What steps do you take when analyzing the customer journey?

Not exactly sure what you mean by analyzing, but building the customer journey for your GTM strategy is essential for ensuring the right segment gets the right message via the right channel. It’s also how you can identify which assets (or bill of materials) to prioritize for the launch.

I’d start with your GTM strategy: Who’s your target audience (including different segments), what are you trying to make them do (objectives), and how will you get them there (channels + assets)?

I’m a visual learner, so I like to build a flow chart for each audience segment to map out their journey. Each journey should culminate with your primary goal. Some questions to think through as you build these out:

• Based on previous launches or internal marketing knowledge, which channels are most effective in reaching this specific segment?
• How many touch points do you need to get your audience to achieve your goals?
• What is the happy path (ideal flow) for each step? What can you do if someone falls off the path?
• Finally, what type of content is most compelling given your audience, message, and channels? I would lean into other content and marketing teammates to build your bill of materials.

Build from what you know

If you’re doing this to prepare for a launch, I’d consider whether this new feature or product is for a similar audience that you already target. If are marketing to a large portion of your existing customers, you may already have some journey insights. It helps to plot these on a buyer/customer journey map.

Consider learning more about the competitor journey
If you are expanding to a new audience and/or a new category, you’ll want to analyze the customer journey of comparable competitor products. I'd do this first through surveys and then through follow up interviews.

What are the key trigger points that move a customer further towards a purchase, an action, or a renewal? What are the failure points?

Prioritize the areas that need attention most

Once you have your map of the most common pathways for each major segment, it helps to label sections of the journey map that are more consistent. To the extent you can quantify drop off at each micro-step of the funnel, that's ideal. Often these are moments after they’ve bounced from a sales page and when they haven’t returned to your product in some time. Are the majority of users dropping off at a key step or just one segment? Is that a key segment? Make sure to keep testing the flow yourself so you can find any big technical barriers or intuit points that could be confusing or adding too much friction.

Continuing building stronger/clearer analytics

Then there are moments in the funnel where it's much harder to tell what's going. These are moments when you can't tell if customers are “on track” anymore. 

What bridges are missing there? Why didn’t they find what they were looking for? What data aren't you tracking that could provide more insight into what's going on?

User test new designs before going all in on them
Conduct quick user research to hear potential customers share the honest opinions of how they experience your new version of the upgrade page (or whatever the experience is you're testing). Is there something lacking that is making them feel skeptical? 

Once you learn that, figure out how to proactively provide answers to customers at the right stage of their purchase decison.

“Analyzing the customer journey” is quite a large questions! It really depends on what you’re trying to solve for. Instead, I’d first try to figure out what I want to learn/where I want to focus my time. By scoping things more narrowly, you’ll be able to figure out a method and metrics to get useful answers. 

So first, map what you know— start with the evidence and assumptions you have and document it. Once you have everything in one place, pull together your PM, Sales, Competitive Intel (+ whoever owns win-rate analysis), CS, Demand Gen, and UX and walk through what you have. Whether this is with each person one-off or a lively discussion with everyone in the room, I have seen that different stakeholders have different data points and assumptions. These conversations will make it easier to understand where there are gaps/data is lacking in an impactful way and clarity will help your business grow. On the flip side, you might even see that someone has the data you need! 

In terms of the customer journey itself, some topics I like to consider for mapping/conversations: 

• Consideration set (who is the competition, why are they winning deals, when do they lose?): be sure to include not just product differentiation here but selling tactics as well (ex is your competition an industry giant who has great exec relations with clients, or maybe a start-up who does a great job of selling quickly when budget is approved?). 

• Messaging: You hopefully have a good insights into this outside of just customer journey, but do you talk about your product/solutions the same way the customer is describing them? Does the language change throughout the journey based on who is getting added to the conversation? Does your Sales team know how to speak to the different personas? 

• Buying committee/personas: think about the user, the internal advocates, and the exec sponsors — how do these individuals interact? What problems can you solve for all three - does your messaging address that appropriately? 

• Touch-points: How does your company talk to prospects? Do your Sales and DG teams work together to send the same message or are they taking a different approach? Are these touch points effective? Are you even going after the right titles? 

• Win/loss rates: Not every company tracks this, but data regarding your sales team’s win/loss ratio and why those deals went through or didn’t can be wildly helpful. I usually try to get more details from Sales reps directly, but if your organization doesn’t document this, talking to Sales (reps or leadership) is a good place to start. 

• Feedback from Sales/CS: This is likely something that is the most accessible since Sales can be quite vocal, but listen to your Sales team and try to answer if there’s an underlying issue. Ex: if you repeatedly hear that the team needs new collateral, is that because they don’t know where the collateral lives (and so the customers aren’t seeing it) or because there are new use cases that need to be showcased? At the end of the day, Sales/CS is on the frontlines - don’t dismiss their requests too quickly :) 

Once you have your customer journey “problem” scoped, figuring out metrics and methods will be a lot easier. Hope this is helpful! If you have a more focused question on customer journeys, please tag me! Would love to help.