Understanding your customer's journey

The goal of your go to market team is not to sell your product. It is to help people discover and buy your product. The process your customer goes through from becoming aware of your product though using more and more of it is called the customer journey (or the buyer journey). It is the core of your go to market motion and it almost always involves various aspects of sales, marketing, customer success and account management.

How to think about the customer journey

Reflect on a few purchases you made recently. Perhaps you needed some office supplies–say, post-it notes–and you bought them online. Perhaps you bought a car. Or subscribed to software to accomplish a goal. Every time you eventually purchased something, you were on a customer journey. Now think of the things you didn't buy–those were also customer journeys, just failed ones.

For the post-its, you probably just opened up your online store of choice (Amazon, for most), searched "Post it" and clicked "buy it now". You knew the use of post-its, you knew the brand (or store brand), and you probably didn't care much about the price. So you just clicked "buy" and that was that. This is a very typical B2C customer journey, honed to perfection by the good folks at Proctor & Gamble, Clorox, and every other successful consumer packaged goods (CPG) company.

Compare that to buying a car. If you're a car person, and you watch Top Gear or subscribe to Car and Driver, you start out very knowledgeable. You know the new Ford F-150 lightning is out now; you also know about Tesla's price decreases, and the new (non-electric) Land Cruiser. You know demand and resale values are still high for Ford Broncos and Jeep raised prices without improving anything 40% since the pandemic.

Maybe you're not a car person. You know very little about cars. The car buying process horrifies you and you just want to be done with it. But, you need a car, so you search in Google for "toyota corolla" because you saw an ad for it recently (which you may or may not remember seeing) and thought it looked cool. You browse Google's first result, which happens to be Toyota's own website, and configure a car. You submit that to a dealer, and the sales wheels start whirring.

As you can tell, the customer journey can wander. It is not the same for everyone–and in fact can be very different even for people who share the same demographics, job title, and more. The car guy might know more about the car he's purchasing than the salesperson, while the reluctant buyer might do anything to avoid spending an extra minute in the car buying process (including obliviously overpaying).

What constitutes a well-crafted customer journey?

Companies that are customer-centric keep their customer journey at their core. They know the rough spots and wherever possible they pave over them, making them smooth. Here below are a few key things that companies with well-done customer journeys have in common.

Understanding Unique Customer Journeys

The customer journey looks different for every company, and so should the website, sales processes and supporting materials. No company, however large or successful, has a perfect customer journey. There are always gaps. Sometimes you cannot control the gaps–large companies buying expensive software need to go off and get approvals, and you're never going to be invited to those meetings. Markets change, and a company that was effectively the only one in the market might now have customers who wander off the path to look at new competition. The key is identifying those gaps and tailoring your processes and assets to address them.

Take an example close to home: Silverwood Advisors, my company. We sell a service–advisory work for early stage startups. We have (as of this writing) a simple, one page website. The page supports the customer journey (Are these guys legit? Looks like they are; let's take a meeting. That's an interesting book, maybe I'll download it before I do that meeting). Could we have more than one page? Yes, we could. But we chose not to, because that would not support the journey better than one page–in fact, it might support it worse. Because the goal of the website is to get the prospect who is ready and in the market to take a meeting.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, take the Hubspot website. Hubspot is a content marketing company so they use their website not only to sell their software but also as a showcase for content marketing. It is truly enormous in scope. They also now have a very broad product suite and a large sales team. Their website is tuned to help the journey of various customer segments in various industries looking at various products. However, they probably know there is one happy path.

Finding your “Happy Path”

The happy path is that path you don't have to pave, because prospects travel down it almost unaided, like they're just magically pulled along to the point where they become customers. Maybe your happy path is very subtle (like Mint.com, where just signing up and connecting your bank account is enough). Maybe it is complex (a full scale enterprise sales process). Usually it has nothing to do with the path and everything to do with the circumstances and type of prospect.

Finding this path is the key first step in optimizing your customer journey. The leads on this path might simply be better leads. Some prospects through some channels are simply more ready to buy than others. There are lots of people who look at car websites–enthusiasts, investors, fans, curious teenagers. But the typical car buyer starts shopping 3 weeks prior to actually making a purchase, and chooses between no more than 8 models. This is the person you need your customer journey to serve.

Beyond characteristics, the leads on this path might have had something happen to them or their companies that trigger buying your product. Take Hubspot as an example. In Hubspot's case, there are several catalysts or "triggers" to buying. Here are a few:

If you know this about your product and customer journey, you can tailor everything to that. You can target marketing and sales outreach to sales leaders who are new in their roles, or companies that just raised funding. You can partner with agencies or accelerators, giving them incentives to switch clients to your product.

If you cannot articulate at least three moments or catalysts for buying, spend time looking at your successful customers and tracing their journeys back to the beginning. How did they find you? Why were they looking for you? Who made the decision and what else was going on at the time?

Optimizing Your Customer Journey Strategy

Once you've established the happy path, figure out how to replicate its success. Get prospects who aren't on it to be on it. Realize that different segments may have different happy paths. For example, an SMB sales motion might not require demos at all–a free trial might be sufficient–while a large enterprise sales motion might require a few demos, to get buy in from different stakeholders.

Understanding your customer's journey is critical to building a successful GTM motion. By looking at each part of the journey–both marketing and sales–you can smooth out the rough patches, so more prospects can become customers more quickly.

Finding our content helpful?

We at Silverwood Advisors are committed to supporting Founders in their journey to building successful startups.

Our Podcast, Seed to Sequoia, offers practical advice for founders from investors and successful startup founders. Get it on Apple Podcasts or any other podcast platform.