Most businesses fall into one of two camps. Either they have a customer journey mapped somewhere but never actually look at it, or they don't have one at all. This article is for the second camp, and for anyone wanting to re-map their journey so it becomes a tool they'll actually use.
Mapping the journey is also one of the fastest ways to understand a business. When I start with a new client, walking the journey end to end tells me more, and faster, than almost anything else. It's often a natural part of implementing a CRM too, because fleshing out the journey is really the same exercise as defining your sales stages and the information you need to capture at each one.
How long it takes depends on a few things:
- How long the lifecycle is, from a prospect first becoming aware of you through to a paying customer, and everything in between.
- Whether this is the first time the journey has been considered, or a re-map.
- How detailed you want to go. You might start relatively high level and break it down from there.
A few hours for a short, simple lifecycle. A few days for something long or complex with many steps. Either way, the method below gives you a working map: one that turns the moments driving revenue into a practical to-do list.
What you actually get out of it
Two things make this worth the effort.
First, a clear view of the entire process, from lead generation through to sales handling, quoting or contracting, and in some cases delivery of the product (think manufacturing, where the journey runs well past the sale).
Second, and this is the valuable part, you start to see where people fall off. Where do leads go cold? Where does the sales team consistently lose momentum? Once you can see the drop-off points, you can decide what to put in place at each one to reduce them and win some of those people back.
"The goal isn't to document the journey. It's to find the moments where a better system would change the outcome."
Set the journey up to be useful
The key when planning is to keep it simple and usable. Not so high level that it lacks the detail you need to act on, and not so detailed that you create unnecessary complexity and everyone avoids it.
The biggest trap is over-customisation. Businesses often build a separate sales process for every persona or customer type, and it quickly becomes unmanageable. My rule: build one core process for everyone first, then define where the real variations are.
When you feel the urge to make something bespoke, ask why. What am I trying to achieve with a fully custom process here that I can't achieve with the standard one? What actually makes this customer so different? Often the honest answer is "not much", and you've just saved yourself a lot of complexity. Always asking why is a good way to keep the map honest.
A real estate agency doesn't have one type of lead, it has several: vendors, buyers, builders, plus agents and brokers. Some of those never really become a lead in the traditional sense, they're just part of the network. Others clearly are: a vendor is a lead because you need to win the listing before you can sell the house, and a buyer is a lead too, because you can't sell the vendors property without a buyer.
In any platform, the process of qualifying the lead before creating an opportunity or deal can be streamlined for both these options. For example, you may have New → Working → Nurture → Unqualified → Converted - and these can be used for either a vendor or buyer; however, when working through the Opportunity, each of these customer types are quite different.
The practical method
At its simplest, the journey is one set of sales stages that every lead moves through, fed by a range of entry points. Get that core view down first, then layer in the detail.
1. Start before anyone enters the system
Before mapping stages inside your CRM, go further back. Where are your future customers when they first have a need? Are they searching Google? Asking people they trust? Sitting in a feed? The first job is to make sure you show up in that moment, and to know every way someone can come to you.
We like to identify every entry point from the outset. Often you start high level, then break it down:
- Paid media, which splits into paid social, paid search, and so on
- SEO and organic
- Events
- Sales canvassing and cold outreach
- Your team's own network, for example LinkedIn
List them all. This is the top of your map.
2. Recognise that entry points aren't equal
Each entry point tells you two different things: how warm the person is, and how much you already know about them.
Temperature is the obvious one. If you tier entry points cold, warm, hot, you'd expect something like:
- Newsletter subscription: cold
- Webinar registration: warm
- Requesting a callback or booking a meeting: hot
Information is the one people forget. Someone who completes a detailed contact form has handed you qualifying detail, so they might legitimately skip a few early steps. Someone who only enters an email for a newsletter is unqualified and not ready to talk to yet. Paid media works the same way: brand-awareness campaigns bring people in very early with little known about them, while retargeting and paid search reach people who already have a need and sit further along.
The point is to identify, for each entry point, where that person should land in the journey and what you already know about them. That decides what happens next, which is why we pause here and pick up the sales process from the coldest entry point.
3. Map the stages, and the information that moves people along
Now walk the sales stages forward. For each stage, ask one question: what has to be true, or what information do we need to capture, before this person can move to the next stage?
That includes the point where a lead becomes sales-qualified (an SQL) and the point where you start putting a quote together. When you can see exactly what's needed at each step, you can see where automation belongs: prompting for the next piece of information, moving records along, and cutting out manual entry so the sales team spends its time selling, not on admin.
4. Find the silent gaps
Between each stage, ask what a prospect hears from you if they don't move forward on their own. For most businesses the honest answer is nothing. Those silent gaps are where automation earns its keep. The usual suspects:
- Post-enquiry: there was a need identified and a conversation, you quoted, then silence, with no automated follow-up.
- Long consideration: not ready this quarter, and by next quarter they've forgotten you, and are liaising with a competitor.
- Post-sale: the invoice is paid and the relationship goes quiet until renewal panic.
5. Turn the map into a build list
Once the gaps are visible, rank them by revenue at stake and effort to close. You'll usually find the top three are automatable with the tools you already own, or are looking to purchase. That ranked list, not the pretty poster, is the real output of journey mapping.
In practice
One business found that 10% of their substantial unengaged audience of more than two years (0% engagement at all), re-engaged following a three-email follow-up 'do you want to hear from us' sequence, built in an afternoon.
The worksheet and CRM starter templates
The article gives you the method. The worksheet turns it into something your team can run in a room together: stages, silent gaps, and the ranking matrix, with prompts and tips to get the most out of each section.
Alongside it, there are starter templates built on the standard, out-of-the-box setup for the main platforms:
- Salesforce
- HubSpot
- GoHighLevel
Each one gives you a sensible baseline to map against, then you adapt it to your business rather than starting from a blank page. Adapting the standard model to suit the business is the whole point: every business is different, and the template is just the starting basis.
The Customer Journey Mapping Worksheet
The exact process we use with clients, ready to run with your own team. Pop your details in and we'll send it straight to your inbox.
Where to from here
Run the exercise with whoever owns sales and whoever owns delivery in the same room, because the gaps usually live in the handover between them. An hour is enough for a first pass, and the worksheet keeps it honest. Do it with me, or have a go on your own. I really do encourage teams to try it themselves first.