A Look Through Into Customer Journey & Its Significance In Sales

When you run a business, you may be very familiar with your company’s products and services from pricing to features and their advantages. But how familiar are you with the customer journey with those products and services that you provide to them?

Salespersons interact directly with customers, yet, often they don’t have a clear knowledge of how the customers they talk to actually experience the product across various channels and touchpoints.

Customer journey Map is important for the sake of getting a complete understanding of the buying behavior of a customer. You need to be aware and familiar with a customer’s journey with your product and services so you can quickly and comfortably resolve any difficulties the customer might face along the way.

Let’s get some insight into the customer journey and its importance in sales and businesses.

What Is A Customer Journey Map All About?

A customer journey is nothing but the entire set of experiences that the customers go through when interacting with your salespersons and product. Usually, it is represented pictorially in the form of a customer journey map. However, instead of looking at it as a part of an interaction or experience, the customer journey covers the entire experience of being a customer. 

The customer journey is a good initiating point because it allows you to go through your customer’s experience and the steps they take forward. Also, it allows you to explore if there is anything you can support them with, in their business journey. Overall, think of the customer journey as a roadmap detailing how a prospective customer becomes aware of your product, their interactions with your salespersons, and beyond.

Why Customer Journey Map Is Important In Sales?

A customer journey can be a perfect way to analyze the sales behavior of customers that helps an organization understands how their customers go through the entire sales process and how they feel during their interaction with the salespersons. However, this approach provides two major advantages such as it allows sales managers to stay focused on their customers. And, it helps make each step of the buying experience easier for potential leads. May you have the best sales team, but if your customers aren’t happy, you won’t get anywhere in sales. The best way to explain the process of mapping the customer journey is to look at it like a graphic chart that everyone on the sales team should have on their tables.

According to recent stats accumulated by Techjury,” There is an 80% increase in revenue for businesses that focus on improving customer experience. Also, 73% of customers agree that customer experience helps to drive their buying decision.” Overall, the customer journey is important, because it is a strategic approach to better grabbing customer expectations and is vital for optimizing the customer experience. 

4 Types Of Customer Journey Mapping

Current State Mapping: This type of mapping pictures how customers are interacting with your product or service right now. It is based primarily on customer data and observational research. Current-state journey maps can help you look for new opportunities to update your sales strategy and improve customer interactions with your company.

Future State Mapping: This customer journey mapping is the representation of the unique journey you’d like customers to have as they experience your product or service. This is all about conceptualizing and picturizing new experiences for your customer. This type of customer journey map is most helpful for communicating your vision for new products and services with the customers.

Day In The Life Mapping: This mapping details all of the day-to-day activities your ideal customer does in their daily life, not just those where they use your product or service. This is a useful map for understanding the extended context of your persona and identifying new sales ways to provide value. These maps help you uncover new possibilities to drive strategies and meet customers’ changing needs.

Story Centered Mapping: This is all about connecting the storytelling technique with a customer journey and leading the customer through the process. Storytelling is a perfect way to describe anything because stories conjure detailed images. This is what the story-centered customer journey map is all about ideal storytelling that involves comprehensive planning to capture the design process and deliver a unique customer experience.

Benefits Of Customer Journey Map In Sales

Better Understanding Of Customers And Their Pain Points

The customer journey in sales helps you to understand and visualize your customers’ interactions with your sales employees. By being able to understand this, the salespersons can understand what causes pain points and help improve them completely for the customers’ experience. View exactly where customers are getting troubled, either between touchpoints or at individual touchpoints, and using the outlook the salespeople can optimize them. In addition to improving the customer journey, it also helps to know in which areas users are most engaged and satisfied, as well as where they spend the most time. You can understand customers’ points of view more clearly and see what led them to choose your product and their needs.

Take Teams Out Of Silos

An internal company silo refers to different teams within a company that works independently without a common goal and sales processes. This decentralization in the company can lead to dissolution in the customer experience without having all the needed knowledge to improve the customers’ experience and some teams will outperform others. This will harm the business in cases where most teams lack the correct information about customer profiles. Establishing a proper customer journey allows seeing how different teams work together. Nevertheless, having a customer journey map can act as guiding morale for various teams to work within the collaboration. All teams will be put on with ensuring that customer experience is intensified. They will share knowledge and strategies on achieving this and even structuring better customer personas through collaborated engagements. 

Identifying Gaps In Customer Service

Companies must put together strategies and processes in order to identify and solve customer service gaps. This involves identifying gaps between what customers expect from the brand versus the actual service provided by them at every stage of the business and through every interaction. It is only after identifying the gaps that a company can create the right solutions to close them and enhance the level of customer service it provides. The customer journey will also help you to successfully identify any gaps in your present customer services or communication. It can also reflect if there are any communication difficulties between your sales employees and customers. This small addition of the customer journey to your sales strategy creates extra comfort for some customers and may convince them to purchase your product.

Enhancing Customer Experience And Customer Retention

With the help of the customer journey, you will be able to understand whether customers are having a satisfying experience interacting with your sales team. You can ascertain specific aspects of your present sales process customers seem to like and what other processes you can upgrade so that their experience is more presentable. Knowing these details can help you redefine their buying journey positively and make it easier to engage with your product and sales team. However, this exhibits the customer churn a product has and sales teams within the business can work to remove obstacles that cause the loss of customers. By identifying and resolving customer churn, companies can improve their customer retention and add significant profit to their sales line.

Increases Sales And Conversion Rate

A customer journey map is an important aspect to improve sales. It is important for the sake of getting an overall knowledge of the buying behavior of a customer. When a company understands exactly how their customers are buying their product and services, they can make slight accustoming to keep more customers and use cross-selling and up-selling to generate more sales. Also, marketing teams can personalize their marketing strategies to target customers in their journey maps and this can increase conversion rate to a great extent. Another major advantage of the customer journey is that you can improve your sales cycle. Supporting your new and existing customers with a smooth and comfortable experience should be your top priority across every sales channel. Companies can get their sales cycle up and running by optimizing each sales channel. 

Summing Up

Understanding the perspective of the customer is important in understanding their experience with a company’s product and services. For this reason, many companies are using the customer journey to study the customer experience and learn where enhancements can be made. Mapping the customer journey allows companies to look at the sales process from the customer viewpoint to find out what they’re doing good and how they can improve their sales model. Any business that is planning on improving their sales and retaining customers should look no further than analyze their customer journey.