    Support

Business success comes from customer success, so you should do everything you can to make sure they succeed. While delivery may be critical, so is this.

You need to continue supporting your customer, answering questions about the product, helping with issues that arise, and supporting the customer in all aspects of your product. Nurturing current customers is the best way to ensure you get new ones.

6.    Loyalty

Positive customer experience and support for the product or service you’ve given will lead to customer loyalty and trust in you and your product.

They’ll be more likely to keep you in the future, boosting customer lifecycle value, especially for companies that offer services such as SaaS companies.

7.    Advocacy

The best B2B advertisements are words straight from the consumer’s mouth. Good brand experience will lead to testimonials and glowing reviews, bringing in more customers, starting the process anew.

This last step in the customer journey helps you get more customers to feed into the process again, creating a never-ending loop of success for you.

Data, Data, Data

You need to get customer feedback from every step in the process, from your customers, from people who went to another company, from people who dropped you, from everywhere customers contact your company.

Customer feedback data is what drives your customer journey maps. That said, you don’t need to gather everything solely from customers.

It might be helpful to ask departments and people who regularly contact customers, such as sales teams, customer service representatives, and support departments. They all have regular contact with customers and are essential touchpoints in the customer journey.

Why Research Is Important

Market research is crucial to learn about your core customer segments, and compiling that data into a readable chart is a daunting task. However, the journey mapping exercise is key to understanding the buyer’s journey. In B2B journey mapping, you need to prove you’re worth your market share to the buyer and ensure they’re satisfied at all the journey stages.

Often the people buying the product and the people using the product are two completely different sets of people, so the buying journey is long and complicated.

That is why data analytics is so crucial for B2B customer journey mapping.

It gives you a clear view of how the customer moves and feels throughout their experience with your company. Customer journey analysis helps you see where customers fall through the cracks and how you can patch them.

Remember Data, Not Internal Perspectives

Remember, you should use data for your customer journey map, not your internal perception of the customer journey. B2B customer journey mapping relies heavily on data as it’s overly complex and can have many more customer touchpoints than B2C customer journey mapping.

A good customer journey map helps you identify where you can do better, while a bad one sits on a poster in your office. So gather data on as many different touchpoints as possible to optimize your business practices.

Customer Personas

Who is your ideal customer? Understanding your customer’s journey doesn’t mean much unless you know who’s walking it. That is why you should create personas . Personas are caricatures of your ideal customer, who they are, and what they need.

In B2B customer journey mapping, personas can get messy because there’s more than one buyer, and buyers and users may not be the same people, which is why you should include personas for all of them. Buyer personas, user personas, buyer-user personas.

Include their job title, company size, what they’re looking for in your product. The customer needs between buyers and users might differ, and their decision-making process focuses on different things.

Learn About Your Consumers

Buyers tend to focus on value, while users focus on your product’s integration and usability. So you need to create these personas and find different ways to target them. You should ensure you are getting through to your target audience and even create profiles for the ideal company you would like to work with, like what industry they should be in and how many employees they have.

You should have a good idea of whom you want to work with and check if your current clients match this profile. If they don’t, you may wish to change your marketing strategies to target the B2B customers you want.

Buyers tend to focus on the value you bring to the business. This includes high-level management and stakeholders in the company. They tend to be critical near the beginning of the journey stages but warm up to you once you prove your worth to them.

They’re focused on whether your product or service is worth the money to them. So make sure you’re providing plenty of value.

Unlike buyers, users are focused on the usability and versatility in your product. They want something that’s easy to learn and integrate into their workflow. They’re typically the ones doing the research to see if your product is a match for their needs, so give them plenty of materials that prove your support and versatility.

Managing Your Customer Experience

Positive customer experiences don’t just manifest out of thin air. You have to curate them. Journey mapping is one part of that. Once you understand how the customer moves through your processes, it’s time to update them.

Update all of your processes to give better customer experiences, whether that’s more frequent calls to check up on the customer, update your website with new research materials showing your company’s value, or even get a better delivery process and support system.

Everything should come back to the customer, and if you’re doing it right, you’ll see it reflected in an updated customer journey map.

You’re Not Done Yet

Mapping your customer’s journey is just one step in the process. Afterward, you need to identify critical touchpoints, identify pain points and relieve them, open up bottlenecks and confer with your department heads on how to improve processes to improve the customer journey.

Moreover, improvements don’t just end. You don’t finish your journey mapping and optimize your processes just once. You should repeat this process every year or two to make sure you’re on top of the ball for customer success and satisfaction.

Change the Way You Think About Customer Service and Customer Satisfaction

Finally, you need to change how you think about your customer experience management. The touchpoints you interact with stretch across your whole company, and even departments that don’t come into direct contact with customers can be improved to offer a better customer experience.

You can use everything from your sales qualification process to the purchase process and even your marketing efforts to enhance your customer relationship. Journey mapping is just one step of this process, along with personas and fulfilling your customer expectations.

Change the Way You Think About Customers and Watch Your Business Thrive

For example, sales reps familiar with personas can better target buyers and users to give more effective pitches. Having a B2B customer journey map your employees are familiar with increases employee engagement and helps senior management optimize their department’s practices to make the end-to-end experience perfect for customers.

Customer success and satisfaction also lead to better inbound lead generation and lead acquisition. When customers see testimonials or receive recommendations, they’re more likely to move to the purchase stage and buy your product or service.

High customer service and satisfaction also lead to repeat business, making it easier to acquire enterprises who’ve used you before. All of this leads to more business growth for you, so customer success is integral to your own goals.

Keep In Mind

Customer journey mapping isn’t easy, especially B2B customer journey mapping. But at the end of the day, you need to remember it’s about the customer experience. You want to manage the customer journey to create a better customer experience.

Here are some of the most common questions about the B2B customer journey

Awareness, consideration, conversion, delivery, support, loyalty, and advocacy are the seven steps every customer journey map needs to take in order to succeed.

The buyer persona, which is the fictional representation of the customers you are targeting. The pain points , which is the reason customers hesitate to buy or bottleneck the business. The customer’s emotional journey as well as their actions and thoughts and finally the touchpoints, which is where the business has some kind of contact with the customer.

First you have to identify what your business is all about, how it’s organized and how it makes decisions. Then you have to do the same, but in this case, for the customer. Once you have perfectly placed who is who, understand each one’s needs and desires. Finally, map the journey into phases.

Related Posts:

• The Complete Guide to the Customer Acquisition Funnel
• Digital Content Strategy: How to Make the Most of…
• How to Develop an Accurate B2B Buyer Persona that Converts
• Full Funnel Marketing Strategy for Lead Generation
• How to Provide the Best B2B Customer Experience

About Ron Sela

Ron is a marketing advisor to technology-driven businesses. He has 15 years of digital marketing experience and an MBA from the University of Florida. Ron helps companies grow their revenue by developing and executing integrated marketing plans that align with their business goals. He has a proven track record of success in helping companies achieve their growth objectives.

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The Practical Guide to B2B Customer Journey Mapping

This Practical Guide to B2B Customer Journey Mapping is the definitive resource for anyone looking to improve their B2B business’s customer experience.

It provides a comprehensive overview of how to map the customer journey and understand the customer experience covering everything from the basics of customer journey mapping to more advanced topics such as how to run the journey mapping workshop.

With this guide, you will be able to create a customer journey map that is tailored to your business’s needs and improve your customer experience.

Why you need a B2B Customer Journey Map

The goal of every customer journey map is to document the journey that a customer takes when interacting with the organisation so that it can be used to understand and continuously improve the journey over time.

Understanding this journey is not nearly as obvious as it sounds.

While you may think everyone in the organisation has a clear and consistent view of the entire set of interactions a customer experiences, they almost certainly do not.

Many times attendees at my journey mapping workshops react with surprise when learning what happens in another part of the organisation. Staff understand the part of journey that relates directly to their own area of responsibility but often not the overall journey.

This can lead to problems.

What might seem to be a very efficient way of running a process at the local organisational level can cause issues (lost sales, higher costs, annoyance, etc.) for the customer and the organisation in a broader context.

For instance, while Accounts may be processing bad debts very efficiently – it may not be taking into account clients with multiple products. A poor experience with Accounts may cause a customer to take their non-bad debt business elsewhere.

The Difference Between B2B Journey maps and B2C Journey Maps

B2B and B2C maps are very different because the way B2B and B2C organisations interact with their clients is so different.

The B2B Customer Journey Map Steps

Due to the larger investments and multiple decision makers, B2B customer journeys are typically more complex and formal than B2C journeys

When designing your B2B customer journey map you should ensure you capture at least the following steps:

1. Problem Identification, Prioritisation and Budget

Not only will your product/service need to solve a specific and acknowledged need the customer has, it must also also be a need with a high priority and typically have an approved budget.

2. Needs Definition

This could be as simple a one page summary, or a thousand page needs assessment .

3. Solution and Vendor Identification

Similar to the Awareness / Consideration phases of B2C customer journey but can be multiple parallel sets of meetings and documentation.

4. Vendor Selection

This will often be a more formal process than B2C decisions with multiple customer contacts and approvals required.

This is the equivalent to the Decision phase of a B2C customer journey.

5. Implementation

Many B2B sales will require an extensive implementation process so this should be actively considered in your journey map.

6. Adoption

Successful adoption of the product/service will often require substantial change management, training, etc for significant numbers of staff.

Failure to include this element in the journey map can lead to rapid turnover of the contract.

Failure to pre-plan and act on the Renewal stage can lead to high customer attrition rates.

Example B2B Journey Maps

The exact content of your journey map will be different based on exactly what you business does and how it operates but here are a couple of examples of B2B customer journey maps.

Notice how complex both of these journey maps are compared to a B2C customer journey map

How to Create a B2B Customer Journey Map

Before running your workshop you need to ensure that you have completed the following pre-work

Step 1: Identify and Prioritise Customer Segments

It is very likely that your organisation serves more than one customer segment. It is also likely that different segments will have either slightly different or completely different customer journey maps.

You should prioritise your journey map creation so the more important segments are implemented before less important segments. This prioritisation can be strategic, or by value or some other variable important in the business.

Critical to prioritisation is that a customer group is defined by having a unique customer journey through the organisation. Small variations (credit card payment Vs direct deposit) are not important. Substantially different journeys should be captured as different customer groups, e.g. intermediated customers vs direct customers, and journey maps

Step 2: Identify and Document Customer Personas 

Your B2B Decision Making Unit will include various buyer personas that need to be included in your customer journey map. 

Before attempting to create you map, create buyer persona profiles for each to ensure your journey map addresses their requirements 

Here are the Buyer Personas that need to be considered in your journey map:

Economic decision maker:

Typically a single person will have the authority to approve the final decision but they will most often take the advice of the rest of the Decision Making Unit so your customer journey also needs to address the consensus building process.

Subject Matter Expert(s):

This is expert(s) in the organisation on the product/service you provide. They will often also be responsible for rollout and use.

With most B2B agreements being relatively complex you are sure to need to engage with the legal team.

IT / Security

If your solution includes any software or IT components someone in the client IT group will most likely want to assess it for compliance and security.

Most larger B2B organisations have a formal Purchasing department that will manage the purchasing process. 

Step 3: Run The Journey Mapping Workshop

Who should attend.

Attendees for the workshop should be intimately involved with the actual processes in the organisations, as opposed to what might be written in corporate policies or documents. 

You should also strive to make the group cross functional; include people from different regions, areas (sales, accounts, marketing) as they will bring different perspectives on the customer journey.

Lastly, attendees should be mid-tier in the organisation: senior enough that they understand the elements of the process, junior enough that they are still in touch with how the business operates in practices, as opposed to what the corporate manual says.

Attendee Preparation

If you choose the right attendees they will need little preparation as they will have a deep understanding of how the business operates and be able to recall each element of the customer journey in the workshop.

How to Run the Journey Map Workshop

There are a variety of software tools that you can use to document your customer journey map but if you can get everyone in the same room, old school sticky notes and butcher’s paper is often the best way to capture the journey.

Here is how to run the workshop: 

Step 1: Introduce the goal of the workshop and the process.

Step 2: Hand out a pad of sticky notes (large size [3”x 5”] if possible) to all attendees.

Step 3: Ask each attendee to, by themselves, write down each of the touchpoints that exist in the customer journey with the following instructions.

• One Touchpoint per note it
• Clear, easy to read handwriting
• No more than 5 words.

While they are writing down the touchpoints tape several sheets of flip chart paper up to the wall in the line. Then draw a line horizontally in the middle of the sheets. Write “Customer” on the top half and “Company” on the bottom half. Then “Start” on the top left and “End” on the top right.

In this context the Customer section is where touchpoints initiated by the customer are placed (e.g. inbound service request) and Company is where touchpoints initiated by the Company are placed (e.g. send welcome pack)

When attendees finish writing down their touchpoints, have them start to place them on the touchpoint map where they think they should go. Encourage people to move the touchpoints around to get the order correct. Also have them throw away any duplicate touchpoint notes which are bound to have been created in the process.

When everyone has placed their touchpoints on the map, start at the top left of the map (the first contact) and interactively work through the entire map to create an accurate view of the customer journey.

Typically this works best if the facilitator stands at the map and simply asks “after this Touchpoint what happens”. New post-it notes will have to be made as some touchpoints will have been forgotten and there will often be disagreements between attendees on exactly what happens. However, when consensus is reached a valid customer journey map will have been created.

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Getting Started with the B2B Customer Journey Map

We can all agree that sales are the lifeblood of every business, right? It’s true that sales are important, but you can’t make sales if you don’t know your current or aspirational customer base. You can’t have a happy customer base without a good B2B customer experience.

Your business has nearly complete control over the customer experience. There are always outliers, but most of your customer base can be influenced using the process known as customer journey mapping. 

Customer journey mapping designs the lifecycle of a customer from their first encounter to closing and continued experience, helping you to curate a delivery method designed to please them. 

Though it sounds intricate, we plan to break it down for you. In this blog, you’ll learn about the customer journey mapping process, the stages of customer journey maps and their significance to your business. 

You’ll also explore:

• Examples of B2B customer journey maps
• What a B2B customer journey map entails
• How an understanding of the customer journey can improve your business

Your customers, current and potential, are your greatest assets. Understanding what they experience can help you adapt to their needs. Ideally, this will improve customer attraction, engagement, and retention over time. It’s an exciting prospect that just takes a little bit of understanding. If you need help understanding your customer journey map, we’re happy to help you out. Contact us today to receive a free customer journey map consultation with one of our expert strategists.

Explaining Customer Journey Mapping

So, just what is customer journey mapping? A customer journey map is a chart of your customer’s experience with your brand. The map will act as an outline of your customer’s touchpoints during the buying process. 

As a business, customer journey mapping can show potential and current customers experience your business at every step of their buying process. What do they see? How do they interact with you? How are they treated? There's a lot to creating, examining, and changing B2B customer journey mapping and B2C customer journey mapping.

Customer journey mapping can also improve the overall B2B customer experience. For customer retention and longevity, you need to develop a customized experience that serves the needs of the customers you’re trying to attract and then keep. 

Overall, this will promote customer engagement, trust, and loyalty. As such, your customers become brand ambassadors themselves, promoting your business and all you do for them to attract like-minded customers. 

Every part of the business that is a customer touchpoint is part of the journey map. Any part of your business accessed by potential or current customers is a touchpoint. 

Talk with the leads in the sales, marketing and support departments as well as the people who are in the trenches who work directly with active and potential customers. More likely, they have valuable information that could help you improve the customer journey based on vital feedback and data.

The Importance of Having a Customer Journey Map

Going through the customer journey mapping exercise is crucial because of the businesses that use it take a strategic approach by paying attention to the expectations of their customers. It gives them a better understanding of the wants, needs, and pain points of customers. 

This understanding allows businesses to tweak their marketing, customer service, and advertising to better serve each current and potential customer. Most importantly, you can create a timeline, such as quarterly or annually, to go through this process to ensure that their customers continue to get the best customer service based on new information. 

Examples of B2B Customer Journey Mapping Processes

It’s never easy to get started on something new. We’ve developed these B2B customer journey mapping examples to give you something to work off. Chances are you’ll see something that inspires you to design your own set of journey stages for your customers. 

Each type of customer journey relies on creating a buyer persona. A buyer or customer persona is crucial so that you’re able to truly flesh out what your B2B customers and potential customers experience at each touchpoint during the mapping process. Keep this in mind as you read through the following B2B customer journey mapping options. By knowing the buyer most likely to respond to your touchpoints, you can better maintain engagement and consistency. 

The Traditional B2B Customer Journey Map

This customer journey map covers the traditional stages of the B2B customer experience and the customer touchpoints. It addresses all of the customer touchpoints within the journey stages. 

The stages of a traditional customer journey map include:

• The Awareness Stage: Your business uses various methods to make potential customers aware of who you are, what you do, and how they can benefit.
• The Decision Stage: Your business can offer several things (like a coupon, free consultation or quote, demo, or work with a sales rep) so that they can decide whether you’re right for their business.
• Service Delivery and Feedback Stage : Your customer receives the services they were promised. Did you meet the customer’s expectations? Ask for feedback if they don’t voluntarily provide it to you.
• Relationship Maintenance Stage : Your business works to strengthen and maintain your relationship with the customer.

Tactical B2B Customer Journey Map

This process is used when there are only one or two specific areas to improve the customer experience process. For example, maybe the biggest area that needs to improve is in the relationship maintenance or the decision stage.

Despite being a tactical map that addresses only one or two areas, the map itself can look much bigger. That is because it analyzes the microstates within the stages mentioned above, ensuring that everything that occurs within is a customer touchpoint in itself. Let’s take a look at relationship building to analyze customers’ decision-making regarding making a purchase. 

The journey stages of a tactical map are:  

• Awareness: This becomes a presales stage for an additional purchase. They become more aware of the services you provide for their business.
• Information Seeking: Your clients seek the right information to help solve their problems. As B2B customers, they are looking at multiple businesses that may be able to meet their needs. So, how can you improve how you present this information to your customers, so they choose you?
• Supplier Short List : Your customers then create a short list of suppliers who can meet their needs.
• Pricing: B2B customers find out the costs of the services they need. They may also look to negotiate. If you get past this stage, the presales stage itself is complete, and you enter into the repurchasing stage.
• Ordering: The customer orders the services they need. This is the first part of the repurchasing stage.
• Delivery: The customer receives their new services.
• Sales Rep Support: During this stage, the B2B customer receives support from your sales team. This is the most crucial part of relationship building to graduate to customer loyalty. They need easy access to information regarding your services, along with a great relationship with your business's customer service and sales reps. 

Similarities & Differences of B2B Customer Journey Maps

The core similarity in these maps is the emphasis placed on the customer’s overall experience. Understanding and improving the customer experience should be the main goal for any business because happy customers are the most loyal. Each stage has a role, impacting the others like a series of dominoes. Simply by understanding each of these stages, you’ve come a long way toward designing your own customer experience. 

The differences between these customer journey map methods are found in the goals of the customer journey maps themselves. You can see the various touchpoints involved in each one, the questions asked and answered, and the objectives of each one. These things are unique to your business and will help you determine which one will be right for you.

Deciding which to use or deciding to develop your own style depends on your goals. You can create a customer journey map in many ways:

• A map that outlines the current state as it exists today provides a foundation.
• A map that outlines your business’s ideal state to establish goals. 
• A map that outlines a strategic situation provides a wider view of your objectives with a mind toward completing them.  
• A map that outlines the tactical experience which shows a day-in-the-life-of view of your customer. 
• A map that outlines levels based on buyer personas and demonstrates the breakdown within customer touchpoints. 

Each can act as a solution for your business and allow you to get more in touch with your customer and their experience with your business. 

Customer Journey Maps: A Great RevOps Tool

Regardless of the size of your business, a B2B customer journey map can help improve your customers’ experience. Now that you have a better understanding of the various customer journey maps, their stages, and how they’re used, you can start working on one for your business.

While you’re here, check out these other resources to help you improve your business processes:

Jake Fisher

Jake Fisher, is President and Co-Founder of BridgeRev. He helps our clients with their revenue and growth goals by providing better strategies, better processes, and better technology. He also makes videos and written content to help entrepreneurs, business owners, and managers achieve their own revenue goals. And, he talks to business and industry leaders at conferences and association events.

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Customer journey mapping in 2 and 1/2 days

How to create a customer journey map that improves customer success.

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There’s a common saying that you can’t understand someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes—and that’s exactly what customer journey maps do: they help you put yourself in different customers’ shoes and understand your business from their point of view.

Why should you do it? How should you do it? Find the answers in this guide, which we wrote after interviewing 10+ customer journey experts who shared methodologies, dos and don’ts, and pro tips with us. 

On this page:

What is a customer journey map?

How to create a customer journey map in 2 and ½ working days

4 benefits of customer journey mapping for your business

In later chapters, we dive deeper into customer journey analytics, workshops, and real-life examples.

Start mapping your customer journey

Hotjar lets you experience the customer journey through their eyes, so you can visualize what’s working and what needs improvement.

A customer journey map (CJM) is a visual representation of how customers interact with and experience your website, products, or business across multiple touchpoints.

By visualizing the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers experience, a customer journey map helps you better understand them and identify the pain points they encounter. This is essential if you want to implement informed, customer-focused optimizations on your site.

Mapping the customer journey: narrow vs. wide focus

A customer journey map can have a very narrow focus and only look at a few, specific steps of the customer experience or buyer’s journey (for example, a product-to-purchase flow on a website), or it can take into account all the touchpoints, online and offline, someone goes through before and after doing business with you. 

Each type of customer journey map has its advantages:

A CJM with a narrow focus allows you to zero in on an issue and effectively problem-solve 

A CJM with a wide focus gives you a broader, holistic understanding of how customers experience your business

Regardless of their focus, the best customer journey maps have one thing in common: they are created with real customer data that you collect and analyze . The insights are usually organized into a map (hence the name), diagram, or flowchart during a group workshop, which is later shared across the entire business so everyone gets a clear and comprehensive overview of a customer’s journey.

How to create your first customer journey map in 2 and ½ working days

The process of creating a customer journey map can be as long or short as you need. Depending on how many people and stakeholders you involve, how much data you collect and analyze, and how many touchpoints there are across the business, you could be looking at days or even weeks and months of work.

If you’re new to customer journey mapping, start from a narrower scope before moving on to mapping every single customer touchpoint . 

Here’s our beginner customer journey mapping framework to help you create your first complete map in 2 and ½ working days:

Day 1: preliminary customer journey mapping work

Day 2: prep and run your customer journey mapping workshop.

Final ½ day: wrap up and share your results

Download your free customer journey map checklist  (as seen below), to mark off your tasks as you complete them.

On your first day, you have three essential tasks:

Define the goal and scope of your CJM

Collect customer data and insights

Invite your team to a customer journey mapping workshop

Step 1: define the goal and scope of your CJM

Clarifying what part(s) of the journey you're looking at, and why, helps you stay focused throughout the mapping process.

If this is your first map,  start from a known issue or problematic area of your website. Keep the scope small, and focus on anything you can break down into four or five steps. For example:

If you have a high drop-off on a pricing page with five calls-to-action, each of which takes users to a different page, that’s enough for a mappable journey

If your purchase flow is made of five self-contained pages, each of which loses you potential customers, that’s a good candidate for mapping

✅ The output: a one- or two-sentence description of what your map will cover, and why, you can use whenever you need to explain what the process is about. For example: this map looks at the purchase flow on our website, and helps us understand how customers go through each step and the issues or obstacles they encounter. The map starts after users click ‘proceed to checkout’ and ends when they reach the 'Thank You' page .

Step 2: collect customer data and insights

Once you identify your goal and scope, the bulk of your first day should be spent collecting data and insights you’ll analyze as part of your mapping process. Because your map is narrow in focus, don’t get distracted by wide-scale demographics or data points that are interesting and nice to know, but ultimately irrelevant. 

Get your hands on as much of the following information as you can:

Metrics from traditional analytics tools (such as Google Analytics) that give you insight into what’s happening, across the pages and stages your customer journey map covers

Data from analyzing your conversion ‘funnels’ , which record how many visitors end up at each stage of the user journey, so you can optimize those steps for potential customers and increase conversions

Behavior analytics data (from platforms like Hotjar) that show you how people interact with your site. For example, heatmaps give you an aggregate view of how users click, move and scroll on specific pages, and session recordings capture a user’s entire journey as they navigate your site

Quantitative and qualitative answers to on-site surveys relevant to the pages you’re going to investigate, as customer feedback will ultimately guide your roadmap of changes to make to improve the journey

Any demographic information about existing user and customer personas that helps you map the journey from the perspective of a real type of customer, rather than that of any hypothetical visitor, ensuring the journey makes sense for your target audience

Any relevant data from customer service chat logs, emails, or even anecdotal information from support, success, and sales teams about the issues customers usually experience

✅ The output: quantitative and qualitative data about your customers' interactions and their experiences across various touchpoints. For example, you’ll know how many people drop off at each individual stage, which page elements they interact with or ignore, and what stops them from converting.

💡Pro tip: as you read this guide, you may not yet have most of this data, particularly when it comes to heatmaps, recordings, and survey results. That’s ok. 

Unless you’re running your CJM workshop in the next 12 hours, you have enough time to set up Hotjar on your website and start collecting insights right now. The platform helps you:

Learn where and why users drop off with Funnels

Visualize interactions on key pages with Heatmaps

Capture visitor sessions across your website with Recordings

Run on-site polls with Surveys

When the time comes for you to start your customer journey mapping process, this data will be invaluable.

Step 3: invite your team to a customer journey mapping workshop

In our experience, the most effective way to get buy-in is not to try and convince people after things are done—include them in the process from the start. So while you can easily create a customer journey map on your own, it won’t be nearly as powerful as one you create with team members from different areas of expertise .

For example, if you’re looking at the purchase flow, you need to work with:

Someone from the UX team, who knows about the usability of the flow and can advocate for design changes

Someone from dev or engineering, who knows how things work in the back end, and will be able to push forward any changes that result from the map

Someone from success or support, who has first-hand experience talking to customers and resolving any issues they experience

✅ The output: you’ve set a date, booked a meeting space, and invited a group of four to six participants to your customer journey mapping workshop.

💡Pro tip: for your first map, stay small. Keep it limited to four to six people, and no main stakeholders . This may be unpopular advice, especially since many guides out there mention the importance of having stakeholders present from the start.

However, when you’re not yet very familiar with the process, including too many people early on can discourage them from re-investing their time into future CJM tasks. At this stage, it’s more helpful to brainstorm with a small team, get feedback on how to improve, and iterate a few times. Once you have a firm handle on the process, then start looping in your stakeholders.

On workshop day, you’ll spend half your time prepping and the other half running the actual session.

Step 1: prepare all your materials 

To run a smooth workshop, ensure you do the following:

Bring stationery: for an interactive workshop, you’ll need basic materials such as pens, different colored Post-its, masking tape, and large sheets of paper to hang on the wall

Collect and print out the data: use the data you collected on Day 1. It’s good to have digital copies on a laptop or tablet for everybody to access, but print-outs could be the better alternative as people can take notes and scribble on them.

Print out an empathy map canvas for each participant: start the workshop with an empathy mapping exercise (more on this in Step 2). For this, hand each participant an empty empathy map canvas you can recreate from the template below.

Set up a customer journey map template on the wall: use a large sheet of paper to create a grid you'll stick to the wall and fill in as part of the workshop. On the horizontal axis, write the customer journey steps you identified during your Day 1 prep work; on the vertical axis, list the themes you want to analyze for each step. For example:

Actions your customers take

Questions they might have

Happy moments they experience

Pain points they experience

Tech limits they might encounter

Opportunities that arise

Step 2: run the workshop

This is the most interactive (and fun) part of the process. Follow the framework below to go from zero to a completed draft of a map in just under 2 hours .

Introduction [🕒 5–10 min]

Introduce yourself and your participants to one another

Using the one-two sentence description you defined on Day 1, explain the goal and scope of the workshop and the activities it will involve

Offer a quick summary of the customer persona you’ll be referring to throughout the session

Empathy mapping exercise [🕒 30 min]

Using the personas and data available, have each team member map their observations onto sticky notes and paste them on the relevant section of the empathy mapping canvas

Have all participants take turns presenting their empathy map

Facilitate group discussions where interesting points of agreement or disagreement appear

Customer journey mapping [🕒 60 min]

Using Post-its, ask each participant to fill in parts of the map grid with available information. Start by filling in the first row together, so everybody understands the process, then do each row individually (15–20 min). At the end of the process, you should have something like this:

Looking at the completed map, encourage your team to discuss and align on core observations (and take notes: they’ll come in handy on your final half day). At this point, customer pain points and opportunities should become evident for everybody involved. Having a cross-functional team means people will naturally start discussing what can, or cannot, immediately be done to address them (35–40 min).

Wrap up [🕒 5 min]

Congratulations! Your first customer journey map is complete. Finish the session by thanking your participants and letting them know the next steps.

Final half-day: wrap up and share

Once you’ve gone through the entire customer journey mapping workshop, the number one thing you want to avoid is for all this effort to go to waste. Instead of leaving the map hanging on the wall (or worse: taking it down, folding it, and forgetting about it), the final step is to wrap the process up and communicate the results to the larger team.

Digitize the map so you can easily update and share it with team members: it may be tempting to use dedicated software or invest time into a beautiful design, but for the first few iterations, it’s enough to add the map to your team’s existing workflows (for example, our team digitized our map and added it straight into Jira, where it’s easily accessible)

Offer a quick write-up or a 5-minute video introduction of the activity: re-use the description you came up with on Day 1, including who was involved and the top three outcomes

Clearly state the follow-up actions: if you’ve found obvious issues that need fixing, that’s a likely next step. If you’ve identified opportunities for change and improvement, you may want to validate these findings via customer interviews and usability testing.

4 benefits of customer journey mapping

In 2023, it’s almost a given that great customer experience (CX) provides any business or ecommerce site with a competitive advantage. But just how you’re supposed to deliver on the concept and create wow-worthy experiences is often left unsaid, implied, or glossed over.

Customer journey maps help you find answers to this ‘How?’ question, enabling you to:

Visualize customer pain points, motivations, and drivers

Create cross-team alignment around the business

Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership

Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

We’ve done a lot of customer journey work here at Hotjar, so we know that the above is true—but don’t just take our word for it: all the people we interviewed for this guide confirmed the benefits of journey mapping. Let’s take a look at what they shared.

1. Visualize customer pain points, motivations, and drivers

It’s one thing to present your entire team with charts, graphs, and trends about your customers, and quite another to put the same team in front of ONE map that highlights what customers think, want, and do at each step of their journey.

I did my first customer journey map at MADE.COM within the first three months of joining the company. I was trying to map the journey to understand where the pain points were.

For example, people who want to buy a sofa from us will be coming back to the site 8+ times over several weeks before making a purchase. In that time, they may also visit a showroom. So now I look at that journey, at a customer’s motivation for going to the website versus a physical store, and I need to make sure that the experience in the showroom complements what they're doing on-site, and vice-versa, and that it all kind of comes together.

The map helps in seeing that journey progress right up to the time someone becomes a customer. And it also continues after: we see the next touchpoints and how we're looking to retain them as a customer, so that they come back and purchase again.

A customer journey map is particularly powerful when you incorporate empathy into it, bringing to light specific emotions that customers experience throughout the journey.

2. Create cross-team alignment around the business

The best, most effective customer journey maps are not the solo project of the user experience (UX) or marketing team (though they may originate there).

Customer journey maps are a quick, easy, and powerful way to help everybody in your business get a clearer understanding of how things work from a customers’ perspective and what the customers’ needs are—which is the first step in your quest towards creating a better experience for them.

Our first goal for preparing a customer journey map was to improve understanding customers across the company, so that every employee could understand the entire process our clients go through.

For example, people from the shipping department didn't know how the process works online; people from marketing didn't know how customers behave after filing a complaint. Everything seems obvious, but when we shared these details, we saw that a lot of people didn't know how the company itself works—this map made us realize that there were still gaps we needed to fill.

If we discover that customers have a pain point in a specific section of the map, different teams can look at the same section from several angles; customer support can communicate why something is not possible, and engineering can explain why it’s going to take X amount of effort to get it done. Especially in cross-functional teams where we all come from really different disciplines, I find these maps to be an incredible way for us all to speak the same language.

3. Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership

As a company grows in size and complexity, the lines of ownership occasionally become blurry. Without clarity, a customer might get bounced like a ping pong ball across Sales, Success, and Support departments—not great for the seamless and frictionless customer experience we all want to offer.

A central source of ‘truth’ in the form of a customer journey map that everybody can refer to helps clarify areas of ownership and handover points.

We were growing as a team, and we realized we needed to operationalize a lot of the processes that, before then, had just been manually communicated. We did it through a customer journey map. Our goal was to better understand where these hand-off points were and how to create a more seamless experience for our customers, because they were kind of being punted from team to team, from person to person—and often, it was really hard to keep tabs on exactly where the customer was in that entire journey.

4. Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

A customer journey map will take your team from 'It appears that 30% of people leave the website at this stage' to 'Wow, people are leaving because the info is incomplete and the links are broken.' Once everyone is aligned on the roadblocks that need to be addressed, changes that have a positive impact on the customer experience and customer satisfaction will happen faster.

The customer journey map brings it all together: it doesn't matter who you've got in the room. If you’re doing a proper journey map, they always get enlightened in terms of ‘Oh, my word. I did not know the customer's actually experiencing this.’ And when I walk out of the session, we have often solved issues in the business. Accountability and responsibilities have been assigned, and I find that it just works well.

Shaheema (right) working on a customer journey map

Collect the right data to create an effective customer journey map

The secret of getting value from customer journey mapping is not just building the map itself: it's taking action on your findings. Having a list of changes to prioritize means you can also measure their effect once implemented, and keep improving your customers' experience. 

This all starts with collecting customer-centric data—the sooner you begin, the more information you’ll have when the time comes to make a decision.

Start mapping your customer journey today

Hotjar lets you experience your customer’s journey through their eyes, so you can visualize what’s working and what needs improvement.

FAQs about customer journey mapping

How do i create a customer journey map.

To create a useful customer journey map, you first need to define your objectives, buyer personas, and the goals of your customers (direct customer feedback and  market research will help you here). Then, identify all the distinct touchpoints the customer has with your product or service in chronological order, and visualize the completion of these steps in a map format.

What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping provides different teams in your company with a simple, easily understandable visualization that captures your customers’ perspective and needs, and the steps they’ll  take to successfully use your  product or service. 

Consider customer journey mapping if you want to accomplish a specific objective (like testing a new product’s purchase flow) or work towards a much broader goal (like increasing overall customer retention or customer loyalty).

What is the difference between a customer journey map and an experience map?

The main difference between an experience map and a customer journey map is that customer journey maps are geared specifically toward business goals and the successful use of a product or service, while experience maps visualize an individual’s journey and experience through the completion of any task or goal that may not be related to business.

20+ User Journey Map Examples and Templates

13 min read

Looking at user journey map examples can help you come up with a visual representation of your customer’s journey.

Customer journey mapping research also allows you to identify areas of opportunity in your processes and plan to reduce those friction points. For instance, you might discover that you need user onboarding software to retain users after the first three months.

So, we’ve compiled 20+ examples and templates of customer journey maps to help you get inspired.

Let’s get started!

• A user journey map is a document that shares the steps a user must follow to accomplish a goal. It can also include sentiments, thoughts, and friction points.
• The terms user journey maps and customer journey maps are usually interchangeable. These are similar because they both tell the story of a customer’s journey . However, they vary in scope, definitions, and goals.
• For instance, a user journey map is usually reduced to a specific product or service; while a customer journey map shows the end-to-end of a customer’s activities involving your product or service, e.g., advertising.
• The touchpoints in a user journey map refer to in-app experiences, and customer touchpoints in a journey map refer to every interaction the customer has with your app.
• Usually, the user journey map influences product design, while the customer journey map informs business strategies.
• There are four types of customer journey maps:
• Current-state maps. To illustrate the customer journey in the present.
• Future-state maps. To speculate on potential user journeys in the future.
• Day-in-the-life maps. To show what a user does in relation or without any link to your product/service.
• Service-blueprint maps. To define everything that needs to happen internally to properly serve users.
• Examples of user and customer journey maps include companies like Hubspot, Zoom, Mailchimp, Dropbox, and Userpilot.
• Templates of user journey maps include service blueprints, customer empathy maps, user touchpoints, and effective journey maps.
• Did you identify friction points in your user onboarding? Try Userpilot , the all-in-one product adoption platform that’ll help you improve your onboarding experience and boost retention rates. Get a demo .

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What is a user journey map?

A user journey map is a document that shows the steps a user follows to reach a goal with your product or service. It’s usually used for UX visualization as it tells the story of a person navigating your product and their interaction with different touchpoints.

This document also helps you gather information about the user and the functionality they find most relevant.

In your first version of a user journey map, you may only add the user’s actions. But as you expand it, you should also add their emotions and thoughts.

User journey maps vs customer journey maps

User journey maps and customer journey maps are almost interchangeable terms. They both show the road a person takes to achieve goals and help improve the user experience .

However, these vary in scope, definitions, and goals:

• Scope. User journey maps usually showcase the way a user experiences and interacts with a specific product or service. On the other hand, customer journey maps visualize the end-to-end experience of a customer across various brand touchpoints.
• Definitions. The word ‘touchpoints’ has different meanings in each case. A touchpoint in a user journey map refers to interface interactions and in-app experiences. However, a touchpoint in a customer journey map means every moment a customer interacts with or becomes aware of your brand — e.g., advertisements, customer support, or at checkout.
• Goals. User journey maps are useful to influence product design improvements. The insights of a customer journey map , usually inform broader business strategies and customer engagement efforts.

Types of user and customer journey maps

Using customer or user journey maps for different purposes allows you to influence different aspects of your business. For instance, a day-in-the-life journey map lets you spot areas of your customer’s routine where you can participate.

Here are different types of user and customer journey visualization to implement in your business:

• Current-state map. Illustrates the critical user journey as it is now. It helps you visualize the current state of the user experience based on facts. This type of journey map allows you to identify the strengths and opportunities of your current process.
• Future-state map. Design how you wish the customers’ journey could look in the future. This type is aspirational and it’s useful when speculating potential customer paths. It’s mostly based on data from the current state map and creativity.
• Day-in-the-life map. Lists everything a customer does throughout the day despite those actions being related to your brand. A day-in-the-life map gives you an overall understanding of who your customer is, how they spend their time, and where your company falls. This map is based on user research data.
• Service-blueprint map. This is an internal document that states all the actions, policies, and processes that go behind customer-facing services. The service blueprint is usually for employees to know what they need to do to meet the customer across the journey.

User and customer journey map examples

Take a look at examples of user and customer journey maps from successful businesses and get inspired to draft your own.

1. Userpilot’s current user state journey map

To examine the user’s current state, you can use Userpilot to perform a path analysis .

With path analysis, you can identify and understand how users navigate through your product, pinpointing the key interactions and touchpoints they encounter.

For example, to optimize conversion , you can look into how enterprise users navigate toward the conversion point. Then you can use the discovered insights to replicate the experience for new users.

2. Spotify’s music-sharing user journey map

Spotify is a music streaming platform with various features. This example shows a detailed view of a Spotify user’s journey when sharing music with friends and family.

The image shows the steps the user takes to find and share music as well as their thoughts, emotions, touchpoints, and actors. It starts with a user opening Spotify to listen to music at work. They look up the different playlists and feel excited to see the suggestions.

Once they find a song that makes them feel happy, they share it with a friend by sending the link through WhatsApp. They follow up and wait for an answer.

This example is particularly interesting since it includes the actions, thoughts, and sentiments of two different personas.

3. Uber’s first experience user journey map

Uber is a popular transportation company for booking rides. This current-stage customer journey map shows all the steps a user takes from the moment they choose to use Uber as a new user, up to when they arrive at their destination.

It includes screenshots that show exactly what the user sees when they go through each of the customer journey stages.

This example includes goals from the persona on the side. It also includes verbatim thoughts and emotion tags that give you deeper insights into the target persona.

The bottom part of the map shares critical insights that help marketing and sales teams understand the user on a deeper level and improve their experience.

4. Dropbox’s customer journey map

This journey map includes the user persona’s jobs-to-be-done (JBTD) and the path they follow from the problem-awareness stage.

Since Dropbox is a cloud storage platform, using it for business affects the day-to-day of all workers. Hence, this map includes a clever section named “cast” which includes the profiles of everyone who’ll be affected by the decision to use Dropbox.

As you can see, Sophia starts her journey when she discovers Dropbox. She researches alternatives, books a demo, and signs up for the application.

This looks like a future state journey map as it seems quite simplified for a current state map.

5. Mailchimp’s day-in-the-life customer journey map

Mailchimp is a popular email marketing platform. The customer journey map captures everything a marketing worker named Dani does every two weeks.

This customer journey map compiles all the little tasks she does before, during, and after she sends a marketing email.

It’s considered a day-in-the-life map rather than a current-state one because it includes more detail than simply outlining the steps Dani takes to send an email. Instead, it includes the digressions she takes before actually completing the task, as well as emotions and areas of opportunity.

6. Hubspot’s customer journey map

This platform offers multiple services for managing a business. This is the current state of Hubspot’s customer journey . It shows everything a user does from the moment they become dissatisfied with previous tools.

This map explains in detail how customers interact with Hubspot until they become paying users. It also includes all the other actors involved, the factors that lead to a positive or negative experience, and the decision points.

This map also includes thoughts and sentiments, friction points, customer touchpoints, and internal actors involved.

7. Netflix’s customer journey map

Similar to the Mailchimp example, this customer journey map explains the macro steps a user like Jen takes to watch a movie on Netflix.

As a media streaming platform, Netflix’s algorithm comes up with movies and TV show recommendations. This map shows how Jen disregards those recommendations and searches for a different movie instead, making it an area of opportunity for the Netflix team.

As part of the analysis, this map also includes Jen’s pain points, motivators, and emotions. This is an example of how breaking the journey down into smaller goals can simplify spotting friction points by showing an end-to-end process on a single screen.

8. Canva’s user journey map

Canva is an online graphic design platform, mostly suited for non-designers. This user map tells the story of Laura, a woman who isn’t a designer but wants to build beautiful flyers to promote her hobby.

As you see, the map walks us through the process of building a new design. It starts with Laura creating a board and ends when she exports the design. Similarly to the Netflix example, this journey map is also restricted to one scenario.

This user journey also includes actions, pain points, goals, expectations, and thoughts across the phases.

9. Zoom’s user journey map

This popular online meeting platform serves different purposes. This example is about Zoom for teachers and it’s broken down into three main categories: Action, emotions, and thinking.

This user journey map explains what a teacher does to give online lectures. It’s separated into five main action buckets with a breakdown of the tasks that go into each bucket. For example, for a teacher to “Start teaching” they need to open Zoom and roll the call.

You can also see how the teachers’ emotions and thoughts vary throughout the session. Plus, the design of this map lets us quickly identify opportunities just by looking at the emojis.

10. HeartiCraft’s user journey map

HeartiCraft is an online store for people who want to buy handcrafted products. The experience begins when the user researches and finds the website and ends when they decide to buy again.

It’s an interesting view of a user journey map as it exposes where HeartiCraft shines but also where it fails to delight users.

This map highlights four different stages and includes all the actions, thoughts and feelings, pain points, and delights under each of them.

11. Say Yeah!’s customer journey map

This company helps businesses deliver products and services that better serve neurodiverse users. To analyze this customer journey , you need to place your eyes on the left side of the screen and skim through the stages.

As you can see, this is the journey of an adult child looking for health support for their parents. It starts at the moment they discover a problem and ends after they’ve made a purchase.

This map includes the tasks, actors, emotions, media, tactics, and the thinking process of the user across the stages. It also shows how relevant each of those moments is for serving the customer properly.

12. Gartner’s B2B customer buying journey map

As a consulting firm, Gartner has a deep understanding of the B2B sales process. You can see that in this example because it paints the B2B buyer’s journey as a non-linear path.

This is likely informed by historic customer behavior, journey analytics , and user research. In the map, you’ll see four main actions across the user’s journey that allow them to buy a product.

However, there are internal discrepancies that Gartner manages to capture in this map. For example, showing that the person meeting with the company isn’t necessarily the decision maker and needs to go back and get the CEO’s approval before agreeing to make a purchase.

13. Service blueprint map for technical support

As mentioned above, a service journey map helps employees know what needs to happen internally to power customer-facing tasks. In this example, we can see how systems are interconnected and linked to company policies.

This map also shows the actions employees take to provide service, including the invisible back-end tasks and the evidence that supports each action.

Templates for user and customer journey mapping process

Explore the different templates included on this list, and edit them to fit your customer journeys:

1. User journey map template in Figma

You can leverage this template on Figma for your customer journey mapping exercise and uncover user activities and emotions across different stages – from realizing their needs to becoming a paid customer.

It allows you to add what you expect the user’s emotions, experience, and expectations to be at each of the stages.

You can include as many ideas as you wish on this canvas or even invite your teams to work on this together.

2. User empathy mapping template in Notion

An empathy map compiles your target user’s feelings, thoughts, and behaviors.

This Notion template follows the classical approach by including the four main categories:

• Says. Direct quotes or statements that provide insight into the user’s thoughts and opinions.
• Thinks. Reflects the user’s thoughts, beliefs, and feelings.
• Does . Includes what the user does in real life or during their interaction with a product or service.
• Feels . Fears, frustrations, joys, and other emotional responses.

3. Future state customer journey map template from Xtensio

Use your creativity and your current state journey map to fill out this template. Explore alternative customer paths to offer a better customer experience.

This template includes space to add:

• Stages of the journey.
• User’s thoughts and feelings.
• Actions and touchpoints.
• How this map is different from the current journey.

4. Service blueprint customer journey map template from Miro

This is a typical service blueprint template. Miro lets you edit it to your liking by following these steps:

• Define the customer service scenario to investigate.
• Plot customer actions in chronological order.
• Lay out processes, actors, and support systems.
• Add roles and responsibilities by specifying interactions, visibility, and internal actions.
• Illustrate cross-functional relationships.

5. Customer journey map template from Mural

Use Mural’s customer journey map template to have a better understanding of your target audience’s touchpoints, needs, motivations, and barriers.

Here you can:

• Establish a customer scenario, e.g., buying a shirt online.
• Define the customer steps, including big and small actions.
• List all customer interactions with your brand, either in physical or digital touchpoints.
• Determine your customer’s goals and motivations.
• Highlight the positive moments at each stage.
• Define the negative or frustrating moments across the journey.

6. Customer journey map template from Canva

Find many different customer journey map templates on Canva. These all let you edit the customer actions across stages, and depending on the option that you choose, you’ll also be able to add the user’s:

• Emotions and feelings.
• Thinking process.
• Physical or digital touchpoints.
• Barriers or pain points.
• Solutions to barriers.

7. Customer touchpoint map template from InVision

Map out the customer touchpoints on this InVision template. Here, you’ll be able to list all the different interactions between the user and your business, as well as mention all the involved actors. You can break down the actions by stages and teams.

8. Customer journey mapping template from Slidesgo

Slidesgo provides you with 29 customer journey mapping examples. You can choose the design that piques your interest the most and add the different stages, touchpoints, actions, and sentiments. These designs are mostly suited for journeys of up to five steps.

9. B2B customer journey map template from UXPressia

UXPressia developed a set of B2B/B2C customer journey map templates for you to use. This mix also includes persona templates to guide you when creating personas for your journey maps.

You can use these templates as-is to guide your thinking or adapt them to fit your specific project needs.

10. Customer journey map template from Conceptboard

This customer journey map template is a classical one. Open the file with a clear understanding of your user persona.

There, you’ll be able to add customer data concerning each stage, more specifically regarding their:

• Touchpoints and channels.
• Overall experience.
• Pain points.
• Areas of improvement.

Exploring user journey map examples can inspire you to enhance your customers’ experience by pinpointing critical areas, such as better onboarding processes.

To create an effective customer journey map, you need a deep understanding of your user and a clear mapping path, i.e., via conducting user interviews and contextual research.

Userpilot is an all-in-one product platform that can equip you with actionable customer journey insights. Get a demo to explore our powerful analytics capabilities!

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What do B2B Customer Journeys Look Like in 2024?

We walk through how B2B businesses should approach constructing the ideal customer journey in 2024.

What is a B2B customer journey? 

The 5 stages of the b2b customer journey, b2b vs. b2c customer journey mapping, how b2b customer journeys are evolving in 2024, 3 challenges of b2b customer journey mapping, how segment can supercharge your b2b customer journeys.

A B2B customer journey refers to all the interactions that take place between a business and a customer as the latter moves through the funnel. But in a B2B context, the customer in question is usually acting on behalf of their organization (e.g., a team of stakeholders looking to bring in a new email automation tool into their MarTech stack) . 

As a result, B2B customer journeys are usually much longer than business-to-customer (B2C) interactions – sometimes culminating in months-long exchanges that require input from multiple decision-makers. 

The customer journey describes all the interactions that take place between a customer and a business. It starts before a customer discovers your product and continues beyond the point of sale.

While they’re are key distinctions, both (B2B) and (B2C) customer journeys share the same five basic stages:

Awareness  

This is when a customer becomes aware of a specific pain point or need they have, and starts searching for a solution. From a business perspective, this is where having a sharp understanding of your audience and target personas comes into play. When driving brand awareness, you’ll often cater your messaging to speak to each individual and relevant persona. For instance, if you’re marketing a live chat tool, when advertising to a potential end user you’d likely showcase specific features and its ease of use. But when promoting it to someone in upper management, you may focus on the ROI their business stands to gain. 

One way to capture your target audience’s attention is to run ads based on lookalike audiences – here’s how . 

Consideration  

The consideration stage is when a prospect discovers your product or service as a potential solution to their problem. This can look like: browsing relevant product pages on your site, requesting a demo, speaking with live chat bot – a sort of fact-finding mission to understand how your product stacks up to their expectations (and why it’s better than your competitors). As we said earlier, in a B2B setting this process can take a long time due to the multiple stakeholders involved in making a decision. 

The conversion is the point when the customer makes a decision to commit to your brand, perhaps by signing up for an account or committing to a premium subscription (whatever your ultimate conversion goal happens to be). 

Conversion is not the end of the road, though. Once a customer starts using your product or service, a new facet of the customer journey begins: one that’s concerned with helping them reach time-to-value as quickly as possible and preventing churn. This is where personalized onboarding flows can come into play, and when onboarding journey maps can be especially useful to have a solid idea of what milestones your customers should be hitting and when. 

5 Tried-and-True Onboarding Campaigns + Templates

This step-by-step guide describes how to implement 5 user onboarding campaigns to drive long-term loyalty..

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For example, at Twilio Segment we know that setting up a Source and Destination, and having data flow between these two points, is a crucial step for users to recognize product value. By analyzing the behavior of both retained and churned customers, we were able to pinpoint when, approximately, a customer should have completed this step – and proactively intervene if they seemed to be struggling. 

You can learn more about how we used data to streamline onboarding here . 

An overarching goal is to have your customers become staunch supporters of your product  – not only so they remain customers, but so that they also become brand advocates. 

Referrals are an incredibly powerful and cost-effective way to acquire new customers. And with the right data, you can pinpoint the most strategic time to ask customers to give a referral and even automate your referral program.

Customer journey maps are “documents that visually illustrate customers’ processes, needs, and perceptions throughout their relationships with a company,” according to Forrester Research . They identify interactions and touchpoints at every stage of the customer lifecycle. 

You create these maps to understand how customers view the experience of doing business with your company – meaning you take their perspective. That’s why Forrester also calls these documents “moment of truth” maps.

There are some differences between B2B and B2C journey mapping, however, mainly: the number of touchpoints, and the number of decision-makers and stakeholders involved. 

Touchpoints

Customer journey touchpoints take place before, during, and after a sale. As B2B sales cycles tend to be longer than B2C ones, B2B customer journey maps have more touchpoints in the awareness and consideration stages.

Certain touchpoints are particularly important in B2B relationships – think reading case studies and customer testimonials, viewing product demos, comparing prices and product features, going through week 1 onboarding, and evaluating a plan upgrade.

Decision-makers

With B2B marketing, you have to convince multiple stakeholders of your product’s value since the end-user may not be the same person with the purchasing power. You need to understand these individual personas, and engage them on the channels they prefer .

By contrast, in B2C marketing, the consumer and end-user are usually one and the same person. (Family products tend to be an exception – for example, you’d market baby products to parents, not the babies themselves.)

B2B customer journeys are becoming more complex, as more business users now expect a customer experience similar to that of B2C brands. This demand is largely driven by millennials, who are now the primary B2B decision-makers, according to research by The B2B Institute and LinkedIn .

Being digital natives, millennials are used to cloud-based software and collaboration tools, and the experience of using these services has shaped their expectations of B2B products and solutions. For instance, they demand self-service sales transactions – choose a plan, pay for it, set up an account, and go. Gartner found that 44% of millennials don’t want to interact with a sales rep when it comes to making B2B purchases.

The report notes that millennials “are being met with a wave of new digital products, brand concepts, AI-powered plug-ins and productivity tools that are more akin to the consumer user experience of Uber and Airbnb than traditional business services.” To deliver similar experiences, B2B brands like Basecamp, Stripe, and Slack have mimicked popular lifestyle apps with their high-gloss marketing campaigns, aesthetics, and emphasis on UX.

The post-sale experience is changing, too. With the rise of “everything-as-a-service” models like SaaS, businesses need to convince customers to renew their subscriptions either monthly or annually. It’s now crucial to repeatedly engage customers at the service and loyalty stages through customer retention and engagement strategies.

Plotting out the B2B customer journey is a crucial step in empathizing with your prospects (and hopefully streamlining the path to conversion). However, B2B customer journey mapping is not without its challenges. As we mentioned above, these interactions can be complex, lengthy, and span numerous touchpoints. The point being: there is rarely a linear path between awareness, conversion, and retention when it comes to B2B customer journeys. 

Below, we talk about these challenges (and how to overcome them) in more detail. 

Identifying & prioritizing potential customer touchpoints

For a long time, marketers have turned to third-party cookies to help them with ad attribution and retargeting prospects. But in the past few years, data privacy regulations and browser-led changes on iOS, Safari, Firefox, and Chrome have been leading to one thing: the end of third-party cookies .

However, many companies haven’t completely broken up with third-party cookies yet – meaning they may be ill-equipped to understand the customer journey in its entirety if they don’t implement a new strategy. 

So, what’s the way forward? In short, a prioritization of first-party data . This type of data, which businesses gather from direct interactions with their customers, is compliant and serves as a competitive differentiator (that is, no other business has access to those insights). But for first-party data to be effective, it has to be consolidated – or in other words, there shouldn’t be any blindspots between teams when it comes to customer interactions.

Integrating the customer experience across touchpoints

One goal of customer journey mapping is to create a consistent experience across channels and touchpoints. But as the number and variety of those touchpoints grow, integrating tools can be complicated. 

For instance, different tools might use different naming conventions for data collection . You’d have to standardize these names if you want to unify data from multiple sources. To create this unified view, there are a couple steps you need to take:

Create a universal tracking plan for your business that clarifies the proper naming conventions for data, what’s being tracked (and why), and where that data originates from and ends up.  

Ensure this data is consolidated into a central repository and that data is democratized across teams (e.g, marketing teams don’t need to depend on analysts or engineering to pull audience lists – they can do it themselves, in real time). 

Preventing data silos & ensuring all teams can access customer data

The lack of integration between tools results in data silos and missed opportunities to engage customers. Let’s say sales has given a product demo to a specific prospect. If marketing doesn’t know that, they might email the prospect an invitation to try a demo. As a result, you waste the customer’s time (and your own), along with inviting their annoyance.  

What are the hallmarks of an effective B2B customer journey? As we’ve explored in this article, there are a few healthy indicators: an emphasis on first-party data, a democratization of data across teams, unified, real-time customer profiles . 

With consumers gravitating to multi-channel interactions, it’s become imperative for businesses to fix any blindspots that may crop up in their strategy. Effective marketing and top-tier customer experiences are now built on data, and having a scalable infrastructure in place is fundamental. 

Enter, the customer data platform. CDPs have emerged as a must for businesses, helping to collect, clean and consolidate data in real time and integrate every tool and app in their tech stack. Here’s how a CDP like Segment can supercharge B2B customer journeys.

Centralize & consolidate your data

Segment’s CDP can consolidate data from every customer touchpoint , ensure it’s cleaned and validated, and then send it to any downstream destination (like email, advertising, customer service, or product development software) for activation. 

A common challenge for businesses is being able to consolidate and trust the data they collect to glean insights. Too often, data silos pop up due to disconnected tech stacks, resulting in blind spots across teams. This can wreak havoc on the customer experience and business operations. 

Say a customer has an issue and tries to resolve it via live chat – providing details about their account, the problem at hand, and so forth. They end up being transferred to a phone call with a representative…and have to repeat everything they just went over. Not ideal. 

With consolidated, trustworthy, and accurate data, businesses can have more precision in their customer interactions, creating a better overall experience that pays dividends when it comes to greater customer satisfaction and retention rates. 

Create a single customer view

Identity resolution is the process of stitching together a customer’s behavior, from across channels, into a single, unified profile. This single view of the customer is essential for effectively engaging them – giving every team a 360-degree view of how they’ve been interacting with your business. It’s a crucial component of creating a cohesive customer journey, especially when these profiles are updated in real time . 

Personalize campaigns with real-time data

With this complete, overarching view of customer behavior, businesses can then leverage real-time data to personalize experiences at scale . For instance, with Segment Journeys , teams are able to orchestrate multi-step, and multi-channel campaigns based on a person’s actions in the moment . 

Interested in hearing more about how Segment can help you?

Connect with a Segment expert who can share more about what Segment can do for you.

Frequently asked questions

What are the stages in the b2b customer journey, what are the benefits of creating a b2b customer journey map, what are examples of customer touchpoints, how are b2b and b2c journeys different, how can twilio segment help b2b companies construct customer journey maps.

Customer Journey Map

Ai generator.

A Customer Journey Map is a strategic tool that visually maps the customer’s experience with a product or service across multiple touchpoints and interactions. It delineates the stages a customer progresses through, from initial awareness to post-purchase support, pinpointing pain points, opportunities for improvement, and instances of delight. Utilizing this management approach, businesses can pinpoint critical areas for optimization, improve customer satisfaction, and develop more personalized and seamless experiences. These enhancements are key to driving loyalty and retention, effectively aligning with broader business strategies for customer relationship management.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation illustrating the step-by-step experience a customer goes through when interacting with a product or service, highlighting key touchpoints and emotions.

Examples Of Customer Journey Map

• E-commerce Website : Journey from website visit to post-purchase feedback.
• Retail Store : Experience from entering the store to returning items.
• Mobile App : From download to regular use and updates.
• Subscription Services : From free trial through subscription upgrades to cancellation.
• Banking Services : Account opening, using online banking, and loan applications.
• Healthcare Services : Patient journey from appointment scheduling to follow-up.
• Travel and Tourism : Booking, traveling, and post-trip feedback.
• Insurance Claims : Claim filing to payment and post-claim service.
• Automotive Sales : Research, dealership visit, purchase, and after-sales.
• Real Estate : From house hunting to buying and moving in.
• Software as a Service (SaaS) : Free trial to subscription renewal and upsell.
• Education : Student enrollment, learning, graduation, and alumni involvement.
• Restaurant Dining : From reservation to dining and posting a review.
• Utility Services : Service connection to billing and service termination.
• Telecommunications : Plan selection, device purchase, and troubleshooting.
• Event Planning : Ticket purchase to post-event engagement.
• Public Transportation : Planning, ticketing, travel, and feedback.
• Fitness Club : Signing up, regular visits, and membership renewal.
• Pet Adoption : Adoption process and post-adoption support.
• Library Services : Membership, borrowing, event participation.
• Beauty Salon : Booking, service, product purchase, and rebooking.
• Home Improvement Projects : Research to project completion and follow-up.
• Legal Consultation Services : Initial inquiry to case resolution.
• Non-Profit Donor Engagement : Donation process to long-term support.
• Luxury Goods Shopping : Product discovery to after-sales care.
• Digital Marketing Campaigns : Targeting to campaign analysis and conversion.

Key Elements of Customer Journey Maps

• Persona : Profiles representing different customer segments.
• Touchpoints : Interactions between the customer and the business.
• Emotions : Feelings experienced at each touchpoint.
• Stages : Phases of the journey, from awareness to post-purchase.
• Channels : Communication mediums used by customers.
• Pain Points : Challenges or frustrations encountered.
• Opportunities : Moments for improvement or enhancement.
• Metrics : Data to measure success and identify areas for optimization.

Elements of a Customer Journey Map

• Customer Personas : Detailed profiles of the target customer that represent different segments of the user base.
• Stages of the Journey : The key phases a customer goes through in a nonprofit context, from becoming aware of the organization to post-donation activities. These stages can include awareness, consideration, decision, retention, and advocacy.
• Customer Touchpoints : Specific interactions the customer has with the business during their journey. This can include visits to a website, interactions with sales personnel, or usage of the product.
• Customer Emotions : The feelings and emotional states experienced by the customer at various points in the journey. Highlighting these can help identify areas needing improvement.
• Pain Points and Challenges : Difficulties or frustrations that customers face during their interaction with the brand, which might deter them from continuing the relationship.
• Opportunities : Potential areas for improvement or innovation that can enhance the customer experience.
• Channels and Resources : The various mediums through which interactions take place, such as in-store, online, mobile, or through customer service .
• Metrics : Key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that measure the success of customer interactions at various stages.

Rules for Creating Successful Journey Maps

• Start with Research : Gather data on customer behavior, preferences, and pain points.
• Define Objectives : Clearly outline what you aim to achieve with the map.
• Focus on Customers : Keep the customer perspective central throughout the mapping process.
• Use Visuals : Create visual representations that are easy to understand and engage with.
• Include Key Touchpoints : Highlight critical interactions across the entire journey.
• Consider Emotions : Capture the emotional highs and lows experienced by customers.
• Collaborate Across Teams : Involve stakeholders from various departments to ensure comprehensive insights.
• Iterate and Improve : Continuously update and refine journey maps based on feedback and evolving customer needs.

Customer Journey Stages

Awareness : Customers become aware of a product, service, or brand through various channels such as advertising, social media, or word-of-mouth. Consideration : Customers research and evaluate different options, comparing features, prices, and reviews to make an informed decision. Decision : Customers make a purchase decision, selecting the product or service that best meets their needs and preferences. Purchase : Customers complete the transaction, whether online, in-store, or through other channels, to acquire the chosen product or service. Post-Purchase Experience : After the purchase, customers experience the product or service, seeking support, using it, and forming opinions based on their experience. Loyalty and Advocacy : Satisfied customers may become loyal to the brand, repurchasing products and advocating for it through positive reviews, referrals, or social media engagement.

Why is customer journey mapping important?

• Understanding Customer Needs : It helps businesses gain insights into customer behavior, preferences, pain points, and motivations throughout the entire journey.
• Identifying Pain Points and Opportunities : By visualizing the customer experience, businesses can pinpoint areas of friction, gaps in service, and opportunities for improvement.
• Enhancing Customer Experience : Journey maps enable businesses to design and deliver more seamless, personalized, and satisfying experiences at every touchpoint, leading to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Aligning Cross-Functional Teams : Journey mapping fosters collaboration across departments by providing a shared understanding of the customer journey, incorporating feedback , and encouraging teams to work together to address customer needs and deliver consistent experiences.
• Optimizing Marketing and Sales Efforts : It helps businesses tailor marketing messages, sales strategies, and product offerings to better align with customer needs and preferences at each stage of the journey, optimizing the budget allocation for maximum impact.
• Driving Business Growth :By enhancing the overall customer experience through journey mapping, businesses can achieve increased customer retention, higher conversion rates, and ultimately drive sales , business growth, and profitability.

Using a customer journey map to improve the customer experience

• Identify Pain Points : By mapping out the customer journey, you can clearly see where customers encounter problems or frustrations. These pain points can then be targeted for improvement, whether they’re related to service, product usability, or communication.
• Enhance Customer Touchpoints : Each touchpoint represents an opportunity to improve the customer’s impression of your brand. Analyzing these touchpoints through the journey map allows you to refine interactions to ensure they are as effective and pleasant as possible.
• Optimize Resource Allocation : Understanding the critical stages of the customer journey helps businesses prioritize where to allocate resources for the greatest impact. For example, if many customers drop off at a specific stage, you can invest more in that area to improve retention.
• Personalize Customer Interactions : Customer journey maps often incorporate customer personas, which help in tailoring interactions to meet the specific needs and preferences of different customer segments. This personalization can lead to higher satisfaction and loyalty.
• Streamline Processes : A detailed map can reveal redundancies or inefficiencies in how customers are handled across different channels. Streamlining these processes can improve the overall customer experience and reduce operational costs.

What should be included in a customer journey map template?

• Define Objectives and Scope : Determine what you want to achieve and the focus of the journey map (product, service, or entire brand experience).
• Develop Customer Personas : Create profiles for your target customers, incorporating demographics, behaviors, and needs.
• Map the Journey Stages : Outline the key stages of the customer experience, from awareness to advocacy.
• Identify Touchpoints and Assess Interactions : Document where and how customers interact with your brand at each stage, analyzing actions, emotions, and pain points.
• Analyze and Optimize : Use the insights to propose actionable improvements, implement changes, and track their impact on customer satisfaction and other metrics.

Customer Journey vs. Buyer Journey

Benefits of a customer journey map.

• Enhanced Customer Understanding : Gains insight into customer needs and experiences at various stages.
• Identification of Pain Points : Detects specific areas where customers encounter difficulties or frustrations.
• Improved Customer Engagement : Tailors communication strategies to meet customer needs effectively at different journey points.
• Streamlining of Operations : Identifies and eliminates inefficient processes that impact the customer experience.
• Higher Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty : Enhances overall satisfaction, increasing customer loyalty and promoting positive word-of-mouth.

What’s the first step in creating a customer journey map?

Define the scope and goals of the map.

How does a customer journey map help reduce churn?

By identifying and addressing critical pain points that lead to customer drop-offs.

Can a customer journey map impact revenue?

Yes, by enhancing customer experiences and improving conversions.

Should customer feedback be included in a customer journey map?

Absolutely, as it provides insight into customer satisfaction and pain points.

What is the role of metrics in a customer touchpoint?

Metrics help measure the success of interactions and guide improvements.

How does a customer journey map differ for B2B versus B2C?

B2B maps typically involve more decision-makers and longer cycles.

Is there a universal template for customer journey maps?

No, but many follow similar structures adapted to specific business needs.

How can a customer journey map facilitate cross-functional collaboration?

By aligning various departments around a common understanding of the customer experience.

What outcomes should you expect from a good customer journey map?

Improved customer engagement, satisfaction, and organizational efficiency.

How does technology affect the construction of a customer journey map?

Advances in analytics and digital tools enhance accuracy and insights.

What’s the ultimate goal of using a customer journey map?

To continuously improve the entire customer experience across all touchpoints.

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• Jun 6, 2023

5 steps to building a user journey map for your SEO strategy

Author: Grace Frohlich

Trust paves the way for conversion. One of the best ways to earn your target audience’s trust is to be there for them, answering their questions time and time again.

For SEOs and site owners, this means creating content. The most effective way to accomplish this task at scale is to map out the topics and potential questions that are relevant for your audience.

User journey mapping is a technique that helps businesses visualize their customers’ journey—from the moment they start searching for a solution to the point of conversion. This technique accounts for relevant topics, questions, and even user search intent to help you create a true full-funnel content marketing campaign.

In this article, I’ll cover:

What is user journey mapping for search?

How to build a user journey map.

Using your user journey map for better SEO

Tracking & reporting using user journey stages

You may have heard of the “buyer/customer journey”—a user journey map is similar. It is a model or visual representation that illustrates the stages a customer goes through, from the moment they start searching for a solution to when they actually become customers.

The main difference with user journey mapping is that the touch points exclusively relate to online search.

For example, in the SaaS customer engagement industry, a user journey may look something like this:

01. The user starts their search by typing how to improve customer retention into Google.

02. They may then click on a blog post about customer engagement strategies, leading them to a software company’s website.

03. From there, they may browse the website and eventually convert by signing up for a free trial.

User journey mapping is a crucial component of full-funnel content marketing , as it helps align website content with user search intent, which I’ll expand on in the next section.

How search intent contributes to user journey mapping

Search intent refers to the “why” that drives a user to search a given keyword , and it is not always reflected in what they type into the search bar.

For example, let's say you’re a B2B SaaS company that sells CRM (customer relationship management) solutions. Along their journey, a user searching for CRM products could make their way through the following search intents (and corresponding search terms):

Informational intent (e.g., CRM management tools ) — The user is researching possible CRM solutions on the market.

Comparative intent (e.g., best CRM tools ) — The user is comparing different tools to see which one best suits them.

Transactional/navigational intent (e.g., [company name] CRM ) — The user is ready to buy the product from your website.

By mapping search intent to each stage of your user journey, you can create a strategy so that your brand appears in the right places at the right time, meeting users where they are with relevant content. This not only benefits potential customers, it also helps search engines find and rank your content more effectively.

One of the reasons why search intent plays such an important role in this process is because many keywords can have the same intent . For example, the keywords CRM for small business and customer relationship for small business have the same search intent.

In fact, Google has claimed that 15% of search terms have never been searched before. And, Google processes trillions of searches every year , which means hundreds of billions of searches are completely new.

For SEOs, this means that it’s much more important and efficient to track search intent rather than chasing keywords. This is why understanding the real intent behind searches is essential if you want to target your audience with the right content at the right time, and ultimately, drive conversions.

The process of building a user journey map starts similarly to a UX customer journey map, except that you will predominantly use Google data. Here are the steps to build a user journey map for search:

Step 1: Define your user persona

Your audience and their pain points can serve as a clear roadmap for your user journey map to expand upon. For many brands, this means building out personas (if you haven’t already).

When defining your user personas, go beyond the demographic and behavioral characteristics associated with search (i.e., users that tend to search on mobile versus desktop) to also include user goals and motivations as they relate to search and your website or industry. Spend time to identify who your target audience is and what their search habits are. Find out what types of problems they face. User surveys, focus groups, and interviews can provide critical insights into what your potential customers want and what they’re looking to avoid.

If you don’t have this type of data (as is the case with many small businesses), I have found that there are AI tools, like ChatGPT , that can help generate user motivations and pain points to build a user persona.

For example, if you’re a B2B SaaS company looking to generate user motivations for CRM solutions, you could feed ChatGPT a prompt like “List the most common user motivations for searching CRM solutions.” The tool will generate something like this:

You can then dig into each line item to find specific pain points.

Let’s look at one of the user motivations ChatGPT gave us as an example—“Improve customer retention and loyalty.” To get more granular and identify specific ways to help your audience, you could type in the prompt:

“My company is a SaaS customer relation management company. I’m researching my customers’ problems and pain points about customer retention and loyalty. What are the most common pain points for my customers around improving customer retention?”

ChatpGPT will generate a list like this:

Repeat this for each line item until you have a comprehensive list. Then clean your list by combining similar items, removing duplicates, or simplifying some items. You will end up with a full list of all user motivations and pain points.

Step 2: Create a user journey

Next, you need to use your personas to map out the user journey into “stages” and “milestones”:

Stages are top-level steps in the user journey.

Milestones refer to more specific steps that fall under a specific stage.

I will demonstrate this process using the example for “improving customer retention and loyalty,” using the user motivations output from ChatGPT as our stages.

(Note: While I am listing out the user journey in chronological order to help us visualize it, the reality is that user search behavior is non-linear and is more like “ the messy middle. ”)

Start by arranging your list of motivations and pain points chronologically. Next, copy and paste the pain points (your own list or the ones ChatGPT provided) into a spreadsheet.

Pro tip: It helps to categorize each item with stages in the marketing funnel : awareness, consideration, and conversion.

Then split the list into two columns where the colon is. The first column will be your milestones, while the second column is a brief explanation.

Tweak the wording for milestones so that they are action phrases. Now, you have specific steps in your user journey. Repeat this process for all of your stages until you have a full user journey. Again, you can assign marketing funnel stages if that helps visually (as shown in the example below).

Step 3: Build a keyword list

Now that you have your user journey, it’s time to get to the “mapping” part.

You’ll need to compile a comprehensive keyword list to feed into the user search journey. Your list should include currently ranking keywords and aspirational keywords (terms that you would like to rank for and that make sense for your product/service). This will help you formulate business goals and uncover gaps in the user journey.

To start, export ranking keywords from Google Search Console (GSC) .

You can supplement this list with a keyword research tool, like Ahrefs or Semrush. If you don’t have a third-party tool, you can use Google Keyword Planner to find keyword ideas .

Next, pull competitor keywords and add them to the list. Again, you can use Ahrefs or other third-party tools to get competitor keywords. Otherwise, it may be a more manual process. You can either use tools that offer free trials (although many have usage limits) or you can even leverage ChatGPT to expand on your keyword list. This article shows you AI prompts for how to do this.

Step 4: Assign milestones to keywords

Once you have a full keyword list, assign each keyword to a milestone in your user journey. For example, below I have listed keywords to place into each milestone for improving customer retention.

improve customer service for retention

how to keep customers engaged through communication

customer service tips for retention

customer retention through personalization tactics

increase value for customer retention

value-based customer retention tactics

customer communication strategies for retention

personalize customer experiences for retention

improve product quality for customer retention

customer retention strategies for better products

Categorize each keyword into the most relevant milestone. I’ve formatted as above to show a visual representation, however it’s much more efficient to format your data following the example below. This will help you filter, sort, and organize your data down the line.

Pro tip: It also helps to assign milestone code numbers as a quick reference.

Step 5: Categorize keywords into search intent and topics

The last step is to categorize keywords by search intent and topic groups. This gives you a high-level view of topics per journey stage, and helps you spot content opportunities. This can be a time-consuming process, but using an AI tool like ChatGPT can significantly speed it up. I have detailed one method below:

First, enter your list of keywords into ChatGPT’s text input field and specify what type of intent or topic you want to categorize the keywords under. For search intent, you could input the prompt:

“Categorize these keywords into one of these search intents: Informational, Transactional, Comparative, Navigational”

If you want to categorize keywords by topic cluster , you could enter a prompt such as

"Categorize these keywords by topic related to customer retention."

ChatGPT will then generate a list of topic clusters and suggested search intents based on the keywords you provided. You must review the suggestions and group the keywords accordingly. Repeat this process until all of the keywords are categorized into their relevant topics and intents.

Once this is done, you’ll be able to identify common themes and topics that are important to your audience at different stages of the customer journey. This can help you create highly relevant, valuable content for your target audience, which can ultimately lead to better site performance.

How to use your user journey map for better SEO

Now that you have your user journey map, I will explain some key insights that you can get from it.

You can monitor stages and milestones to pinpoint areas that need improvement. The example below shows average monthly ranking by user journey milestone. This helps you identify specific milestones that consistently underperform and create a plan to further optimize them.

Another key benefit is better site content alignment: In the previous section, you mapped your user journey according to journey stages, search intents, and topics. Take it one step further and map specific pages on your site to each keyword and intent.

Let’s say you notice certain pages have been underperforming over the past few months. Look at which user journey milestones those pages are mapped to, as well as target keywords. Check if the pages satisfy the search intent. If the intent is informational but it’s mapped to a transactional page, you will have to either map to a different page or create a new page.

If your pages rank well for each of the mapped keywords and stages, it means that you’re on the right track. This insight can help you determine if your targeted content resonates with customers at each stage of the journey and help you identify pages that need retargeting or optimizing.

What if you don’t have a page that ranks for keywords you want to target? That’s an opportunity to investigate more or even create new content. You can then create targeted content to fill these gaps, ensuring that your brand is relevant and valuable no matter what pain points the user might currently be trying to resolve.

User journey mapping also provides an easier way to track content. By mapping specific pages on the website to stages, you can see performance by site sections or groups. In the next section, I’ll explain tracking and reporting in more detail.

Tracking and reporting with user journey stages

You’ll need to track and report on your website’s performance to evaluate how well your user journey map is working. But, tracking keywords to measure performance is (or will soon be) outdated. Google’s MUM update aims to reduce the number of searches needed to satisfy user intent, which means we need to change the way we track and measure traffic to our websites. Instead of focusing on individual keywords, monitor user journey stages and topic groups to better understand the performance of your content in relation to user intent.

Instead of tracking keywords individually, monitor user journey stages and topic groups to better understand the performance of your content in relation to user intent.

I highly recommend using a keyword tracking tool for this (I use STAT Search Analytics ). When you upload your keyword list into the platform, you can tag each keyword with the user journey stage, milestone, and code. This way, you can track performance by sections.

You can filter your data by user journey stage, milestone, or topic group and drill down on the data. For example, the ranking data in the image below was filtered by one specific milestone. We can then investigate keyword performance within that milestone. If you spot certain keywords that have not been ranking well, reevaluate the search intent for these terms. Check the keywords in the SERP to see if you can switch them out for other terms that better satisfy intent.

The screenshot below is an example of a user journey in STAT. You can see keyword performance by milestone, which makes it easier to make optimizations in batches, which in turn helps you work more efficiently.

As your content grows, so too will your user journey map

User journey mapping is an ongoing process that requires continuous monitoring and refinement. As you update and add new content to your website, it’s important to regularly review and adjust your user journey map to ensure that it remains aligned with user intent and behavior. I recommend doing this user journey mapping exercise annually to keep your data up-to-date.

The initial research and set up will take time, but the reward is an invaluable resource that you will continue to use and adapt. Plus, you will find deeper insights about your current and potential customers. So, start mapping out your user journey today and take your SEO strategy to the next level!

Grace Frohlich - SEO Consultant at Brainlabs

Grace is a consultant at Brainlabs SEO (formerly Distilled), and has extensive knowledge and experience in SEO fundamentals. She enjoys sharing strategic processes and insights, and has spoken at BrightonSEO and SearchLove. Linkedin

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