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April 18, 2016 by Elizabeth Earin Leave a Comment

Mapping the Customer Journey

blog-1-cj-featured-imageA customer journey is a story of the prospect as they move through the sales process, and ideally beyond. It begins before the prospect is aware of the brand, product or service and follows them through the sales funnel, documenting both their expectation and experience.

A customer journey is a powerful tool that can be used by the entire organization. But, before we can share this story with the rest of our organizations, we must document it. To get started, I am sharing the customer journey template that Brilliant Metrics uses with its clients. This is the first post in a five-part blog series to explain each section of the customer journey in bite-sized portions. These blogs will also share why we map customer journey information and provide questions to help get the conversations started with our internal teams.

To begin, we recommend starting with the customer journey of one persona. After all, starting small is a fundamental truth of Iterative Marketing! Choose the persona that has the greatest impact on the growth of your business or the one that marketing and sales interact with most often. Once you have a single customer journey mapped and have run it through its paces, you can document the journeys of your other key personas.

Identifying which persona to focus on is a great opportunity for marketing and sales to work together. In addition to being able to provide feedback on which persona is most important, the sales team can also provide valuable insights into the mind of the customer. I have found it is most effective to involve the sales team as early as possible in the customer journey process and keep them at the table as long as they are engaged.

The template is split vertically into three sections – “Persona,” “Marketing” and “Sales.” Horizontally, it follows the persona through Avinash Kaushik’s “See,” “Think” and “Do” consideration states. To follow along, you’ll want to download our free customer journey template. When the template loads, you’ll be prompted to subscribe for free to IterativeMarketing.net, where you will gain complete access to our premium content. Our template provides an example of Hannah, a stay-at-home, as she moves through the process of buying a car.

The template can be read horizontally, from left to right, and vertically, from top to bottom. As you work your way down a consideration state column, you will gain a deeper insight into the persona, marketing perspective and sales perspective in that specific state. As you move horizontally from left to right, you see how the persona, marketing and sales departments change their points of view and tactics based on the customer journey state, See, Think, Do, Grow or Give.

Details for completing each of template’s sections with your own information can be found in the following blogs:
#2: Mapping the Customer Journey: Persona’s Perspective
#3: Mapping the Customer Journey: Marketing’s Perspective
#4: Mapping the Customer Journey: Sales’ Perspective
#5: Expanding The Customer Journey. Reference this blog to break the consideration stages into more actionable segments.

For advice and tips on uncovering your customer journey, join the Iterative Marketing Community on LinkedIn.

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