Given the changes in buyer behaviors, I’ve become a bit obsessed with the B2B buyer journey. The whole thing. Not just as related to a specific campaign, but across as many channels and touchpoints as possible.
We need visibility. Especially given the shift in buyers wanting to self-educate, preferring digital interactions, and pushing vendors to the end of their process. Yet, most of us don’t have the visibility we need – at least not easily or on a timely basis.
Perhaps you can relate…
In a recent client project, to evaluate a nurturing program I had to access the marketing automation platform (MAP), content display platform, intent data platform, CRM, GA4, and a few custom reports in Tableau.
Then, to see how potential buyers each engaged in the program, I had to drill down on each contact record to review what they engaged with. The only way to limit the effort was to focus the deep dive on contacts that reached the SQL stage and then look backwards to how they’d engaged over time.
It was fascinating, but so frustratingly incomplete. Not to mention “after the fact.”
What I learned was also concerning. The number of outbound comms inundating contacts in the nurture that weren’t ours included:
- Event and conference invites
- Newsletter sends
- Product updates
- Course schedules and registrations
- Sales outreach
- Customer success check-ins
In some cases, there were so many comms that the MAP sensed the overload trigger during a month and put contacts on pause, causing nurture touches to not send to engaged buyers in our program.
The team I was working with was blind to this interference. Just as the teams sending those other comms were blind to ours. And yes, the pauses interrupted other sends, as well.
Complex buying processes are long. They involve multiple buyers from each account. Therefore, a long-term nurture program is bound to overlap with other communications. To orchestrate appropriately, we all need visibility. Across everything. All the time – not just when one team decides to expend the massive amount of effort needed to review a program or campaign.
Looking at it from the other side, just imagine being on the receiving end of this madness.
B2B marketing has become so siloed that we’ve lost perspective of the overall buyer/customer experience with each team dialed into the pursuit of their own initiatives.
Buyer Journey Mapping: Art or Science?
Every customer-facing team or role across your organization likely has their own interpretation of the “buyer journey.” I heard a story recently that a new VP doing orientation by “walking” around an enterprise company discovered 72 different customer journey maps. Yep – 72 of them.
This isn’t to say that companies won’t have more than one. Depending on personas, ICPs, industries served, and products sold, there will be variations on buying. But journey and experience orchestration are impossible without real-time visibility across channels and programs.
In my effort to explore the state of buyer journey mapping, I did some outreach, talked to marketing executives, and dove into online research.
What I heard varied. From “I don’t care about the touchpoints, I care about which messaging resonated” to “customer intelligence is hugely important after the purchase,” responses had a wide range.
As for the construction of the maps, from what I can gather, it’s mostly art with limited market data or customer insights used to inform journey development. Often, we do this in a workshop setting with stakeholders from customer-facing teams providing perspectives.
The outcomes can vary based on type of company (go search for buyer journey maps and click to view images to get an idea). But mostly what I see are maps by stage that include channels and formats and logic triggers (I have a business problem) for each stage and transition. Some also presuppose the emotional response of the buyer at each stage.
The caveat is that we map buyer journeys from awareness to purchase—usually targeted to one role/buyer, rather than considering the full buying group. We may use personas to create the campaign plan and data to evaluate them after execution, but we seem to do so in a bubble disconnected from everything else going on (see bulleted list above).
From what I can tell, many buyer journey maps are static and need manual updating. They represent what those involved identified as the buyer journey at that point in time. Because they’re constructed manually (disconnected from data source), they are quickly out of step with the rapid changes in today’s markets—and with today’s buyers.
After looking at this from different angles, I’m left with art more than science.
And yes, the joy in marketing often comes from creativity, but it can also come from data insights used to optimize programs, which in turn helps inspire the creative side—not to mention maximizing growth outcomes.
It’s not either or, it’s both.
Solving for B2B Buyer Journey Blindness
As marketers, we know the metrics we rely on are isolated and not truly performative. Opens, clicks, dwell time, page views – focus on engagement in isolation. Not all of them carry the same weight. And without tying them to buyer behavior beyond a touchpoint or campaign, we’re left making assumptions based on what we hope that engagement indicates.
We need to understand that a B2B buyer journey is not ours to control. Your buyers have told you this. With buyer journeys lasting for at least 11 months, with 70% of them completed without our involvement, we need to expand our visibility and get our data in order.
But we need to cull context from the data.
Imagine what’s possible if you can easily:
- Identify patterns of engagement across channels, content (types and topics), personas, ICPs, industries…
- See the activity of an account buying group—even if they’re not all in your campaign.
- Get recommendations for next-best actions based on these patterns.
- Know when a buyer/account moves from out-of-market to in-market.
And be able to access these insights in real-time so you can optimize pipeline ongoingly—instead of doing a post-mortem after the fact.
With buyers becoming more self-reliant, we need to do everything we can to eliminate B2B buyer journey blindness. But we also need this visibility and data to inform the “then what” question with context we can use.
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