Customer Journey Map for B2B Tech Startups: What Is It? Why It’s Important & How to Create It?

From their beginning, B2B tech startups must always keep in mind that they must be experience-led businesses. Customer journey mapping is one such tool that enables SaaS startups to visualize the customer experience.

Startups usually strategize to engage audiences through different channels or touchpoints. The buyer journey begins with their first interaction until they either convert or diverge to another brand’s offering. Managing the entire customer journey remains quite essential for B2B startups with a highly competitive market, homogenous products, and constantly changing B2B buyer demands.

What is a Customer Journey Map (CJM)?

Customer journey maps are becoming a popular way to identify all customer touchpoints, visualize the experience of users, and understand how buyers interact with your product. The goal of the journey map is to visualize the customer experience through your buyer’s eyes.

Customer journey mapping allows tech startups to optimize the conversion process by delivering on customer expectations. By optimizing all customer touchpoints and clearly mapping the buyer journey, you can lead the customer on a facilitated path towards purchase.

Why is CJM Important for B2B Tech Startups?

The customer journey map provides an in-depth customer-focused review of their experience and how their move through your marketing/sales funnel. Mike Weir identified four benefits of customer journey mapping:

• Enable Better Experiences
• Pave the Way for Your Customers to Better Achieve Their Goals
• Give Your Company Much-Needed Context
• Position Your Company to Drive Better Results

Customer journey maps can be of critical importance to several functional areas. For instance, marketers can identify the content that audiences like, while designers & developers can emphasize the visual elements that appeal to buyers.

Startups can optimize their websites, emails, social feeds, blogs, and video channels, new acquisition channels to engage with potential audiences through effective journey mapping. This process elevates customer convenience and facilitates them to engage and convert at their own pace.

3 Types of Customer Journey Maps for B2B Tech Startups

1. The Current State
2. The Future State
3. The Daily State

There are a number of customer journey maps that tech businesses are using and improve their conversions. B2B tech startups should focus on the three basic ideations of the tool:

1 – The Current State

The current state CJM is one of the most common types and identifies how B2B buyers are engaging with your startup brand across different touchpoints. Current state maps identify existing problems in the buyer’s journey and facilitate them by optimizing the entire marketing process.

Current state maps are created to get a better understanding of buyer behavior to see how they perceive and engage with your startup. The current state map can pinpoint negative interactions with customers, analyze these events, and finally optimize all touchpoints to ensure such steps are eliminated.

2 – The Future State

Future state CJM is primarily developed from the current state mapping process. The future state map emphasizes designing the future of the customer experience. Startups usually employ future state maps when developing new products or adding new features to existing ones. 

B2B SaaS startups learn from customer behavior, demands, industry trends, and other data insights to create a framework to evolve their customer experience through new designs, features, new products, content types, and even a refreshed buyer journey.

3 – The Daily State

The daily state CJM is a useful tool for startups to understand their B2B audiences on a daily basis. By identifying issues with user experience on a daily basis, startups can develop a customer journey that anticipates issues and fixes them without the customer experiencing any inconvenience.  

The daily state CJM is an illustration of how your ideal customer profiles engage with your brand through multiple channels throughout the day. Startups can use the insights from daily maps to predict buyer behavior in real-time, hence allowing them to be a step ahead and delight customers with elevated experiences.

Conclusion

Customer journey maps are a strategic tool that allows startups to understand customer experience and how to optimize it to speed up conversions. By becoming an experience-led startup, B2B sellers can better engage, educate and convert their audiences with longer customer lifetime values.

Chasm helps B2B tech startups to create successful product marketing strategies to know the right audiences and deliver top-notch experiences to buyers on their way to conversion. Our exclusive customer journey mapping consultancy services identify issues in real-time to ensure your customers experience a consistent journey across all brand touchpoints.