Mapping The Buyer Journey - Why and How?

The term buyer journey has become a hot favorite across different fields of marketing for quite some time now. Well, there are different ideas of what the buyer journey might refer to. Specialists in sales have a particular definition of the buyer journey, while those working in marketing view it differently. Customer success experts may have yet another differing idea about what the buyer journey stands for. 

For a sales or rev ops expert, the buyer journey is a mix of the mental experience of the customer and the methods - they use one of the many established ways to ascertain where exactly a buyer might be buying something. For a marketing specialist, the buyer journey is all about the cerebral or mental experience of encountering an issue, researching for a remedy, and then arriving at a decision. Customer success gurus claim that the buyer journey is a cycle of dealing, re-dealing, and re-selling with the same customer. 

It is common for business leaders to ask for a buyer journey map , which, in effect, refers to how a lead is gradually converted into a customer. How can this data be used across different products and teams, and what kind of data will this exercise yield?

Here, we try our best to map as many paths as possible for the customer to go from showing initial interest in your brand to becoming closed-won. Data on revenue operations will be crucial in supporting teams working on a go-to-market strategy. Therefore, the mapping of buyer journeys should continue even when the first lead is closed-won. Mapping of customer personas should continue in order to keep a tab on how they are upsold, renewed, cared for, or churned.

But why are revenue operations critical in the case of buyer journeys ? Let us find out.

The Revops Role In The Buyer Journey

Revenue operations play a crucial role in every business. Enterprises thrive on the ability to catch the attention of buyers and retain them over a prolonged period of time. Since revenue operations have to liaise with teams working on go-to-market strategies from the beginning, it can help avoid sticking points and positively contribute to selling points.

Thus, the job of RevOps experts is to positively impact how a company closes down on customers. Therefore, the RevOps expert role is crucial to the buyer journey.

We recommend all companies (yes, even the big ones) map out their customer journeys and create a business plan with minimum baseline measurements. A company may realize the importance of documenting if it decides to do the same for the introductory phases of the business. If a company is not able to meet its numbers, it may not be interested in beginning a project that may not be required at the outset. 

But why should you still map out the buyer journey?

It is essential because it helps Rev Ops professionals:

• Take note of how various systems store and transmit data to each other.
• Keep an eye on incompetence and potential breakages within the organization.
• Look for how the multiple departments treat and engage potential buyers and customers at different stages.

Despite our supervision of the process, it is still important to involve the administration in the buyer journey, for they can often spot something that we may tend to overlook. This means that they gain new insight into buyer journeys every time something is documented.

What is a typical buyer journey?

There are different models of buyer journeys available, out of which the most recent ones even inculcate the customer lifecycle after the sale. The first model of a typical buyer journey would be the Demand Gen Waterfall established by Forrester (previously SiriusDecisions). The two most common models available today are Flywheel from the book Good to Great (2001) by Jim Collins and Winning by Design’s Bow Tie. 

The very first closed-won opportunity for you may signal the end of the buyer journey , but ideally, it should not. As a new company interested in broadening the buyer base or that may not be focused on customer success, your team might be more focused on newer acquisitions. So, what are you waiting for? Include your buyer journey map with all these signs!

The Bow Tie and Flywheel approach stresses continuing to draw revenue from the customer base even after they buy. The first approach stresses this as it is less costly and easier to sell to existing customers rather than enlarging the business. Earlier, the focus was mostly on sales, which are good in the initial phases, but the focus has shifted in the last 10 to 15 years for early businesses and growth B2B companies. 

We agree that it is important to focus on retaining customers and customer success. Flywheel also focuses on innovating and responding to the demands of the existing customer base.

As revenue operations experts, we can vouch that all buyer journeys are different, and we try our best to extract crucial insights from them for the go-to-market teams. Thus, buyer journeys never really fit the idea of having a flywheel, conceptual funnel, journey, or bow tie.

Mapping buyer journeys into one slide or document is a difficult affair unless one uses Miro or Figma. However, it is recommended that one should have a basic version with simplified signals and systems that will fit into one slide.

Here, we do not focus on each stage of the buyer journey separately. We are interested in focusing on the customer from the beginning to the end of the process. 

The Different Stages Of Buyer Journeys

The things to keep in mind are:

• Look after whether the systems have been set up correctly to monitor every stage as outlined by the go-to-market teams
• Focus on the flow of data through the focal systems to check whether the system is in place
• Interact with go-to-market teams to understand the stages they are concerned about

A reference document should contain system workflows and stage definitions for future reference by the company's people.

When are multiple maps needed? 

This funnel will be useful if your company, or the go-to-market team, treats all the units - services, products, and customers - uniformly. The buyer journey can be broken down into different parts by product family and business units or if other processes are being followed for renewing or upselling products than for selling to new customers.

Most of the companies follow the same process for monitoring sales across different product families. A fresh buyer journey map will be required in case there are different market automation arenas, CRMs, or systems for business units or other product families. For a different and new process and system, it will always be easier and sensible to map out a new buyer journey rather than edit the original one.