A customer journey map is a tool that helps B2B companies tackle long sales cycles, streamline stakeholder management, and deliver value at every stage of the buying process. By addressing key pain points and optimizing touchpoints, your business can drive measurable results like higher conversion rates and increased customer retention.

In this guide:

• What is a customer journey map?
• What should a customer journey map include?
• Benefits of a customer journey map
• How to create a customer journey map
• Optimizing your customer journey map
• Customer journey map resources

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visualization of the journey your customer goes through during the process of engaging with your company. It’s visual storytelling that helps you understand and optimize customers’ experiences with your business by describing the storyline of every customer interaction step by step.

Most customer journey maps are designed chronologically, representing the customer experience as a timeline of events. However, customer journeys — spanning from brand awareness to customer loyalty — are rarely linear. Customers often follow a cyclical, multichannel set of steps, such as making purchases online and offline during the same period if both channels are available.

What kinds of customer journey maps are there?

The customer journey map represents a bird’s-eye view of every touchpoint between individuals and your brand, starting with awareness. While customer journey maps can take many forms, these four are the most widely used. Knowing how they work can help you make informed decisions on which to use.

• Current state: Visualizes customers’ experiences with your product or service as they currently exist. It’s a critical tool for identifying friction points that may be costing you customers.
• Day in the life: Describes the routine activities of potential customers, regardless of whether they interact with your business. It identifies unmet needs your product or service can address.
• Future state: Visualizes the ideal journey your team hopes to create. It’s particularly useful when introducing new products, services, or targeting new audience segments.
• Service blueprint: Starts with one of the above maps and layers in technology, employees, and services required for each touchpoint. It helps identify how resources are allocated and where adjustments are needed.

What should a customer journey map include?

Real-world journeys often involve non-linear, multichannel interactions. A comprehensive map should include:

• Customer touchpoints: Every interaction between the customer and your brand, whether direct or indirect.
• Moments of truth: Key events that change a customer’s perception of your brand.
• Pain points: Barriers or challenges customers face when engaging with your brand, such as delays or poor digital experiences.
• Desired actions: Actions you want customers to take, like making a purchase or engaging with content.
• Completed actions: The actual actions customers take, which help you assess how aligned the customer journey is with your goals.

When these elements are included, you gain holistic insights to deliver maximum benefits.

Benefits of a customer journey map.

Understanding your customers’ experiences is essential to staying ahead of changing needs, technology, and market dynamics. According to Hanover Research, 79% of companies that invest in customer journey maps become more customer centric.

Key benefits include:

• Targeted insights: Better understand customer behaviors and preferences to optimize marketing and sales processes.
• Increased engagement: Create relevant, informative content that improves inbound marketing effectiveness.
• Higher retention: Satisfied customers are more likely to return, while poor experiences lead to attrition.
• Optimized touchpoints: Identify and improve touchpoints with low engagement or poor performance.
• Customer-centric focus: Prioritize customer needs and address challenges proactively.
• New business acquisition: Use insights from existing journeys to target new customer personas effectively.
• Reduced silos: Encourage cross-departmental collaboration by visualizing the customer experience.
• ROI assessment: Evaluate the impact of past and current UX/CX investments to guide future spending.

How to create a customer journey map.

Building a customer journey map involves 10 key steps:

1. Set clear objectives: Define goals and focus on a specific customer segment or persona.
2. Conduct research: Gather qualitative and quantitative data to understand customer behaviors and pain points.
3. Profile personas: Develop or refine personas based on your research, ensuring they reflect your customers’ goals and challenges.
4. Highlight target personas: Narrow your focus to ensure the map addresses the most relevant insights.
5. List all touchpoints: Identify direct and indirect interactions customers have with your brand.
6. Map the current journey: Document how customers currently navigate their journey with your business.
7. Map the ideal journey: Visualize the optimized path you want customers to follow.
8. Assess resources: Determine the tools, budget, and personnel needed to implement your ideal journey.
9. Take the journey yourself: Test the map to uncover inconsistencies or areas for improvement.
10. Make necessary changes: Implement adjustments to align the journey with customer expectations.

Let’s take the example of a B2B workflow automation company targeting mid-market IT directors. Here’s how they applied the 10 steps to improve their customer journey:

1. Set clear objectives: The company aimed to improve lead-to-conversion rates by identifying bottlenecks in their sales cycle. Their focus was on understanding how IT directors interact with marketing materials, sales teams, and post-sale resources.

2. Conduct research: They collected data from CRM systems, customer feedback forms, and sales team interviews. Analytics revealed a high drop-off rate after the second follow-up email. IT directors cited a lack of detailed ROI examples as a primary reason for disengagement.

3. Profile personas: The company refined their IT director persona, focusing on pain points like limited time, technical depth, and the need for demonstrable ROI to justify purchase decisions.

4. Highlight target personas: While they had multiple personas, they prioritized the IT director for this map, as they are the primary decision makers in the sales process.

5. List all touchpoints: The company identified key touchpoints, including:

   • Initial engagement through email campaigns
   • Webinar attendance
   • Requesting a demo via the website
   • Follow-up calls with sales reps
   • Post-demo ROI documentation

6. Map the current journey: The current journey revealed inefficiencies, such as inconsistent follow-ups and lack of tailored content during the demo stage.

7. Map the ideal journey: The optimized journey introduced personalized email campaigns with links to ROI calculators, a streamlined demo request form, and an automated follow-up sequence including case studies tailored to mid-market challenges.

8. Assess resources: They identified gaps, including the need for a dedicated content writer to create tailored resources and additional budget for CRM automation upgrades.

9. Take the journey yourself: Internal stakeholders tested the journey as if they were IT directors, uncovering points where the demo process was unclear and the follow-up emails felt generic.

10. Make necessary changes: The company implemented real-time personalization in their email campaigns, improved the demo process with more detailed ROI discussions, and added automated reminders for follow-ups.

Optimizing your customer journey map.

Customer journey maps are not static tools — they must evolve with your business. Regular updates ensure relevance and effectiveness.

Tips for optimization:

• Review and update regularly: Reflect changes in offerings, customer behavior, or market conditions.
• Track performance metrics: Measure KPIs like retention rates, conversion rates, and customer satisfaction.
• Incorporate feedback: Gather insights from customers and stakeholders to identify improvement areas.
• Leverage technology: Use automation and analytics tools to scale and personalize touchpoints.
• Test scenarios: Simulate journeys to identify bottlenecks and refine strategies.

Customer journey map resources.

Although creating customer journey maps may seem complicated at first, they’re actually quite simple once you break the process down into manageable steps.

Adobe Analytics can help you optimize both online and offline interactions so that you can optimize your customer journeys using data to create comprehensive customer journey maps. Likewise, Adobe Customer Journey Analytics can help you visualize cross-channel customer interactions.

The better your ability to automate the process of tracking and interpreting the customer experience, the more efficient and effective your customer journey mapping process will be.