Many people don’t start big projects like going digital because they don’t know where or how to begin. We’re going to fix that now. The simplest way to start a digital transformation is to map out every interaction in your prospects’ buyer journeys, and keep mapping even after they become customers.
If you view this journey from the prospect’s perspective and see your company through their eyes, you’ll have all the information needed to complete this process.
If I asked 100 CEOs to show me their buyer journey map, 99 couldn’t do it. This is a major problem and a big reason for slow or no revenue growth.
Mapping the buyer journey is the first step to creating sustainable, predictable, and repeatable revenue growth. Although it may seem overwhelming, even the longest journey starts with a single step.
Engage Your Team To Do This Right
When working with clients on this, we suggest forming a cross-functional team representing prospects and customers. This team should include people from sales, marketing, and customer service.
Everyone needs to agree that there are no bad ideas. All input is welcome, and honest and candid feedback is necessary. If you’re not truthful about prospects’ and customers’ experiences, your efforts will fail. Honest and direct feedback is crucial for success.
Bring a prospect/customer buyer journey framework to the group. This is the structure you’ll use to work through each stage of the buyer journey, mapping out every touch point and connecting it back to the prospect/customer and their feelings about the experience you’re providing.
We created our own framework for clients, the Cyclonic Buyer Journey™ framework, but there are many frameworks to choose from and various ways to work through this with your team.
While mapping out each touch point, keep this in mind: You might have heard the phrase “solve for the customer.” When discussing each stage and every touch point, keep asking your team and challenging them with these questions:
- What would the customer (or prospect) want us to do here?
- How could we exceed their expectations?
- How can we proactively create peak moments in their experiences with us?
- How can we consistently make them say, “Wow, this company is amazing”?
The more peaks, the more little wows, and the more memories you create, the more stories your customers and prospects will remember. They’ll talk about your business more, bringing new and excited people to you.
Before moving on, let’s clarify some of the touch points we’re talking about:
Marketing Touch Points
Your website will be responsible for many touch points. The homepage is the most obvious, but others include secondary pages, landing pages, blog articles, forms people fill out, confirmation pages after they fill out a form, and all the content they consume on your site. These are all separate touch points.
Any email you send them, whether it’s a follow-up after they fill out a form, a general email, or a blog notification email, is a touch point.
Any interactions they have with you on social platforms are touch points. This includes your company pages, individual pages, your content on social media, any comments or engagement on your social pages, and any ads you might serve on social platforms.
Sales Touch Points
How your prospects interact with sales will be the first of many sales-related touch points. If they call in, how are they treated? Is the call directed immediately to a sales rep? Is the rep available, or do they reach voicemail?
Do they fill out a form? How long is the form? What page do they see after filling out the form?
Can they chat with sales? What is that experience like? Do they get a link to schedule a meeting, or are your reps going back and forth via email to set up that first call?
If this process is burdensome, prospects will feel frustrated, anxious, and turned off.
What happens next? Does the rep push products or services? What is the first call designed to do for the prospect? How long is it? What does the script look like? What’s the objective of that first call with a rep? This first call almost always decides if there will be a second call.
Usually, there are several calls during the sales process. Of course, these are touch points, but so is every email the rep sends, every link they provide, and every piece of content they send.
Each touch point needs to be designed to move the prospect forward while helping them get to know, like, and trust your reps and company. This is a very deliberate and strategic process. The experience should be designed like Disney designs their ride experiences.
Finally, as the prospect gets close to signing, the touch points might become more significant. These include reference calls, the process of getting references, the contract, the signing process, and any negotiations – all touch points that need to be designed to deliver little wow experiences.
If you can do this, you’ll shorten the sales process and increase your close rate, guaranteed.
Customer Service Touch Points
After prospects become customers, more experiences need to be mapped out and strategically designed.
If your customers don’t get a wow experience, they won’t talk about your business. This means no word-of-mouth marketing, no buzz in the community, no referrals, no reviews, no references, and no success stories. As a result, your Revenue Cycle grinds to a halt.
Here are some customer-centric touch points to focus on:
How you deliver your services is crucial, with many touch points around delivery. Does your delivery experience match what was shared in the sales process? It needs to match perfectly.
Do you deliver on time? What does the communication around delivery look like? Is it proactive? Is it clear? Is it the right amount?
How do you handle invoicing and follow up on delayed or late payments? These are touch points, like it or not. How you handle these touches with customers affects their experience.
How do you cross-sell or upsell? How do you engage your customers to participate in your advocacy marketing efforts? How do you ask them to be a reference? How do you check in to see how they’re doing? How do you resolve their issues? These touch points can make or break the story they tell about your organization.
When you’re done mapping out every prospect and customer touch point, you’re ready to start improving each touch point. Use digital tools to automate and personalize as much as possible.
This process will reveal the need for data, a CRM platform, and the right tools to create those peaks or little wow moments for your prospects and customers.
These changes will have game-changing impacts on your business. But implementing these upgrades will take time, persistence, and a commitment to digitally transforming your business for the better.
In upcoming articles, we’ll delve deeper into the marketing, sales, and customer service upgrades needed to deliver a truly remarkable experience to today’s buyers.
