Completing your B2B buyer’s journey is an ongoing process. Once you’ve finished mapping it, take these next steps...
Planning a vacation can be a lot of fun! You get to map out routes, pinpoint must-see spots and ask others who’ve been there before for advice based on their own experience. That last part can be the secret to planning an epic adventure — and it’s also the final step when completing your B2B buyer’s journey.
Even after you’ve finished mapping out your intended buyer’s journey, there are a couple of things you should do to have a better chance of matching reality with all that detailed planning.
Properly communicating your map to everyone in your company and then fine-tuning along the way is part of this process. The goal is to proactively avoid ongoing issues that may have led to redeveloping your buyer’s journey in the first place (and skipping these final steps definitely won’t help your inbound strategy).
Follow these next actions to complete your planning:
1. Validate the journey with real customers
Ask for tips from experts to ensure your voyage will be safe. Getting perspective from those who have gone on your expedition in the past lets you and your team know if you’re on the right track, and aren’t making any planning mistakes.
You can also present your new B2B buyer’s journey to select customers in order to validate it. Those who were already contacted for preliminary research are a good choice for this step, as it’s only a hypothesis until validated. This will enable the team to spot gaps in the buyer’s journey or incorrect hypotheses.
2. Share the map with the organization
If you have other people joining you on your trip, you generally share the itinerary and destination so everyone is on the same path. The same needs to be done with the B2B buyer’s journey.
Your validated map can be professionally visualized through the work of a graphic designer (or you can even use software such as Excel), helping everyone visualize walking in the customer’s shoes. To get buy-in from both management and employees, it’s critical that the customer’s issues and pain points are accurately represented.
Share and communicate the map in multiple channels:
- Branded posters hung in key locations
- Training/coaching sessions
- One-on-ones
- Company intranet
- Shared drive
- Internal newsletter
3. Work with key team members to execute customer experience (CX) repairs
Work with individual stakeholders to identify ways to build on things that are working well and improve on customer pain points. Additionally, the B2B buyer’s journey will also bring to light what kind of content each stage is missing so that you’ll be able to fill those gaps with new content.
Set your priorities since it may not be feasible to attack all possible areas of improvement simultaneously (eg. not in the budget or don’t have enough human resources). Think of choosing the simplest or most obvious solution first to get the ball rolling.
4. Hit your checkpoints via key metrics
Once CX improvements have been implemented and given a chance to play out, analyze the results to determine if you’ve met your business objectives and KPIs. Be sure to measure against whatever your team has defined as the benchmark for success before you started creating your B2B buyer journey.
By providing your customers with the best possible experience, and constantly optimizing, you’ll achieve ongoing success.
As you may have gathered by now, the B2B buyer’s journey is an ongoing process and is important for any business. As new products launch or processes change, so does the way your customers interact, which in turn might lead to new pain points. Regularly measuring, fine-tuning and reviewing your persona’s steps to purchase will ensure nothing is getting in the way of that sale.
Titan One is a creative and digital agency helping clients across North America drive results.
