On the face of it, you might be generating leads.
But at the same time, can you tell how many of these leads gave up on your online form midway? Signed up to your demos and were later a no-show? Or went through a number of your product pages only to head to one of your competitors’ websites? Can you determine if there are any particular steps that are particularly patchy, tedious, or annoying for your prospects?
On the flip side, are there any successful touchpoints that continuously usher leads from one stage of the funnel to the next like a breeze?
This is where really understanding your customer journey, mapping it out in detail, and identifying potential pitfalls — is essential, no matter your industry or line of business.
By having a clear understanding of each touchpoint along your customer journey, you can determine how each one contributes to the overall customer experience (CX) and your bottom line, spot pain points or snags along the way, and then act quickly to fix or smoothen out any bumps along the road to conversion.
What are customer journey touchpoints anyway?
Let’s first take it from the top.
The customer journey details all the touchpoints a prospect or contact interacts with before, during, and after their purchase, and is key to influencing their experience and your brand perception, enhancing your ability to scale.
Customer journey touchpoints are the various moments at which a prospect or contact will directly, or indirectly, come into contact with your brand.
Touchpoints can be directly influenced by your brand or controlled by 3rd parties, and while you might not always be responsible for a particular part of your customers’ journey, these “shadowy bits” of their journey still affect your overall CX and their progression down your GTM funnel.
Making sure you offer enough value at every touchpoint will help you turn prospects into customers, and customers into devoted advocates of your brand. And by outlining key touchpoints on a map, you’ll be able to capitalize on timely opportunities more effectively.
B2B examples of common customer journey touchpoints
The most logical categorization of touchpoints is prior to a purchase, mid-purchase, and post purchase:
- Before a purchase – Your customers may have reached you through paid ads, organic ads on social media, online reviews, comparison sites, owned media (e.g. blogs, case studies, whitepapers), or good ol’ fashioned word of mouth.
- During a purchase – This stage refers to your point of sale, and can include your website (self-service), a call with one of your AEs, an onsite meeting with the relevant stakeholders, or a F2F at an event.
- After a purchase – These touchpoints can include invoicing, queries, product support, training, reading your newsletter, QBRs or ABRs, upgrading discussions, and customer feedback surveys.
Let’s go over a few examples per category to put all this into day-to-day context:
Five customer journey touchpoints before a purchase
1 – Social media
The cost-effectiveness of social media, primarily LinkedIn, makes it exceptionally effective for reaching your audience given the option of company and individual-level targeting. But also for boosting brand awareness, forming thought leadership, promoting new products, building relationships with your prospects and customers, encouraging sign-ups and registrations, and advancing your ABM strategy.
Whichever social media platform is on your radar, you can get the best out of it by sticking to the unspoken rule of maintaining a consistent social presence, publishing often and regularly, contributing to other’s discussions, and engaging with commentators on your posts.
Yes, this could be a bit time-consuming, but there’s already ample evidence that this social media minded approach can help you reap some serious benefits in terms of brand awareness, thought leadership, lead nurturing, rapport building, and competitive edge.
2 – Paid ads
Be it Google paid, LinkedIn paid, or other publication platforms, non-organic ads are an effective way to draw traffic to your website and digital assets, especially when balanced well with organic ads strategies for maximal impact, cost-effectiveness, and ROAS.
The three main pricing models applicable for B2B are:
- CPM (Cost Per Mille) – where you pay the publisher for 1,000 impressions of your ad
- CPC (Cost Per Click) – where you pay the publisher when someone clicks on your ad
- CPL (Cost Per Lead) – where you pay the average cost to acquire a new lead.
To get the most out of your marketing budget, be sure to link some of your ads to dedicated landing pages, which will enable you to retarget prospects and nurture them down the funnel with relevant offerings and content.
3 – Owned media
By owned we mean pretty much any piece of content your brand publishes online that promotes your product or services. This includes blogs, videos, case studies or success stories, customer testimonials, infographics, guides, whitepapers, comparison charts, webinars, podcasts, etc.
Beyond analyzing the impact of your marketing content to ensure it performs well, it’s vital to prioritize the quality of the content you put out. It has to be engaging, value-packed, and ideally also offer a fresh perspective on the topics you cover.
Bonus points if you make an effort to create content that actually aims to improve your prospects’ work lives, help them be better at their job, learn new skills or gain applicable knowledge.
Because when your prospects feel like you worked hard to offer them real value rather than just shoved your product in their faces — they’ll grow to trust your brand and keep it top of mind when ready to make a decision.
4 – Events
Conferences present a good opportunity to expand your audience reach and introduce your brand to a wide pool of prospects who might not have been aware of it before.
Provided you’re attending the right events (meaning a good portion of the audience matches your ICP), these venues offer the chance to boost lead gen, connect with new partners, and even discover strategies that can help your business grow.
To make the most of your investment, make sure to go in prepared. Send out your best GTM people, prepare highly relevant and engaging material for prospects to take with, and follow up on attendees who fit your ICP in a timely and effective manner.
5 – 3rd party reviews
Most of your potential customers will trust the opinion of other customers much more than they’ll trust yours. Because of that, a common step in your prospects’ decision-making process is checking reviews on 3rd party comparison websites, as they’re usually hard to fake.
Understandably, prospects’ trust drops dramatically when reviews go down from four stars to three, or conversely — public trust soars around highly-praised products. So work hard to ensure your customers are happy (and are vocal about it), fix bugs and address customers’ concerns as quickly as possible, and when possible — encourage them to write beaming reviews of your product on 3rd party websites.
Four customer journey touchpoints during a purchase
1 – Calls & meetings with AEs / SDRs
The most direct touchpoint in your customer’s journey — calls, meetings, or product demos usually have the biggest impact on your customer’s buying process.
2 – High intent web pages
Pricing page
In B2B, although pricing models are sometimes complex and dependent on a number of factors, do your best to be as transparent as possible when explaining how your cost model works on your pricing page.
When your prospects are after ballpark pricing, and instead find a vague “request a quote” or “schedule a demo” on your website, it tends to lead to disengagement and even mistrust.
If your pricing model entails a layered approach, calls for more information to better fit customers’ needs, or is co-dependent on their company size, number of employees, or use case — be sure to clearly state this on your pricing page to avoid missed opportunities.
Product pages
This is where you showcase your product line’s added value, key features and capabilities, applicable use cases, and general implementation requirements.
To help minimize friction and encourage conversion, it’s best practice to add a CTA button to your product pages, connecting them with an AE, SDR, or AI assistant via live chat. This way you can answer their questions in real-time, offer more information, bring down bounce rates, and hopefully assist your prospects with taking the next step.
3 – Nurture email tracks
Sometimes, the purchase stage can take a while to be completed. That can be because of internal delays on the customer’s end, extended due diligence processes, and other urgencies that might take up your customer’s focus.
To ensure no one drops the ball and the deal becomes stagnant, it could be beneficial to send out periodic nurture emails to check in on the status of things, and offer additional information that could help propel the conversations forward.
4 – Point of sale
The last touchpoint before making a purchase, this stage can include reviewing your T&C, opening an account (self-service), or requesting to review your contract.
Even more importantly than previous touchpoints, this step has to be an absolute picnic. Bring down the necessary steps to conversion to a minimum, get rid of any potential obstacles, and ensure the CX is pleasant and user-friendly.
Five customer journey touchpoints after a purchase
1 – Onboarding call with CS
A highly effective way to build customer rapport, strengthen the relationship, shorten the learning curve, and improve account usage — are setting up kick-off meetings or onboarding calls with all relevant stakeholders.
These calls usually detail all the steps needed for a successful and hassle-free deployment, tips on where to find useful information, clear instructions on how to get in touch if any questions or issues arise, and best practices for maximizing the added value of your solution for their unique needs.
2 – Product feedback surveys
These are designed to evaluate how your product interacts with your customers, offer you a sneak peak into their CX, and allow you to gauge areas for improvement.
Beyond making customers know that you care, these surveys could help you make quick fixes to your product, introduce improvements, retain customers, and nurture a long-lasting relationship with them.
Bear in mind though, that given surveys’ relatively low fill-out rates (average of 3%-10%), the insights they offer you are very limited, and that in most cases it’s either the very happy or very upset customers that engage with them.
To ensure you get a wider, un-biased, and detailed view of your customer journey, opt for a trusted attribution and marketing measurement solution, and then use surveys as a complimentary tool to help you fine-tune your CX.
3 – Upselling emails or calls
As CS folks know all too well, customer needs don’t go away after a purchase is made. In fact, in some cases additional needs rise after customers already start using your product.
This presents an opportunity for you to not only offer stellar customer care, but reassess your customers’ requirements for the long-run, and potentially recommend upgrades, more advanced capabilities, or premium service items.
4 – Billing actions
Billing is a critical touchpoint in your customer journey that often gets overlooked, primarily because it takes place after a purchase has already been made, and is seemingly no longer “your problem”.
That said, don’t underestimate a negative billing experience and its likelihood to result in instant churn if not addressed properly. Make an effort to streamline what is too often a clunky, lengthy process. Automate what you can, and ensure your billing team is exceptionally responsive during this potentially tricky point in time.
5 – Subscription renewals
If you’re a SaaS or a subscription-based business, renewals are obviously crucial to your revenue model. You need customers to renew their subscriptions to maintain steady growth, which makes it vital that you remove as much friction as possible from your renewal process, making it quick and effortless for your customers to extend their subscription.
Say your customer hired a new CFO, introduced changes to their accounting department, or have a new bookkeeping software — don’t wait for setbacks or concerns to arise. Reach out enough time in advance to make sure your customer is happy with your product, and there are no foreseen hiccups — technical or stakeholders-related — ahead of renewal.
The importance of mapping the B2B customer journey
When you don’t understand and analyze your customer journey, it’s impossible for you to:
- Understand how prospects find you, and determine which channels and campaigns to double down on.
- Identify hurdles in your GTM funnel and smoothen them out before they lead to churn, closed-lost opportunities, or damage your brand.
- See what your prospects and customers are most interested in, and then hone your content strategy accordingly.
- Improve your CX and position your brand as a customer-focused business, but also help you create a tailored CX approach, instead of forcing a one-size-fits-all approach on your target audience.
- Influence your prospects’ buying process by offering a hassle-free sail to conversion, and by reaching out at the right time, with the right message, on the right channel.
How to optimize your B2B customer journey for maximum impact
Although different companies have different business models, offerings, journeys, and sales cycles — the following guidelines should apply to all B2B marketers:
1 – Perfect your personas research
To be able to optimize your customer journey, you first need to define your ICP as clearly as possible, and then identify what your target audience is after at every stage in the funnel.
Craft a detailed persona for each stakeholder in the buying group, and be sure to involve your Marketing, Sales, and CS teams to include both objective information (e.g. demographics, position, activities) and subjective information (e.g. areas of interest, challenges, motivators).
2 – Map out your touchpoints to a T
Journey mapping is all about understanding your customers’ needs and interests, and then applying that knowledge to engage them in a thoughtful and meaningful way.
To be able to do that — you’ll need to ditch the guesswork.
It’s not a process of envisioning the steps your prospects need to take towards making a decision. It’s about analyzing your customer journeys to see what brings them to your website in the first place. Is it an organic search? Paid ad? 3rd party product comparison charts? Affiliate websites? Which content do they consume most often? Where do they tend to drop off most often?
Say you’re the marketer at a cyber security company, and your prospect is the Head of IT at a medium-sized eCommerce company that operates 100% of its business online. Let’s assume they fit your ICP, and explore their customer journey touchpoints with your brand:
- Your prospect becomes aware of a certain data privacy vulnerability on their website, and begins researching for solutions that can solve it (Organic touchpoint).
- After concluding their research and shortlisting three relevant providers they found on Google, they search for product reviews on 2-3 comparison websites — your product included (3rd party media touchpoint).
- After finding sufficient information about each product’s capabilities, benefits and disadvantages, they click on one of your banner ads, prompting them to open up a free demo account — so they can test basic functionality on their own (Paid ad touchpoint).
- They try to complete setup, but run into some issues because implementation wasn’t handled correctly. They look for articles and resources on your website in an attempt to self-serve, but feel they require more one-on-one guidance (Organic – Owned media touchpoint).
- They reach out to your technical support team by opening a ticket in your customer portal, and at the same time sign up for a live demo of the product with one of your AEs (Direct – Inbound touchpoint).
Now that you know where your prospects get stuck or require some hand holding, you can actively optimize the weaker links throughout their journey to ensure they have what they need to move forward, or ensure they’re getting the support they need to take that next step.
3 – Talk to your customers
Use surveys, interviews, and incentivized questionnaires to gauge your customers’ pain points, needs, and expectations at every stage of their journey. Be sure to augment their feedback with careful data analysis to determine where and why your customers are getting bogged down in your funnel.
In gathering information, make sure to discern appropriate KPIs and create un-biased surveys that don’t lead customers — but produce objective, actionable data that you can then use to turn their journey into a joyride.
4 – Visualize your customer journey
Creating a visual map of your entire customer journey is not enough. Use a marketing measurement & analysis platform that lets you dissect each journey and touchpoint, and drill down to a channel, campaign, and even account level.
Not only will this give you an interactive visual representation of these customer journeys — down to their individual roadblocks — but it will also allow patterns and trends to rise to the surface. Be sure to study these trends and develop a suitable strategy for optimizing various stages, enhance weaker touchpoints, and establish a more effective path to conversion.
5 – Develop a cross-team strategy
Honing your customer journey is a collaborative, long-term, iterative process.
It will take strategic thinking and commitment from the entire GTM team, as each involved team will need to work together to identify the areas where customers are experiencing the most pain, weigh your collective ability to alleviate that pain, and prioritize the areas in which your company can make the most impact in the least amount of time (and without exceeding budget).
When executing your strategy, be sure to implement the necessary changes across all touchpoints and measure the impact on customer satisfaction, retention, and revenue. Then, rely on trustworthy analytics to determine whether the changes you’ve implemented have made the intended difference.
Remember: Make your changes incrementally, measure impact, and adjust where & when needed.
6 – Stay agile
Continuously review your customer journey mapping and data to adapt to shifting needs and market trends. Factors outside your control will impact your customer journey and B2B funnel, so it’s important to stay ahead of the curve and maintain the ability to pivot in real-time.
Predictive analysis like What-If will help you anticipate changes before they happen, predict outcomes, and optimize your budget allocation accordingly.
Common challenges in managing B2B customer journey touchpoints
1 – Inability to access insights or make sense of your data
When you’re not using a marketing measurement solution that cleans and models your data, you’re facing two major problems that prevent you from mapping your customer journey accurately:
- Messy and fragmented data that makes it impossible for you to properly analyze.
- Inability to access the insights that hide beneath your data, because of most dashboards’ static nature or complex layout — that’s simply not designed for non-technical users.
2 – Customer journeys are ever-dynamic
Customer journeys are never linear or static. They evolve, they’re multi-layered, and are often complex.
That’s because in most B2B environments, a single targeted account consists of multiple contacts, each with their own journey, leading to dozens and even hundreds of touchpoints, spread across multiple channels, campaigns, events, and platforms.
To beat this challenge, don’t treat your customer journey mapping as a set-and-forget process.
Keep a constant finger on the pulse of your key accounts’ journeys, pay attention to changing performance trends that call for attention — like a drop in MQL-to-opportunity conversion rates during specific touchpoints, or high bounce rates on one of your online forms — and then act quickly to save the day.
3 – Getting stakeholder buy-in and support
Customer journey mapping is not a one-off or isolated activity, but a collaborative and cross-functional effort that requires alignment and coordination across senior management, Sales, Marketing, Product, CS, and sometimes IT teams.
But as most marketers already know all too well, some stakeholders struggle to understand the value or strategic importance of customer journey mapping, or even have their own competing priorities and agendas.
To meet this challenge head-on, be sure to communicate the benefits and goals of customer journey mapping clearly and convincingly, aim to involve key stakeholders early and throughout the process, and use journey analysis to showcase how it can inform and improve your GTM decision-making.
4 – Lack of actionability
Translating customer journey data into insights and then into concrete, measurable actions — is not easy when you don’t know how, or when you don’t have the right tools to help you dig past the raw data.
When used correctly, customer journey maps are not just descriptive, but prescriptive tools that should guide your marketing strategies and tactics. However, when you can’t drill down and fish out insights, you’re essentially stuck with the description, without the prescription.
Because understanding what happened is great, but not being able to figure out why and what needs to be done next — turns your journey mapping into a static board instead of a living, breathing engine for revenue growth and strategic planning.
To get to that data-informed growth mindset, make sure you define specific, realistic goals and metrics for your customer journey mapping, use a journey tracking solution to generate and test hypotheses, monitor results, tweak, optimize, and iterate.
The bottom line
- B2B customer journey touchpoints are the various moments at which a prospect or contact will directly, or indirectly, come into contact with your brand.
- Mapping out your customer journey means you’re able to pinpoint specific pain points along the customer journey, and then can step in to make improvements at the moments that matter.
- Using customer experience data and mapping it back to specific touchpoints is how you start to understand the key moments that influence buying behavior. And by analyzing this feedback side by side with your core CX metrics, you’re able to identify the improvements that will have the biggest impact on your customers, win rates, and customer LTV.
- Understanding your customer journey is vital, but it will only prove effective if you take action on the insights that you uncover. Be sure to track customer journeys to have a clearer picture of patchy touchpoints, use a holistic marketing measurement platform that will help you identify the why, and then act quickly to ensure a high-converting funnel.
- The better and smoother the customer experience is at each touchpoint, the more likely you’ll be able to influence your prospects’ decision process.
- By identifying, planning for, and optimizing each customer touchpoint, you can play a role at every step of your customer journey. Nothing is left up to chance and no touchpoint slips through the cracks. Now go get ‘em. 🙂
