Take customer journeys all the way through!

Sample customer journey

Customer journeys are a great tool to align internal efforts both towards customers (most important) and across functions (to minimize overlaps and confusion), so I’m always encouraged when I work with clients who have started to establish journeys.

But I often find that the journeys are not complete. Typically, they are created by the sales and marketing teams and end at contract signature, ignoring the very necessary onboarding work, and ongoing account management. Or, they are created by the customer success team and they ignore the sales process. That’s a big miss, because complete journeys are essential for three reasons.

  • The customer personas may change quite a lot over the entire journey. I recently worked with a client for whom the central persona post-sales was not at all engaged during the sales cycle. It’s an unusual situation to be sure but it’s common for procurement teams to play a key role during the sales process only to fade away afterwards. Creating half-length journeys may obscure essential personas.
  • Landing new customers is key to success–but true success requires being able to implement a solution that satisfies the customer’s needs, and to keep providing value throughout the years. Stopping the journey at contract signature is short-sighted: most vendors find that gathering critical implementation requirements during the sales cycle pretty much guarantees a smooth path to “time to value”.
  • Existing customers are often our best future customers. The customer success team must work seamlessly with marketing and sales, and that means that the post-sales journey must be designed to dovetail into the marketing and sales journey.

Are your journeys truncated? It is challenging to get all interested parties together to create full ones, but it is rewarding. (We can help if needs be.)

Tell us about your customer journeys (hopefully full-length) in the comments.