How do you map the ideal customer journey across all touchpoints (marketing, sales, customer success)?

First, it is important to ensure clear primary ownership on what team needs to make sure something is communicated to a user. Other teams can supplement that messaging, but one team should take the lead on each goal to ensure critical pieces like value communication and account strengthening live in under the team that can impact the metric the most.

The following bullet points are based around a PLG motion.

• Marketing

  • Messaging should be clear to users about what value they get from the product, how they can get more value from the product, and how to reach resources when they want to take their own path outside of the regular customer journey (whether that be connecting with their CSM as a paid user or connecting with sales).

  • Marketing should leverage product signals and content engagement to adjust to what the user is signaling their next step should be. Some signals to consider:

    • clicks on paywalls

    • knowledge center articles visited

    • blog posts visited

    • utm parameters from signup

    • product onboarding behavior

    • take enrichment data on job roles, industry, and company size with a grain of salt. It’s best to index on behavior.

  • Marketing should also own feeding the self-serve motion and stragthening the account as whole to make it sales viable or healthier for Customer Success. Goals should center around:

    • Gaining quick user growth in an account

    • Gaining a large portion of the company as free or low plan tier users

    • Communicating gains from using the product (individual and for whole plans to admins)

    • Communicating what is lost at the end of trials

    • User-specific recommendations to help them improve where it aligns with the product

    • Reminding users of trials ending and how to self-serve or contact sales

    • Giving users options to extend their trial by inviting users

• Sales

  • While marketing nurtures users and funnels the ready ones to inbound, sales can be more proactive but should still ground their outreach on signals and personas. Revenue operations should make sure we are set up to track:

    • What users are using (depth and frequency)

    • What paywalls they are hitting (including timing)

    • Enrichment on who the user is and where they work

    • Case studies relevant to this user

  • Sales should reach out with urgency as the strength of these signals decreases with time. Sequences should be specific to the signals and use case for this users job role.

    • Example: Signals show a user has viewed knowledge articles about a paid feature and the security page. A sequence can reach out focusing on how this feature has helped others in similar positions and how you can help answer questions, help get a broader trial going with their team, and help answer security questions.

  • Revenue operations can facilitate signal specific sequencing by tying signals to sequences while providing sales a prioritized list based on signals and a way to see all the signals the user has given off. Sales should have room in the sequences to layer other signal information into the sequence to strengthen it.

    • Note this means sales needs to be encouraged to spend more time sending emails and not just sending the same email to many users. This should yield better results. Sales management should be encouraged to not just look at activity volume, but also the emails being sent to coach their team on making a more impactful email given the data available to them.

• Customer Success

  • Customer Success should aim to form champions and strong admin relationships.

    • First and foremost CS should be available to answer customer questions quickly and provide recommendations and workarounds as needed specific to the use case of the account.

      • This is both through email and through offering trainings and consultations to admins, but also to team leads and groups to help answer questions, show users features they might have missed, and tailor recommendations.

    • Revenue operations should help decide what plan tiers should offer customer success to improve utilization and reduce risk. This should decide the amount of resources needed. Certain plan tiers or user types often don't require CS engagement so spending resources here should be limited to scaled marketing.

    • Revenue operations should work to figure out what signals a user as being a good fit for CS to reach out. This will help CS prioritize all paid users they work with across accounts. Similar to the signal-based lists made for sales, CS should have some as well although the signals might be more based on product adoption, admin functionality, paywalls being hit for higher plan tiers, etc.

    • Revenue operations should help Customer Success track user roles and feature requests.

    • From there, CS can strengthen relationships further as product launches related to feature requests occur and continue to maintain champion relationships by offering early access to features in beta and chances to participate in user research.

Value communications should just be owned by all teams including product and should not just be for administrators.

• While admins may be wary of budget and license management, love of the product across the paid users is what makes a plan sticky. Proving value to every paid user is important.

The last note is on expansion and renewal. CS should always have an ear out for whether expansion might be the right more for their accounts.

• Revenue operations can hand-off signals of needing higher plan tiers or more paid seats that CS can explore and then generate into leads for sales and make and introduction.

• For accounts without CSMs, sales should be handed these similarly to the bullet point that starts with "Sales should reach out with urgency"

• For renewals without a CSM, these contracts should be on auto-renew or managed by an Account Manager. Warning emails around renewal should go out and the account should enter a renewal phase in the customer journey. For renewals with a CSM, they should work together with the Account Manager to ensure warnings are happening in a timely manner and with context on the account's health and priorities.

Mapping the ideal customer journey can be a great alignment exercise. The way I’ve done it is using the existing journey as a starting point, applying customer-centric thinking, and layering in metrics / data as later step to validate or disprove hypotheses and inform the ideal journey plus set goals:

1. Define the Goal: Start by clarifying the purpose of the mapping exercise. Are you aiming to educate executives, align stakeholders, or diagnose gaps in the customer experience? Setting a clear goal will guide the entire process.

2. Adopt a Customer-Centric Approach: Instead of focusing solely on internal metrics, take a customer-first perspective. Begin with a simplified chart of each major touchpoint. This avoids the complexity of minor nuances and focuses on the core customer interactions.

3. Align Touchpoints with Customer Needs: Evaluate whether each touchpoint effectively meets the customer’s needs at that moment. Are customers receiving the appropriate level of engagement and the right message for their position in the journey? This part can be highly subjective and that’s okay, definitely debate this with your marketing, sales and cs leaders.

4. Identify Mismatches: Highlight areas where there’s a disconnect between what the customer needs and what they are receiving. 

5. Incorporate data: Layer on the conversion metrics and data to validate your findings or challenge your initial assumptions. Assign a key goal for each major touchpoint (e.g. conversion to qualified lead, expansion revenue)

6. Map the ideal scenario against the existing one: With insights from the previous steps, map out what the ideal customer journey should look like. Comparing the current journey to this ideal state will reveal gaps in tools, processes, and strategies necessary to enhance the customer experience.

7. Analyze Drop-Off Points: Identify where customers tend to disengage or drop out of the journey. Understanding these points allows you to develop strategies to re-engage these customers and guide them back onto the desired path.

8. Stakeholder Engagement: Ensure alignment and buy-in from all relevant stakeholders before initiating this project (marketing, sales, cs should be aligned on the ideal journey). The success of redefining the customer journey relies heavily on the engagement and commitment from your go-to-market team.