Our complete guide on how to map the B2B customer journey
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Quick summary
This article explores the essential steps to map the B2B customer journey, from collecting data and identifying personas to refining touchpoints and prioritizing improvements. Discover how tools like TheyDo simplify journey management and foster collaboration. Visit our Resources Hub to deepen your understanding of customer journey mapping.
How well do you know your B2B customer journey?
Today’s B2B landscape is filled with challenges: decision-makers juggling tight budgets, sales cycles growing longer, and teams struggling to align on customer needs. Missing key touchpoints or failing to address customer pain points can mean the difference between closing a deal and losing a hard-earned prospect.
With the right approach, you can transform complex, multi-stakeholder interactions into actionable insights that drive meaningful business outcomes.
In this article, we’re going to explain the step-by-step process of mapping the B2B customer journey, and explore how to align your strategies to meet your customers’ needs at every stage.
But first…
Why listen to us?
At TheyDo, we’ve helped countless organizations, including NCR; a global leader in enterprise technology, transform their approach to customer journeys. By implementing our Journey Management platform, NCR scaled and interconnected their customer journeys, fostering collaboration across Product Development, Customer Experience, and Operations teams.
What is B2B customer journey mapping?
B2B customer journey mapping is the process of visualizing and understanding the steps a business customer takes from initial awareness of a product or service to post-purchase engagement. This involves identifying key touchpoints, decision-makers, and pain points throughout the journey, enabling organizations to align their strategies with customer needs at every stage.
The key stages of the B2B customer journey include:
Awareness: How prospects discover your brand.
Consideration: Evaluating options and conducting research.
Decision: Making purchase decisions and onboarding.
Post-Purchase: Retention, advocacy, and ongoing engagement.
Why mapping the B2B customer journey is essential
Understand Complex Buying Processes: B2B customer journeys are inherently intricate, often involving multiple stakeholders, longer sales cycles, and layered decision-making processes.
Identify and Prioritize High-Value Opportunities: By visualizing the customer journey, businesses can uncover gaps, inefficiencies, and untapped opportunities.
Enhance Customer-Centric Collaboration: Mapping the journey aligns cross-functional teams; such as sales, marketing, product, and customer success, around a unified understanding of the customer experience.
Drive Personalization and Better Engagement: With a clear view of the customer journey, businesses can tailor their messaging, content, and solutions to meet specific needs at the right time.
Measure Success and Optimize Performance: Journey mapping connects touchpoints to measurable KPIs, enabling businesses to track performance and evaluate the impact of their efforts.
How to map the B2B customer journey in 5 steps
Step 1: Collect qualitative and quantitative customer data
Before you can begin mapping your customer journey, you need to collect a comprehensive set of data to inform your decisions. This includes both qualitative and quantitative insights, which provide a complete view of the customer experience.
Qualitative data
These are insights gathered from direct customer feedback, interviews, surveys, focus groups, and customer support interactions. These insights help paint a vivid picture of customer needs, preferences, frustrations, and desires.
For instance, Imagine you are working with a B2B software company that provides project management tools for large teams. Through qualitative data gathered from customer interviews, you might discover that many users find the onboarding process to be overly complicated. They may express frustration about not knowing where to start or feeling overwhelmed by too many features at once.
Quantitative data
This data can come from web analytics, CRM tools, transaction histories, and more. It helps you understand how customers behave at a macro level, showing which pages they visit, where they drop off in the sales funnel, and what conversion rates look like at each stage.
Combining both types of data allows you to understand not only the “what” behind customer actions but also the “why.”
Step 2: Identify key personas and decision-makers
Mapping the B2B customer journey requires identifying key stakeholders, as decisions often involve multiple people with distinct needs. These include:
Executives (e.g., CEO, CTO)
Department Heads (e.g., Sales, Marketing)
Managers (e.g., Operations, Support)
End Users (e.g., employees using the product daily)
A. Identify key decision-makers
In your target accounts, recognize who holds the most influence. For example, in a SaaS company, the decision-makers might be:
CTO (technical decisions),
CFO (budget considerations),
End-users (software experience).
B. Understand needs and pain points
Each persona has different priorities:
CTOs care about technical specifications and integration.
CFOs focus on ROI and budget.
End-users look for ease of use and support.
C. Map the individual journeys
Tailor content and messaging to each persona. For instance, provide:
Technical content for the CTO (e.g., whitepapers, product demos),
Cost analyses for the CFO (e.g., ROI case studies),
User guides for end-users (e.g., onboarding tutorials).
TheyDo’s structured taxonomy allows you to organize customer personas and journeys effectively, providing clarity for cross-functional teams and ensuring alignment on the most relevant touchpoints for each stakeholder.
Step 3: Map out touchpoints across channels and teams
Once you have a solid understanding of customer personas and their needs, it’s time to map the actual customer journey. This means identifying all the touchpoints where customers interact with your brand, across various channels.
For a B2B company, touchpoints could include:
Website: The first introduction, often where customers research your solutions.
Sales Calls/Meetings: The point where a prospect engages directly with your sales team.
Customer Support: Ongoing interaction post-purchase for issue resolution or inquiries.
Onboarding: For new customers, this is a critical touchpoint for ensuring smooth adoption of your product or service.
For example, let’s say you’re a B2B SaaS company, and a customer begins their journey by reading a blog post on your website. They then engage in a demo request through an online form, and later a sales rep reaches out for a follow-up call. After signing a contract, they move into onboarding and product training.
Each of these touchpoints is crucial and must be mapped clearly. A visual mapping of these touchpoints helps you understand the customer’s path and highlights where teams may need to collaborate.
TheyDo provides a unified platform that helps you map touchpoints across various channels, giving you a holistic view of the journey.
Its integration capabilities also enable easy sharing of touchpoint data among marketing, sales, and customer support teams, ensuring collaboration and reducing the risk of silos.
Step 4: Prioritize opportunities and challenges using journey insights
Once you’ve mapped the touchpoints, the next step is to analyze the journey and prioritize areas for improvement. This is where the real power of customer journey mapping lies, identifying pain points, bottlenecks, and missed opportunities.
For instance, if customers are frequently abandoning your checkout process on your website, that’s a key area to address. Perhaps it’s a lack of clarity around pricing or an overly complex form that’s frustrating users. Alternatively, you may uncover that the handoff from sales to customer success isn’t smooth, leading to poor customer retention.
By using the insights gathered from mapping the journey, you can prioritize these challenges based on their impact on the business. Some challenges will have a more significant effect on the customer experience or bottom line than others, so they should be addressed first.
TheyDo’s AI enables teams to quickly extract insights from both qualitative and quantitative data. This allows you to not only spot opportunities for improvement but also prioritize them based on their business impact.
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Step 5: Continuously update and refine the journey map
Customer journeys are dynamic and evolve as your business grows and customer expectations change. A B2B customer journey map is not a one-time project, it’s an ongoing process. As new touchpoints emerge, technology evolves, and customer behaviors shift, your journey map needs to be updated regularly.
For example, you might add a new touchpoint, such as an AI-driven chatbot that customers can use to resolve basic inquiries before contacting a sales rep. As customer feedback comes in, you may realize that the chatbot needs to be trained to handle specific inquiries more effectively. Or, perhaps, your company launches a new product, requiring you to adjust your journey map to incorporate this offering and the corresponding customer touchpoints.
Continuous refinement allows you to keep your journey map relevant and aligned with the customer’s current needs.
Streamline your B2B customer journey mapping with TheyDo
Mapping the B2B customer journey is essential for delivering value, uncovering opportunities, and driving better business outcomes. But navigating its complexities requires a structured, collaborative, and data-driven approach.
TheyDo simplifies this process by centralizing journey management, breaking down silos, and providing AI-powered insights. With a unified framework, TheyDo helps teams optimize every touchpoint and align around the customer.
Start transforming your B2B customer journeys today. Get started for free with TheyDo.