Creating Customer Journeys: The Impact of Sales Funnels

A sales funnel tracks each potential customer as they move through the stages of awareness, consideration, and purchase. It is the best way to identify your customer base and prioritize marketing efforts.

But it isn’t enough to simply track the movement of customers through your sales funnels. You must understand what motivates them to engage with your brand, how they are influenced by external factors and other competitors, and what barriers might prevent them from purchasing. That’s where a customer journey map comes in.

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the experiences and emotions of your target audience throughout each stage of your sales funnel. It combines both analytical/statistical data and anecdotal evidence, such as customer interviews, surveys, social media listening and competitive intelligence.

It helps your teams collaborate on strategies and tactics to meet customer expectations. For example, marketers know they need to shape their advertising campaigns to encourage interest in your product or service, while your support team knows how to best answer a buyer’s questions post-purchase. A well-crafted journey map will ensure these departments are on the same page, allowing them to work together toward common goals.

A clear understanding of customer journeys will help your business identify growth opportunities. By identifying pain points, you can shape your offering to better suit your buyers’ needs and expectations, increasing your customer retention and revenue. It will also reveal areas where your current customer experience can be improved, such as by removing roadblocks like long wait times or complicated ordering processes.

Building a customer journey map starts with defining your audience through personas. A persona is a fictitious profile that represents your ideal buyers in terms of demographics, goals and pain points. The more detailed your persona, the easier it will be to direct every aspect of your sales funnel strategy toward your audience.

You can use a variety of different templates and formats to create your customer journey map. These include current state, future state, day in the life and circular models. Each type of map has its own unique advantages, but all are designed to bring your teams together and focus on the overall experience of your customers and prospects.

Once you have your personas and your customer journey map template, it’s time to start collecting research and anecdotal evidence. Ideally, your mapping team will represent all parts of your organization, from frontline staff to corporate management. This will provide you with the most comprehensive picture of your customer’s journey, ensuring you don’t miss any key details or touchpoints along the way.

When the map is finished, it will be a deliverable that all your employees can appreciate and understand, bringing your entire company together in support of a common goal: delivering an exceptional customer experience.

This will also reinforce that your business is a customer-centric enterprise, which in turn drives
more loyalty from your customers and prospects. Ultimately, this will increase your sales and revenue, as satisfied customers are more likely to continue buying from you again and recommend your products or services to their friends and colleagues.

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