How B2B buyer journey analysis can elevate your customer experience.
The B2B buyer journey doesn’t end just because a purchase was made. In fact, it never truly ends at all.
Most modern marketers understand why the B2B buyer journey is a more accurate, more useful depiction of the purchasing process than the outdated “funnel” model. But many believe the journey ends once a prospect has become a customer.
Why a buyer journey approach enhances B2B customer experience.
Every B2B marketer knows that it’s easier to grow sales with existing customers than with new customers. It’s an age-old idea, backed up by recent statistics.
None of this is news — businesses have been tracking Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) for decades. And companies have entire customer experience departments devoted to boosting loyalty, improving retention, and maximizing that CLV.
But many organizations lose sight of the simple fact that customers are buyers, and their buying journey continues long after their first purchase.
Understanding the journey that your customer goes through is crucial to providing a superior customer experience. Everything you do to engage with prospective buyers on their journey — dynamic personas, campaign journey mapping, messaging platforms, and more — can be done even better and make an even greater impact when done for current customers.
Plus, other tactics come into play to enhance that journey even further.
Customer satisfaction measures don’t tell the whole story.
At this point you might be thinking: Hey, we conduct Net Promoter Score surveys! We’re all over this customer experience thing!
Net Promoter Score (NPS) and other customer satisfaction metrics are essential, quantitative tools that measure the customer experience across a number of dimensions and use root cause analysis to determine how to improve them. They can give you an extremely accurate picture of what your teams are doing right and what they could do better.
But NPS can’t tell you anything about why customers buy. Or why they don’t buy, or why they buy less than you expected.
Quantitative measures can’t define the depth of your customer’s commitment or the quality of your relationship.
Buyer journey analysis, on the other hand, seeks to understand what a decision-maker goes through on a daily basis, and what motivates them to move forward (or not) into a deeper relationship. Understanding these factors is critical for maximizing your account penetration.
At StudioNorth, we’ve developed a guided discovery process that adds a vital, qualitative dimension to buyer journey analysis — a dimension that helps B2B marketers elevate their customer experience to boost loyalty, improve retention, and maximize CLV.
Unscripted conversations that discover deeper insights.
Our guided discovery process consists of one-to-one or one-to-few interviews with your customers’ key decision-makers. Instead of the fixed, multiple-choice or ranking questions used by NPS, we ask open-ended questions about their daily challenges and how they actually feel about working with your organization.
We don’t use a script, or even a list of questions. We have no idea what kind of answers we’re going to get, and each interview turns into a freewheeling conversation. Topics might run from the very general to the very specific. For example:
- What kinds of things help you accomplish your personal objectives on a daily basis?
- What moments do you experience working with us that cause you to want to deepen the relationship?
- How do you budget to expand a solution across multiple locations?
- What goes into a decision to buy certain parts of a suite, but not others?
The goal of guided discovery isn’t to compile statistics about your customer service attributes, but to discover deeper insights into your customers’ feelings, goals, and obstacles. These findings help us learn the moments and motivations that trigger B2B buying decisions — along with the concerns and misgivings that trigger decisions not to buy.
Guided discovery extends buyer journey analysis into the realm of customer experience, because the buyer journey never truly ends.
Want to learn how our guided discovery process can help deepen your customer relationships and improve results?
Sources:
1 SEMRush, “65 Customer Retention Statistics You Need to Know in 2024,” January 2024
2 Smile.IO, “What is a Repeat Customer, and Why are they Profitable?” May 2024
3 HubSpot, 2024 State of Sales Report
