The traditional sales funnel has passed its expiration date. The customer buying journey now provides the vehicle for improving marketing and sales alignment. It provides the insights into finding, keeping and growing the value of customers.

Once you construct your customer buying journey, it serves as the foundation for developing your personas and identifying your data requirements. It also sets the stage for selecting relevant metrics that both Marketing and Sales can use.

Transition to the Customer Buying Journey

Watch this video to learn about how to transition from the sales funnel to the customer buying journey:

The customer journey is not a linear progression.  Customers move in between stages as they consider their options.  Certain factors remain true.  Every journey starts with trying to understand how to solve a problem.

Align your opportunity management processes with the customer journey.

Before any customer makes a buying decisions they first investigate the problem and educate themselves about the problem and solution options. Customers gather information from online and offline sources during this process. It is during this phase customers identify potential providers potentially making initial contact, consuming content along the way.  As customers move into the evaluation, consideration, selection and purchasing phases, the types of conversations change and so must your content and touch points.

A number of factors impact the length of this process and the number of individuals involved. Everything from the customer’s degree of urgency, number of functions impacted, and budget can affect the process.

The more you understand your customer’s journey the better you can address opportunities to improve key business results such as product/service adoption, and loyalty.

Map Your Customer Buying Behaviors to their Journey Across the 6 Cs

While it is common to begin the mapping effort by collaboratively capturing what you believe is the journey, the most effective journey maps incorporate actual customer research.  Contact us to start your construction process.

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