Mapping a customer’s journey for achieving better sales results

Selling a product with a customer acquisition mindset makes a sales rep self-centric. His core focus becomes selling ’’his product’ rather than concentrating on the ’’customer’s business issue.’ To sell a product, you need to have a buyer’s mindset rather than being a mere seller who is only interested in achieving his sales quota. Step into your buyer’s shoes and visualize customer’s journey to purchase a product.

Mapping a customer journey is essential to get a bird’s eye view of their entire buying cycle. You need to be conversant with a customer’s core journey paths to identify and resolve customer’s roadblocks. An in-depth understanding of how a prospect engrosses at each touchpoint and what is their perception is vital to prioritize actions while building your customer experience strategy.

Before delving into your customer’s journey, you need to define your customers first and identify your target audience. Analyze the market and identify the sector that will benefit the most with your product. Avoid approaching masses, instead recognize and target a particular segment who are seeking for the solution that you are offering. Active seekers will react immediately; so, it is vital to target the right audience to achieve maximum profit in less time. You can even refer your company’s past customer records to identify the segment from which you can attract maximum customers. Have a thorough understanding of your customer base and spot the active customers.

Once you are clear with your target audience, you need to map your customer’s journey by pondering over the following points:

Think from the customer’s point of view

As mentioned earlier having a buyer’s mindset is crucial to understand their business requirements and for mapping their journey. Instead of looking through your business profit lens, use the customer’s experience as the base for visualizing their journey map. What they think and feel at different stages is important for your business, you need to be considerate towards their behavior and thoughts throughout the journey.

You can even use your existing customer data to create a model for understanding the requirements, expectations, and agenda of a customer. Commence from the very first interaction and follow it till the end analyzing their behavior at different levels. This information will help you while addressing new potential customers. You will have a basic idea of how a customer moves through each phase of a purchasing cycle while interacting with a company.

Journey map should be actionable

To create an actionable map, you need to consider a customer’s positive and negative behavior in different phases of the purchasing cycle. It requires thorough research to understand their pain points while moving in the cycle. To identify the opportunity areas, you need to have a clear knowledge of their expectations and the results they are seeking at each stage. Once you are aware of their pain points, you will be able to prepare yourself to meet their expectations and provide an excellent customer experience.

Consider all the touchpoints

Companies tend to focus on a particular touchpoint of the customer’s experience, but in doing so, they ignore the whole journey. As a solution provider, you need to cover all the points of contact by listing proper channels or touchpoints. Addressing the touchpoints will help in-

Streamlining your customer touchpoint investment with the expectations of the clients by removing unwanted substances that are not positively contributing to their experience.

Perfect allocation of resources to specific touchpoint for reaping maximum benefits.

Balances your expenditure with ROI in context with customer loyalty and financial results.

To drive business value, you must orchestrate customer’s experience across different touchpoints, and a customer journey map is a vital tool that will aid you in visualizing it.

Emphasis on performance indicators

The primary function of a customer journey map is to spot and evaluate the opportunity areas that have been driving results. Through a thorough research on the customer’s experience of the overall purchasing journey, you can identify the key performance indicators that highlight your strengths. Performance indicators can be very useful in making a journey map actionable. It gives a clear picture of what do you need to do and where exactly do you need to hit to achieve a positive result. For identifying the opportunity areas, consider the metric in context with experiences at different stages like the measure of efforts, net promoter score, the value of specific touchpoint, etc. Include these metrics in your customer journey map to make it more impactful for referring and rendering better services to the customers.

Things you should not miss while mapping customer’s journey –

• Use customer’s persona while mapping to identify each customer and plot their experience
• Break down the journey into phases to visualize the experience and plan necessary action in the specific phase
• Note down customer’s goal and expectations throughout the process
• Garner information of each customer to understand their needs and provide personalized experiences for long-term relationships
• Segregate analytics and metrics for each stage to have better insights of the customer’s journey
• Embrace technology that helps in scrutinizing data at each touchpoint

The final words

Customer journey mapping helps you to answer vital questions like who is your target audience, how do customers interact with your brand, what are their expectations, what are their positive and negative experiences while treading in this journey, etc. It renders a deeper insight into customer’s emotions while taking a purchasing decision. Such information adds clarity to your selling process and helps in recognizing gaps in service or communication. Customer journey assists in delivering better services and aids in exploring opportunities for increasing conversions. You can approach customers in a better way by having an in-depth knowledge of their needs and expectations. Consider the above guidelines while mapping your customer’s journey to create an effective map for quickly achieving desired outcomes.

Want to know more about how Salesmate CRM can help you in mapping customer journey? Contact us now!