Every aspect of sales and marketing today is meant to be as revenue-driven as possible. In a complex B2B buying environment, how can sales and marketing teams map out their customer journey more effectively with the aim of adding relevance and value through every buying stage?
The secret lies in creating a wholesome B2B customer journey mapping process that allows sales reps to differentiate their brand in the marketplace and use the right tactics to boost conversions based on actual customer buying trends.
With the range of salestech and martech platforms at every sales and marketing team’s disposal today, it is far easier to digitize the whole B2B customer journey mapping process and track every stage and movement to lead to what matters most – more sales!
The right tools, processes, attribution models need to come together seamlessly to facilitate this.
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Why should B2B Sales teams focus on strengthening how they map their B2B customer journeys?
To Reduce Buying Complexities and Overlaps
Overlapping marketing or sales messaging, a superficial understanding of various customer touch points and disjointed sales-marketing tactics can cause more complexities in an already long drawn B2B sales cycle. Mapping out your customer journey can allow your sales and marketing teams to align better on campaigns and brand messaging while also providing deeper insights into which channel led to an actual sale and why.
Overlapping campaigns or poor hand off processes between sales and marketing teams can negatively impact the overall customer experience. A thorough visual representation of a typical B2B buyer’s customer journey and how they usually move through their buying process and stages can help sale and marketing teams build linear and seamless buying journeys.
To Help Assign Responsibilities to the Relevant Stakeholders
Without a proper sales and marketing hand off and process, customers can sometimes experience interactions with too many stakeholders at a brand, this can lead to more confusion down the road while making it difficult for customer’s to identify who they should reach out to for different kinds of queries or concerns.
When sales and marketing leaders work together to map their customer journey, it will help put in place the basic fundamentals that allows the right company stakeholders and reps to reach out to customers and prospects at the right time to reduce confusion.
In a typical B2B sales cycle, there are usually multiple people involved in making final buying decisions; but this is where a brand has to take the onus to ensure that they have assigned the right representative to cater to all these buying parties.
To Ease Hurdles in a Typical B2B Sales Cycle
On an average, a B2B sales cycle could last up to 12 months. To track the different metrics across this lengthy sales cycle, seasoned B2B sales leaders are accustomed to mapping entire journeys to pre-empt what can be done and when to shorten this cycle or step in on time when a prospect shows signs of turning cold.
To Improve B2B sales and marketing strategies
In a multichannel buying and selling environment, marketing and sales teams cannot endlessly focus efforts on every channel without understanding which one is leading to actual revenue and sales. To be absolutely sure about which channel and what kind of campaign is resonating the most and leading to business revenue, proper attribution models, measurement tactics and customer journey mapping processes need to be laid down. This can further help marketing and sales leaders double down on that which works best for their product and service based on actual customer conversions.Â
According to an earlier McKinsey study, numbers indicated that over 60% of B2B customers do not convert successfully because of disjointed buying experiences. One of the most common assumptions that marketing and sales teams may have is that their prospects are moving through the buying stages without any challenges, which in reality is not the case.
A proper customer journey mapping strategy can pinpoint pain points in the buying process and allow marketing and sales leaders to understand actual prospect perspectives.
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Knowing what Customer Journey Mapping Entails
A customer journey mapping processes involves building out a detailed visual representation of the various touch points a target customer or prospects will typically need to pass through for your brand or product. It can help ensure proper communication between a brand and prospect and can be a game changer if done strategically teaming creative messaging and proper automation.
A strong B2B customer journey mapping strategy can help sales and marketing leaders identify their most relevant prospect touch points and selling channels, it can boost conversions and long-term customer loyalty while aligning multi-team processes and outcomes more effectively.
A good visual blueprint of your B2B customer journey is as good as a must-have in today’s complex B2B marketplace, it can benefit even new sales reps and marketing executives who are either new to the industry or to their marketing / sales role.
In short, every team within a company as well as the final end user can largely benefit from effective customer journey mapping plans.
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