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RevTech

Customer Journey Mapping: Tips for Operators

AlignmentCustomer JourneyRevOps 101

How well do you actually know your customer journey? Going into 2025, top performing SaaS companies are refining the customer journey to drive revenue growth. With the average B2B SaaS sales cycle at 134 days—a significant increase from 107 days in early 2022—it’s crucial to understand and optimize each stage of the customer experience to be as personalized and frictionless as possible. 

Define Your Customer Journey Stages

To understand what your buyers need at each stage of their journey, you first need to know what they are experiencing and how their behaviors are changing. That means you should be establishing distinct exit criteria for each stage. What behavior must someone exhibit to move from one stage to the next?

Knowing this will help you better determine how to help customers move through your pipeline with less friction.

Adopt a Customer-Focused Perspective

One mistake B2B companies make when analyzing their customer journey is focusing too much on what’s happening internally and not enough on the customer’s perspective. Looking at your pipeline in terms of handoffs and internal processes won’t give you the insight you need to identify the gaps that will have the most impact on your revenue.

While there is always a place for reflecting on the experience of your revenue team, the gaps being felt by your customers throughout their journey should always be the priority.

Look at Your Customer Journey Outside Your Function

Do you know what kind of experience your customer is having before their first engagement with you? How about after your direct interaction with them ends?

The problem with these kinds of internal silos is that they translate into friction throughout the buyer journey.

Account Amnesia, as one of our customers calls it, is when your buyer feels as though they’ve been “forgotten” due to clunky handoffs between go-to-market functions.

When you’re able to look at the customer journey holistically, with a clear understanding of the experience you’re delivering at every single stage, it becomes much easier to find and fix gaps.

Identifying High-Impact Gaps in the Customer Journey

The key to understanding and improving your customer journey is not simply mapping it out, but identifying high-impact gaps that affect revenue outcomes and buyer experiences. Our expertise in this area has shown that identifying and closing these gaps can dramatically improve efficiency, customer satisfaction, and conversion rates. Here’s how we approach this:

  1. Start with Data, Not Assumptions
    “Gut feelings” can cloud judgment and prevent you from seeing the whole picture. Instead, leverage customer journey analytics to identify friction points, delays, or drop-offs. Use metrics like time spent in each funnel stage, conversion rates between stages, and customer feedback to guide your decisions, rather than relying on what YOU are feeling.

    Pro Tip: Segment data by customer persona and deal size to uncover the gaps that are impacting your biggest customers and putting high-value opportunities at risk.

  2. Listen to the Customer
    It might be scary, but try interviewing customers who have churned or converted slowly, or some high-value prospects that failed to convert to better understand their perspective. Quantitative data and analytics may reveal the symptoms, but the voice of the customer can help uncover the root cause.

    Pro Tip: Even mature SaaS companies underutilize customer feedback. With the right system in place to capture these insights, you can create a treasure trove of information to identify high-impact gaps. Implement a process to document and report on closed-lost and churned reasons, if you haven’t already.

  3. Watch for “Micro-Gaps”
    The high-impact issues aren’t always the most obvious. Sometimes it’s the “micro-gaps” that feel like “death by 1000 paper cuts.” Check for ambiguous messaging in follow-up cadences, delayed response time for demo requests, sync errors between platform integrations – smaller gaps can have the largest long-term impact on revenue.

    Pro Tip: Use conversation intelligence tools like Gong to analyze sentiment patterns in your sales calls and uncover areas where your prospects and customers are frequently expressing confusion, frustration, or other pain points.

  4. Get the Whole Revenue Team Involved
    We’ve seen that the biggest fixes often require strong collaboration and communication across sales, marketing, product, and customer service teams. Problems with prioritizing and routing leads? Issues with converting MQLs into SAOs? Sounds like silo syndrome. Bring everyone together to align on lead qualification criteria, follow-up messaging, and an efficient team-to-team hand-off process.

    Pro Tip: Conduct quarterly “Rep Rides” to check in on the customer journey and typical day-to-day workflow for your sales and marketing teams to maintain alignment and accountability and spot potential process or systems gaps (hopefully, before they become a problem).

  5. Prioritize Gaps By Revenue Impact
    Data analysis, customer interviews, and rep rides may uncover a LOT of gaps that you did not expect. How do you even know where to start? Not all gaps are created equal. Focus your efforts on closing the gaps that directly impact revenue: lead handoff processes, streamlining the onboarding experience, or reducing your biggest churn triggers.

    Pro Tip: To avoid the anxiety of having to fix everything all at once, use the 80/20 rule to help you take smaller bites; focus on the top 20% of gaps in your customer journey that create 80% of the overall friction. This targeted approach ensures maximum impact with efficient use of resources.

Take Strategic Action

Once you have a full, holistic map of your customer journey and a strategy to identify gaps, what’s next?

✱ Hold Regular Cross-Functional Meetings
Continue holding cross-functional meetings as a unified revenue team. This helps squash silos before they cause real damage and keeps everyone focused on delivering a seamless customer experience.

✱ Talk to Your Customers
Make it a habit to talk to your customers. There’s no better way to gain insight into what you could be doing to close high-impact gaps.

✱ Innovate and Iterate
Build on your internal processes based on what you’ve learned about your customer experience and behaviors at each stage in the journey.

✱ Leverage AI and Automation
In 2025, the integration of AI and automation is transforming the B2B SaaS landscape. AI is critical for customer satisfaction, with 73% of consumers claiming AI enhances their experience. [ZapScale] Implementing AI-driven tools can provide deeper insights into customer behavior, personalize interactions, and streamline processes, thereby enhancing the overall customer journey.

✱ Monitor Key Metrics
Tracking relevant metrics is essential for assessing the effectiveness of your customer journey optimization efforts. Key performance indicators (KPIs) such as Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Net Dollar Retention (NDR), and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) offer valuable insights into the health of your revenue operations. For instance, a 1% change in price optimization can result in an average profit increase of 11.1% [Maxio].

 

By identifying and addressing high-impact gaps, you can drive meaningful improvements in operational efficiency, revenue outcomes, and the buyer experience—ensuring your customer journey stays ahead of the curve in 2025 and beyond.

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