Rethinking the Customer Journey

My premise: every successful strategy derives from insights about customers.

There are over 1 billion search results for “customer journey” and yet, for most companies, they are still pointed in the wrong direction!

Most customer journey diagrams I see map the customer’s journey through the vendor’s marketing and sales process. That’s not a customer journey. That is a vendor journey. Customers couldn’t care less about it.

When you interview your buyers, you will discover that the reality of your Buyer’s Journey differs greatly from online depictions or preconceived notions.

The idea that you can simply download a template for our Buyer’s Journey from the Internet and fill in the relevant details is simply incorrect. If you want to know how your buyers make decisions, you need to ask them to tell you their story.

Companies need to understand how, when and why the buyer makes their purchasing decision.

In high consideration B2B sales your customer’s buying processes are rarely linear, compounded by the fact that they are sometimes poorly defined or even if they are well defined are often not well understood by many of your customer’s decision team.

What customers care about is any journey that leads to value realization in their enterprise. That means true buyer journey mapping must work backward from the customer’s value goals and objectives, not forward from the vendor’s sales goals and objectives.

Do you know how and why buyers make the decision to buy from you? Do you have any idea, or, is it something you are simply taking for granted? Have you asked buyers to describe their buying decision? What matters to the buyer?

If you are trying to predict future actions like the buyer’s journey, observe customers yourself — not through intermediaries — to build a model and then figure out how to make bets to test and refine your customer model.

So, note to vendors. You can still use your vendor-centric customer journey maps to manage your marketing and sales productivity. Just realize these maps are about you, not the customer.

You cannot simply assign the customer a mindset that serves your interests. You have to genuinely engage with them to get to actionable truths.

Thanks for reading. I’m John McAuliffe and I help companies accelerate growth more consistently and with greater predictability.

I am a learner. I find myself constantly reading on a variety of topics with an insatiable appetite for continuous learning. My thoughts on business have been influenced by many. You may feel a bit of déjà vu in reading some of my thoughts because of this. When it comes to strategy and business management systems I follow the likes of Jim Collins, Roger Martin, Gino Wickman, Verne Harnish amongst others. On consumer insights, marketing and sales I am influenced by the likes of Adele Revella, John McMahon, Geoffrey Moore and many others. Thanks for reading.