A Dynamic Customer Journey Map
A Dynamic Customer Journey Map to Ignite Revenue Growth
Customer-centric business leaders understand the importance of satisfying customers at every interaction. They know that successive positive customer experiences correlate to repeat purchases, referrals, retention and loyalty. They also know it only takes 1 to 2 negative experiences to push customers to try their competitors.
They research, map and automate these customer interactions in order to deliver relevant, personalized, rewarding, and predictable customer experiences.
Here's how they do it.
The Bow Tie Funnel for Systemic Customer Growth
They start by aligning the buyer's purchase process with the seller's sales process.
That allows them to prescribe the actions at each step to effectively convert buyers into customers and customers into advocates.
This alignment may require a shift from the traditional customer acquisition funnel to a customer growth funnel.
The customer growth funnel on the right side is sometimes called a bow tie funnel. Its purpose is to facilitate the post-customer conversion actions needed to systemically grow customer share and lifetime value.
Research performed for The Business Growth Report found this extended approach delivered some big benefits.
If your business development processes are not structured to get more value from new customers, you're leaving money on the table and missing a company growth multiplier.
So, what has to happen to make this shift?
A Sample Dynamic Customer Journey Map
Begin by mapping the customer journey.
This is a prerequisite to aligning, automating and measuring your success.
Below is an example.
The buyer and seller steps vary by industry. The above example is typical for considered purchases in industries such as professional services and software-as-a-service.
Apply Best Practices
The company's goal is to satisfy and systematically advance buyers through their purchase process. Evidence-based best practices will help. They provide a combination of repeatable processes and automation to scale efficient customer growth.
Below are some examples that align to the buyer's purchase process.
Awareness
Online content and social media have given buyers new avenues to get on-demand and independent information about any product or company. Because buyers are now more connected and better informed, the balance of power has shifted. The sales cycle (vendor controlled) must now be recognized as a buy cycle (customer controlled).
Buyers perform their research online and don't engage sellers until they are about two-thirds into their purchase process. Therefore, it's incumbent upon sellers to increase inbound marketing techniques in order to be found by buyers during their research process.
These techniques include things like content marketing, social marketing and search marketing. Marketing Automation Platforms (MAP) are the technology that will bring automation and continuous improvement to these digital marketing programs.
Interest
At this stage most buyers will continue to self-educate using online content. But they will also begin vendor engagement. Because of the buyer's prior research, salesperson discussions focus on topics further down the funnel.
The seller should verify customer fit and focus messaging on the buyer's pain points.
Best practices to accelerate this step include automated lead scoring, lead routing and nurture marketing campaigns.
Evaluate
The buyer has a challenge, pain, or job to get done. It's the seller's job to engage, convince and convert the buyer.
B2B buyers want the same conveniences they've come to expect from consumer companies like Amazon. For the seller, it's less about selling and more about collaborating to solve for the customer.
To do this at scale, sellers need self-sell resources, engagement techniques and on-demand content.
Some of the best practices for this step include sales playbooks, guided selling, sale opportunity win plans, sales enablement assets and a sale methodology.
Purchase
This mutual commitment marks the transition from prospect to customer.
It also marks the start of the post-conversion actions.
This is where the later half of the bow tie begins.
Best practices for this step may include configure-price-quote (CPQ) apps, price optimization calculations, and automated proposal or contract approval processing.
Implement
Customer and company success now depend on the product or service working as advertised.
This step may kick off with automated self-help or people delivered onboarding help.
It may require account managers, customer success reps, consultants or other service staff.
The most important performance metric is time to value. This may be for the first impact or the total solution. Achieving this metric early will advance the customer to the next stages.
Benefit
The buyer and seller have a shared responsibility to solve the buyer's issue or otherwise impact his or her business. If either one falls short, the journey is halted.
Once the benefits are realized, the company executes processes that continue the journey.
Be clear that the benefits should be clearly measured and easily understood. Financial measurements are always the most convincing.
Also, the value realization at this stage is directly commensurate with the company achieving its objective at the next stage.
Grow
Once benefits have been realized, the customer is open to repositioning the relationship from vendor to partner. Trust replaces skepticism. The buyer is amenable to explore additional offerings.
The company is now in position to offer relevant promotions to increase customer share and lifetime value. These promotions may include upsell, cross-sale, bundles, renewals and new products.
The customer will likely achieve economies or synergies from an expanded product footprint.
The seller will now enjoy faster sales cycles, higher win rates and much lower cost of sales.
Best practices for this stage include the delivery of differentiated customer experiences, Strategic Account Management (SAM), and customer account plans.
Advocate
The company's goal is now to shift customer affinity from the product to the brand and turn customers into promoters.
Best practices for this stage include the delivery of relevant, personalized and contextual customer experiences. When company's delight customers, they tell their friends. They publish their experiences on social networks for their entire social graph to see. It's a highly scalable word of mouth propagation that exceeds any type of paid advertising.
You can use social listening tools to find your online advocates. You can then engage them to expand their voice and acquire even more fans. Companies should harvest online data to build campaigns and messaging around these customers.
Performance Analytics are Essential
Each of the buyer and seller steps should be monitored in real-time. This will enable you to surface and quickly resolve bottlenecks or poor conversions.
You will simplify the process by grouping key performance indicators into the four categories of Volume, Conversions, Time and Value. We've written about how to group these RevOps metrics previously so won't repeat that here.
You can then position your top metrics into a RevOps dashboard.
Instrumenting revenue performance with real-time key performance indicators shows what's working, what's not, and when to intervene with timely course corrections.
It's Called a Dynamic Customer Journey Map for a Reason
Any seasoned revenue operations consultant will share that the buyer journey is not always sequential. Buyers sometimes skip steps. They sometimes revert to prior steps. That's why it's a dynamic customer journey map.
As long as the seller recognizes the buyer's position, he or she can respond using prescribed communication, engagement, artifacts and best practices for that particular stage. The seller can satisfy and advance the buyer process irrespective of their prior or next steps.
Also, IBMs Institute for Business Value research shows that 20% of customer journeys account for about 70-80% of total occurrences. Initially focusing on that 20% enables the company to quickly and systemically satisfy the most customers.