Understanding the journey for a B2B customer will allow you to better position your business and its offerings and ultimately meet your customers where they are in that customer journey map. If you choose not to put these strategies in place, you’ll be losing resources, opportunities, and maybe even your customers.
Let’s first take a look at what exactly the B2B customer journey is.
Examining the B2B customer journey
The B2B SaaS customer journey is the path prospects or customers follow, going from a potential customer to an actual one. This path has many stages that are usually represented by a funnel.
The B2B SaaS customer journey outlines how prospects become customers.
It's often visualized as a funnel:
- Top of Funnel (TOFU) - Awareness: Prospects discover your brand.
- Middle of Funnel (MOFU) - Consideration: Prospects compare you to competitors.
- Bottom of Funnel (BOFU) - Decision: Prospects are ready to buy.
Unlike its B2C counterpart, the B2B customer journey is a much more complex purchase process involving multiple stakeholders, a much longer decision-making process, and transactions of much higher value.
When your marketing and sales are well-prepared, you can better anticipate and handle the customers’ needs which can lead to higher conversion rates and loyal customers.
Now, let’s unpack the customer journey stages:
First stage: Initial contact and awareness
The starting point of the B2B customer journey is about letting your prospective customers know you exist and getting that initial contact.
But you must set your brand and offering apart from your competitors. Why should they contact you if they can’t tell what it is that makes your product or service different?
→ Strategies for generating awareness
You’re already reading one of the ways brands generate awareness.You’ve arrived here at this blog post because you probably did a Google search and asked, “What is the B2B customer journey and its stages?”
- Content marketing & SEO: Blog posts optimized for search engines help people find your brand.
- Social media power: Repurpose content for social platforms to expand your reach.
- Targeted advertising: Reach your ideal audience through precise ad campaigns.
→ Identifying potential customer touch points
- Consistent analysis: Marketing teams constantly scan the B2B landscape for opportunities.
- Mapping and analysis: Track touch points like industry events, websites, social networks (like LinkedIn), and email campaigns to understand audience preferences.
→ Measuring awareness effectiveness
There’s no point in rolling out strategies and not analyzing whether they’re working.
- KPIs are key: Track metrics like brand visibility, website traffic, and social media engagement to gauge your success.
- Data-driven decisions: Use insights to refine your strategies for even better results.
The second stage of the funnel is where you really get to shine.
Second stage: Consideration and Interest
As we mentioned before, this part of the customer journey B2B funnel is where prospects are weighing the benefits and costs of your product or service.
Here is where you can really set yourself apart from the competition by demonstrating your value and building trust with potential customers.
→ Tools and techniques for nurturing interest
Equipping your box of tricks with the right tools and techniques is important when you’re trying to nurture the interest of your prospects down their journey in the funnel.
Customer relationship management (CRM) tools, highly-targeted messaging, and personalized content can all be implemented to maintain communication to make sure you’re staying top-of-mind.
→ Key metrics in the consideration stage
Here’s where you’ll want to evaluate lead quality. Sure, you could just throw any lead into the top of the funnel, but you want those high-quality leads to make sure the chance of conversion is higher.
You also want to monitor the lead-to-opportunity conversion rate as well as the time spent on pre-sales activities such as product demos. Here it’s going to be about efficiency and winning back time through process optimization.
→ Building relationships with prospects
The end goal, in the customer buying journey in B2B, should never just be the sale.
So many different things are happening to the prospect along their journey that if you ignore them, you may lose them to your competition.
Really understanding their needs, as well as transparent communication, go a long way to fostering great relationships.
Also, having consistent follow-up strategies is the key to sustaining these relationships way beyond just sales.
Do what you’re going to say you’ll do and personalize their experiences!
Now it’s time to get them to make that final decision.
Third stage: Decision and purchase
With the average SaaS sales cycle length of around 84 days, closing the deal will always be super satisfying.
But to get your prospect to the finish line, you have to concentrate on making the decision-making process easy by addressing concerns they may have.
Here’s where you’ll need to brush up on dealing with objections, too.
→ Influencing factors in B2B purchasing decisions
It’s not just pricing that can affect whether someone chooses your solution or not, but other things like the terms of the contract and if you offer stellar customer support will also come into play.
→ Role of content and demonstrations
Getting the right content to the right customer at the right time during the customer journey for B2B is crucial in helping guide their decision-making process.
Things like whitepapers, case studies, and product demonstrations can help the client see how your offering benefits them. It will give them a way to visualize how your tool or service could be implemented into their daily business.
→ Negotiation and closing strategies
1. Product expertise and pain point mapping
Sales reps must deeply understand the product and skillfully connect its features to the prospect's specific challenges.
2. Objection handling mastery
Reps must be prepared to address objections constructively and persuasively.
3. Effective negotiation
Salespeople should aim for mutually beneficial outcomes, demonstrating flexibility and a focus on the prospect's success.
4. Objection-handling techniques
Offering incentives like discounts, or demonstrating cost savings are valuable tools for overcoming objections.
But what now?
Post-purchase experience and customer retention
Along with marketing and sales, customer success teams make up the “trinity” of the customer decision journey for B2B.
Your organization must have strategies in place to ensure the customer is getting the most out of their experience with your product or service.
A successful customer onboarding program is vital to make that happen.
The importance of customer support and services
The first step is getting a prospect to sign up and become a customer. Now, your customer support team has to show they’re responsive to queries and provide tailored solutions to problems that might arise.
The aim here is to maintain high customer satisfaction and retention rates.
Feedback loop implementation
Not all customers are going to constantly write to you with questions or suggestions. In that case, you’ll need to reach out on a regular basis to collect customer feedback.
This isn’t just to hear what’s going well and what’s not but also to see if they have suggestions on improving your offering.
Making them part of your growth creates a feeling of “community” with your brand allowing them to align themselves with you in the long term.
Strategies for sustainable customer retention
→ Loyalty Programs - Reward long-term customers with perks like:
- Yearly discounts
- Access to exclusive features
→ Upselling & Cross-selling
- Identify if additional products or services can benefit your customer's business.
- Clearly demonstrate the added value they would receive.
→ Exceptional Support
- Emphasize your availability and responsiveness. This fosters trust and demonstrates your commitment to customer success.
The Result: These innovative strategies, combined with excellent support, will encourage customers to stay loyal for the long term.
The role of analytics in understanding the customer journey
Being able to take a look at your processes and strategies to make sure everything is going as it should is key to being successful and growing your business.
B2B organizations need to embrace analytics to smooth out the customer journey by identifying patterns, trends, and things that could be improved.
Key analytics tools and metrics
These tools provide data to inform strategic decisions and highlight customer pain points.
- Web Analytics: Google Analytics tracks website traffic, user behavior, and conversions.
- Marketing Automation Platforms (MAP): Tools like Hubspot Marketing Hub manage campaigns, automate tasks, and nurture leads.
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Systems like Salesforce centralize customer data, interactions, and sales processes.
💡Analytics are crucial. Without data-driven insights, you're operating without a clear direction.
Interpreting data for strategy improvement
The importance of data-driven insights cannot be overstated. Data is static, yes.
But how you interpret that data to improve your marketing or sales strategies dynamically, as well as product or service offerings, will ultimately determine your growth trajectory!
This is all great when everything is running smoothly, but what are some of the challenges or obstacles to your customers’ success during their journey?
6 Common customer challenges during their buyer’s journey
Your teams need to be able to put themselves in your prospects’ and customers’ shoes so they can effectively respond to their needs and provide a seamless experience. Identifying stumbling blocks that may lie in the path to your customer’s success is essential in creating a customer-centric business.
1. Lack of information
If your customer or prospect can’t find relevant product or service information to help them make informed decisions, you’ll most likely lose them. Make it easy to find relevant and comprehensive information about your offerings.
2. Too many choices
The modern market is flooded with products and services that are similar to each other. If you don’t find a way to differentiate your brand from your competition, you’ll make it overwhelming for customers to make a decision. Find gaps in your competitors’ strategy and exploit them by doing what they didn’t!
3. Lost in complex sales funnels
Is your website layout confusing or complicated to navigate? Or are they finding it hard to register for something? Worse still: they want to finalize a purchase but find the steps unintuitive and give up. Be sure to remember user experience across all your touchpoints to make sure you don’t lose potential customers at crucial decision-making points.
4. Inconsistent communication
If your branding and messaging are misaligned, this can negatively impact your potential and existing customers by confusing them and throwing them off-course on their journey with you. Be sure to create a seamless customer experience by making sure everything about your brand and messaging is aligned and consistent.
5. Bad customer service
We’ve all been there - struggling to get help on an automated customer service line or waiting days (or even weeks!) for an email response to an inquiry.
If your customer service team isn’t responsive, or it’s hard to get in touch with an actual human, your customers will feel neglected.
Have customer service that truly serves the customer by being available on multiple channels such as chat, email, and telephone.
Be sure to also have tools in place so your customer service team can deal with inquiries and issues in a timely manner and track the progress.
6. Lack of personalization
Today, your customers expect you to understand their specific needs. If you don’t offer personalized experiences and the customer feels they’re just a number to you, it will create a disconnect that will be difficult to resolve.
Be sure to use data-driven insights and other tools to see how you can create better personalization for your various customer segments along the entire journey.
When you have the right tool, ex. like emlen, you can really bring a level of personalization that will set you apart from your competitors.
How emlen’s insights can help optimize the customer journey
Understanding which content is relevant for your customer helps you to focus and streamline the customer journey.
This means your customers will only find and see what’s relevant to them, making their purchasing experience easy and as effortless as possible.
💡Here's how emlen can help:
→ Content relevance: Streamlining the customer journey
- Focus matters: Tailored content ensures customers find what they need, creating a smoother purchasing experience.
→ emlen's transformative approach
- Early integration: Introducing emlen Destinations early (e.g., after a successful call) provides seamless product exposure.
- Beyond product showcasing: emlen reveals who's visiting, highlighting genuine interest and aligning with your business goals.
→ Refined targeting and outreach
- Valuable insights: emlen's data fuels laser-focused marketing, replacing broad efforts.
- Engagement depth: Track content views, interests (case studies, videos), and repeat visitors for a detailed understanding of prospect behavior.
→ The goal: A resonant customer journey
- Tailored Approach: Use insights to personalize messaging and interactions.
- Customer-Centric Experience: Prioritize the prospect's needs and interests for maximum engagement.
Digital transformation and the B2B customer journey
Digital transformation has taken the B2B customer buying process and journey to another level by offering new channels for communication, ways to improve organizational performance and efficiency, and allowing businesses to enhance personalization for their customers.
→ Impact of digital channels
The rise of social media, email marketing, and webinars contributes strongly to the B2B online customer journey.
Before the arrival of these digital channels, organizations were limited in terms of customer touch points.
For example, the pandemic made it impossible for B2B companies to go to conferences or trade shows to meet with buyers.
That meant that businesses could still engage with their customers and not miss out because they used digital channels.
→ Using technology for a better customer experience
Artificial intelligence (AI) and predictive analytics can help your organization by giving you personalized, relevant content and support to your customers. Things like tailored marketing materials, product recommendations, AI chatbots, and virtual assistants can drastically improve your customer’s experience with your brand.
Be there at every step of your B2B customers’ journey
When you can understand and then optimize the journey that your customers take with you, you’ll be one step ahead of your competitors.
Pay close attention to the customer data for customer journey maps and insights on how to continuously improve that journey and improve customer retention to stay ahead.
Don’t forget to:
- Map your B2B customer journey
- Use the right analytics and metrics tools
- Personalize their experience along all touch points
- Adopt technology to support your overall revenue and customer goals
The goal isn’t just to keep gaining new customers but to retain existing ones by converting them into repeat customers
If you’ve done your job right, brand advocates. So be sure to continue analyzing and improving along the way because the customer journey is always evolving!
