How market research can improve the B2B customer journey

Key takeaways: The B2B customer journey is complex, involving various stages that separate groups in your client base approach differently, and at varying speeds. Customer journey research explores the areas of friction and can help you optimize touchpoints, then personalize strategies for the different segments.

The customer journey in B2B is usually varied and complicated. But with a better understanding of your customers’ path to purchase – and where the areas of friction or pain points are – you can optimize their journey and in turn, your sales process.

There are several reasons why the typical B2B customer journey is different from a B2C one.

B2B purchases tend to cost more and therefore, buying decisions involve more risk and are more likely to be business-critical. Businesses usually involve more stakeholders and stages in the purchase process, to reduce the risk of making a risky purchase.

As a result, the decision-making process is often more thorough and can last several months. The journey also varies by many factors including business type, customer segment, sector, and so on.

Moreover, as purchase channels change and buyer habits evolve, the typical journey changes over time. For example, some B2B companies’ insights into the customer journey from before COVID-19 may be outdated by now.

Compared to pre-pandemic, McKinsey reports that 70% of B2B decision-makers now prefer remote human or digital self-service touchpoints,

Customer journey research in B2B analyzes where you’re missing out on sales and why. It can also highlight where you’re performing well and need to maintain the status quo.

The insights help sales and marketing teams to influence journeys – for example, by pushing the information that buyers are looking for at the right time in the journey.

B2B customer journey research helps you:

• Find customer and prospect pain points in the journey
• Allocate your marketing budget more accurately
• Support sales teams to better anticipate buyers’ needs
• Help product development teams build solutions for unmet needs

Example of a typical B2B customer journey

While the following stages are common in a buyer journey, there are many industry and business-specific variations. The example below is purely indicative.

The duration of each customer journey stage can range from seconds to months, depending on the complexity of the purchase and the formal nature of the decision-making process:

• Trigger: The customer interactions begin when a business recognizes a problem to solve, such as a pain point or competitive pressure.
• Evaluating solutions: Decision-makers weigh options, including doing nothing, in-house solutions, or third-party purchases.
• Defining requirements: The company specifies its needs – including product functionality, budget, and essential criteria.
• Provider awareness: Businesses identify potential vendors through existing relationships, RFPs, or online searches.
• Provider consideration: This can be a formal or informal evaluation of providers against specific criteria.
• Finalizing the purchase: A key individual or team selects the best provider, potentially requiring further justification to higher management.
• Post-purchase customer experience: The journey continues with onboarding, maintenance, account management, and overall service quality.
• Upselling / cross-selling / renewal: Those satisfied with their customer experience may make additional purchases or renew services, often with a shortened decision process.

As mentioned, there are plenty of nuances to a B2B journey.

For example, if a customer makes a repeat purchase, it should take less time and the journey will be much shorter. If the ‘provider consideration’ stage is unsuccessful, customers may go back one or more stages to re-evaluate their options, and so on.

The new show some more of the complexity involved in the buyer journey and also, some of the ‘shortcuts’ that customers can take if or when a stage is not required:

How to do B2B customer journey research

For a comprehensive view of typical customer interactions throughout the purchase journey, we recommend the following research approach:

• Aligning on the unanswered research questions with key stakeholders: Data you or they already have may already answer some questions, or provide some hypotheses to test during the research. For example – buyer journey insights lie in customer service queries, analytics or business intelligence software, and so on.
• Analyzing customers’ decision-making unit (DMU): Seek feedback from old, new, and lapsed customers. Competitor research can also shed light on prospects’ journey. Contrary to popular belief, in B2B your target audience isn’t always C-suite decision-makers, because more junior staff heavily influence purchases too.
• Ranking customers’ priorities: The DMU typically assesses providers against hygiene and differentiating factors. The research should identify these differentiators, establish what the ideal provider looks like, and provide recommendations to reach this level.
• Identifying all the customer journey touchpoints: Walk through a standard customer journey with buyers via in-depth interviews, detailing all customer touchpoints where they are engaging (or not) with your brand. Explore the different channels they use, what information they need, and areas of friction or pain points.
• Analyzing, visualizing, sharing, and acting on the customer journey insights: Build a customer journey map, also highlighting where the path to purchase differs by segment. Flow diagrams, infographics, storyboards, and videos are great ways to visualize and share the insights across departments responsible for the customer experience.

Our detailed guide into the B2B buyers journey explores each of these five steps in much greater detail.

Personalization strategies for the B2B customer journey

We also recommend having a customer segmentation or buyer persona model in place. With this, you can analyze the customer journey from different perspectives, for a more complete picture of the different paths to purchase within your client base.

And after the research is complete, with segmented results, you can use the customer journey map to improve the path to purchase for each of these key groups too.

Segmentations typically use statistical data to categorize market groups, while buyer personas use qualitative research so that customers are easier to visualize and focus on.

Quantitative research provides a robust foundation, while qualitative research highlights the underlying motivations and behaviors that drive purchasing decisions.

You can create more personalized marketing messages for each customer group by understanding these differences.

It’s common to include some or all of the following when segmenting B2B customers or creating buyer personas:

• Profile – job title, years in role, department, seniority
• Organization type – e.g. sector, size, revenue
• Needs and attitudes – e.g. priorities, pain points, values, character traits
• Behavior – e.g. previous buying habits or product purchases
• Purchase criteria – ranking the hierarchy of consideration factors when buying
• Pain points – frustrations, areas of friction, and challenges
• Influence – are they the decision-maker or only an influencer? Who else is involved?
• Information sources – which channels should you use in the marketing strategy?
• Communication preferences – what’s the best way to engage them?

You’ll likely have some of this information already. The role of primary B2B market research is to fill in the gaps.

A quantitative segmentation or qualitative buyer personas also support account-based marketing (ABM).

This is particularly the case when creating a profitability-based segmentation, with expected lifetime customer value. Detailed customer journey research can provide very useful intel to inform an ABM strategy.

Metrics and KPIs for monitoring the B2B customer journey

There are different ways to measure the efficacy or efficiency of your customers’ journeys.

In the long-term, if you try to influence the typical journey and improve it – e.g. by trying to remove friction in specific customer touchpoints – tracking KPIs over time can measure your success.

Metrics and KPIs that are relevant to customer journey research include:

Awareness stage

• Brand visibility: Track search rankings, social media mentions, and organic website traffic.
• Content engagement: Monitor time on page, bounce rates, and content download rates.

Consideration

• Lead qualification: Measure your Marketing and Sales Qualified Leads (MQLs and SQLs).
• Demo requests: Track conversion rates and customer feedback.

Final decision

• Conversion rates: Monitor proposal acceptance and free trial to paid conversion rates.
• Time-to-close: Analyze average sales cycle length and time spent at each customer journey stage.

Customer retention / post-purchase

• Customer satisfaction (CSAT): Consider other metrics too e.g. Customer Effort Score (CES).
• Churn rates: Track customer and revenue churn rates, conducting exit surveys.

Advocacy

• Referrals: Measure number of referrals and their conversion rates.

For advocacy metrics and to improve customer retention, while Net Promoter Score (NPS) is common in B2C research… In our experience,  using NPS in B2B market research is often much less useful or reliable. That’s because there are more types of loyalty than there are for consumer purchases.

Best practices for customer journey research in B2B

#1 Build a separate customer journey map for each key segment

If you try to build a single customer journey map to cover all the groups in your target audience, you may create a model that is very high-level and too simple.

But if you build a model that is overly complex and has lots of permutations and contingencies, it could be too difficult for your teams to use and learn from.

That’s why instead, we recommend building a separate map for each persona. You can start with a ‘master’ map, as some aspects of the journey should be common to all groups, then make copies and tweak each different version accordingly.

#2 Consider validating a customer journey map with an online survey

While a segmentation tends to be quantitative, customer journey research is usually qualitative. 

But you could put the different touchpoints of your customer journey map through an online survey to:

• Quantify the percentage of customers using a touchpoint e.g. starting with a Google search
• Gain a high-level understanding of buyer attitudes and customer behavior
• Rank the relative importance of each step on the journey
• Collect data on your performance e.g. efficiency of the journey on your website

This exercise can create more robust customer journey research outputs. There are more details in our full customer journey map building guide.

#3 Track your customer journey metrics over time

The insights from a customer journey mapping process can help you optimize the customer experience and path-to-purchase, improving factors within your control (e.g. your website).

Some of the metrics associated with each customer journey stage demonstrate part of your overall brand health, which is trackable and measurable over time.

In our guide exploring how to conduct B2B brand tracking research, we explore the reasons why it’s important to do this.