3.2 Great sales is Buyer enablement
If you wish to do some great marketing work that drives disappointing results, failing to adopt an organisation-wide set of customer journey definitions is a good place to start.
| Customer journey | Customer journey framework | Customer journey maps |
|---|---|---|
| A Customer Journey is the experience a customer has across pre- and post-purchase lifecycle interactions with your organisation. | A Customer Journey Framework is a set of definitions and common language to drive organisation-wide understanding of customers and their objectives | A Customer Journey Map is a plan of connected activities you will create or have created to advance customers to recommended next steps |
| It is... | It is... | It is... |
| ...What a customer actually experiences | ...The stages we define a customer's experience against | ...Touchpoints the customer will experience against the customer journey framework |
| ...Non-linear, organic | ...Can be visualised linearly | ...Can be visualised linearly but should assume organic, non-linear engagement in activation plans |
| ...Unique experience for every customer | ...Standardised framework for all customers | ...Standardised activation design but assume non-standard customer engagement |
In essence, the customer journey framework is a model of a simplified, standardised customer journey that represents an holistic view of the steps that all customers will go through so that customer journey maps can be built to create great experiences. A customer journey framework is not how a customer buys. No buyer ever goes through the process as set down on paper as a simplified model. It is always more complex, more disconnected, more collaborative and more personal than a process flow can represent.
Agencies and consultancies love to reinvent the customer journey model as it allows them to sell services to implement and adopt them. A common ‘improvement’ to customer journey frameworks is to change the shape of the process by adding connections to show the cyclical nature of purchasing. Today’s new customer, so the logic goes, will soon be tomorrow’s hot prospect. While this makes logical sense from your perspective, customer journey frameworks should represent the actions of the customer, not of your sales approach. And while you may see cross-sell and upsell as following an initial engagement, for the customer it is simply another sale. They go through the same stages of identifying a problem and researching a solution, they just do it with you as a vendor. Cross-sell and upsell are audience segments, they are not uniquely different journey stages. Adding complex mental images of the actual steps a customer goes through to a customer journey framework simply makes operationalising it more difficult, adds confusion to a model that should be centred on the customer and increases the chances of internal misalignment on activation.
Because being customer aligned is always fashionable for marketing teams there is a temptation to always take on the latest thinking. In some organisations, adopting a new customer journey model is a great way of showing you think customer-first. Unfortunately it can also be a terrible way of actually being customer first. Consistent adoption of one enterprise-wide customer journey framework is essential to effectively activating compelling journeys. When teams attempt to use different customer journey frameworks in an attempt to be ‘innovative’ their ability to communicate their objectives fails. Is my ‘discovery’ stage the same as your ‘problem research’ stage? Is it just a language difference or do we solve customer problems at these stages differently too? Similarly, when Sales and Marketing use different journeys definitions it usually means they don’t align on funnel stages either. Journey and funnel misalignment means problem statements become disconnected from potential solutions.
Many marketing organisations rely upon agencies to scale their operations. Agencies, through their work with many clients can have unique perspectives on customer journeys but if their insights mean they stick to their models rather than aligning to their respective client’s organisational definitions, their work can cause reporting and attribution errors. Agencies must align their delivery to their clients standards, even if that can mean they feel like they are not operating with journey best practice. Consistent, global adoption of a model for the whole organisation is best practice in this case.
Customers do not purchase through the journeys you define. Even as you may seek to bring online and offline omni-channel touchpoints together, the totality of a customer journey can never be fully defined. Touchpoints with your brand that cannot be tracked such as word-of-mouth or the internal functions of a buying centre will influence the path that organisations need to take to arrive at purchase decisions. Customer journeys are elephant paths through your sales, marketing and brand footprint, and your role within this is to craft experiences that connect them wherever they engage in their journey.
Buying decisions are complex and buying groups have multiple needs that must be satisfied for a conclusion to be reached. When organisations focus less on controlling the customer journey and instead align themselves to enabling buyers however the buyer wants to interact, deals get larger, close more frequently and produce customers with fewer post-purchase regrets. Incorrectly applied, customer journey frameworks present an image of structured certainty in a process that should be about applying modelling to customer behaviour. Correctly leveraged, customer journey frameworks provide the foundation for enabling sales and marketing teams to be buyer enablers. They are a shared language for understanding, enabling and measuring the effectiveness of activity to support the customer.
They are frameworks for understanding a customer’s journey; they are not a definition of the journey the customer actually experiences.