The B2B Journey Map: An Interview with Jim Tincher, President, Heart of the Customer Stephen Shaw 6 days ago <span data-mce-type="bookmark" class="mce_SELRES_start amp-wp-32ab865" data-amp-original-style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;"></span><span hidden data-amp-original-style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-heig</p> <p><strong>ht: </STRONG> 0;” data-mce-type=”bookmark” class=”mce_SELRES_start”></span><span style=" class="amp-wp-2cf7910"> <p><strong>ht: </strong> 0;” data-mce-type=”bookmark” class=”mce_SELRES_start”></p></span><span data-amp-original-style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-heig</p> <p><strong>ht: </STRONG> 0;” data-mce-type=”bookmark” class=”mce_SELRES_start”></span></iframe></p> <h3><span style=" class="amp-wp-9530d27"><strong> Jim Tincher is the President of the CX consulting firm Heart of Customer and author of the book “Do B2B Better”..</strong></span> <p>Make it – ship it – sell it.</p> <p>That’s pretty much the way B2B companies have operated forever. Usually product-centric and sales led, they view customers as “buyers” who are pigeonholed as decision makers, influencers or users. The only thing that truly matters: the size of the sales pipeline. How many marketing-qualified leads? How many sales qualified leads? How many proposals? How many conversions? And then, once the final deal is agreed to, the handoff to the “customer success” team whose job mainly is to make onboarding go as smoothly as possible.</p> <p>According to this old-school selling model, the path to purchase is the customer journey. That journey typically ends with a signed contract. No one thinks too much, if at all, about the post-sale experience: what happens when things don’t go exactly as planned. When products fail to work as advertised. When shipment dates are missed. When the customer urgently requires on-the-spot help. When product needs change. When questions come up that can’t be answered through a routine service call.</p> <p>Accountability for keeping the customer happy gets lost somewhere between sales, field support and service. And certainly it is never within marketing’s purview, whose only job is to keep sales happy. On the executive floor, experience metrics like NPS and customer satisfaction are rarely part of the conversation, overshadowed by the latest market share and revenue figures. </p> <p>All of that explains why most B2B companies are rated at or near the bottom of the CX Maturity scale, according to the XM Institute (1). However, that has finally begun to change in the last few years, mainly due to B2B digital disruption. The buying process has become infinitely more convoluted. A wider circle of stakeholders has got involved in decision making. Buyers no longer want to see a sales person until much later in the buying cycle. They prefer to communicate through digital channels. They are more research driven – more knowledgeable – more demanding – more inclined to shop around. Their expectations are based on their own personal digital lives. </p> <p>As a result, marketing’s job has changed: now B2B marketers need to create a richer digital experience for customers, giving equal attention and weight to all stages of the customer lifecycle. Sales is no longer the exclusive owner of the customer relationship. Marketing has a much larger role to play in securing customer loyalty by enhancing the experience.</p> <p>Around a decade or so ago the concept of journey mapping came into vogue as a way to improve the post-sale experience. By visualizing the steps customers took in their interactions across touchpoints, while identifying their thoughts and emotions as their journey progressed, companies could design a better, more rewarding experience, making it easier for customers to do business with them. So journey mapping became a foundational step in addressing customer satisfaction and loyalty.</p> <p>The problem, of course, is that, a lot of the time, those journey maps end up as just pretty wall posters due to a lack of follow-through. Transformation of the B2B experience can be a complex undertaking due to siloed organizational structures, multiple stakeholders, internal pockets of resistance and a lack of systems integration. It takes commitment and resources to fix pain points by working across functional lines and business units. Executive management has to be fully behind the effort, making CX a priority. And, above all, it takes internal champions with the courage and fortitude to be “changemakers”, according to Jim Tincher, whose book “Do B2B Better” outlines how companies can take a more systematic approach to customer experience design. </p> <p>I began by asking Jim what led him to become an early pioneer in customer journey mapping.</p> <p><strong> Jim Tincher (JT):</strong>: Well, to be honest, I got fired a lot. So I started my business small, business we have to be really customer focused. Went to Best Buy, US retailer again, very customer focused, and went to a large health insurance organization. Came in as a product guy and recognized that not everybody is customer focused. At that point I literally thought every company is customer focused. That’s how you do business. And this organization, nobody in marketing and product development had ever met a client. And we led the nation in sales. We also led the nation in churn. And it wasn’t close but you know, when you’re growing, that covers up a lot of sins. And so I started getting this idea about building around the customer, understanding more about the customer. Started blogging. And then left there, went to a consulting company, got fired went to a research firm. And while I was there I was asked to build a journey map. Had no idea what a journey map was. I said, well, here’s a PowerPoint slide with some bubbles on it, but use this. Now I think you know from our work that that offended me. You can’t take the richest of the customer experience and toss them bubbles on a PowerPoint slide and say that’s it. It’s got to be much more immersive, much more visual. And I didn’t want to do it, but you know, it was my job, I had to do it.</p> <p>But I wrote in my blog about how I would do journey mapping. The top 10 requirements. I showed 10 plus 4 requirements of a customer focused journey map. And my blog was the ugliest website you’ve ever seen. It was bad. I had a friend of mine at church built my logo. It was ugly. But that ugly little blog post went viral. For customer experience – 60,000. I mean we’re not cat video viral, but 60,000 hits at that point. </p> <p>And then around the same time my boss came to me and said, we need you in sales, I said, great, okay, who’s going to take my projects? What do you mean? Well, I’m going to be in sales. No, no, you still have to your projects. Okay, great. What accounts are I get to take over? No, no you’re “new” sales. Okay, where are my leads? Leads? No, no, get out there. You’re in sales. Well, shock. Number of months later I was fired because I hadn’t sold enough. But at that point I was number one on Google for journey mapping.</p> <p>In fact, journey mapping anything, journey mapping software. I was number one link, over Touchpoint Dashboard, which at the time was journey mapping software. And so I thought maybe there’s a business here. I’ve been fired twice in two years. I never wanted to be a consultant, but I found that our approach to journey mapping, mine originally, really resonated. And so we started doing that work and really started to take off and grow. And so I hired on Nicole Newton from Thomson Reuters, my co-author in the first book. And we had a great time along with other members of the team as we grew, really working with companies to take a different, more deliberate approach to journey mapping.</p> <p><strong> Stephen Shaw (SS):</strong>: Yeah, well, obviously your success speaks to how much of a pioneer you’ve been in this area. Now, let’s talk B2B for a second. One of the stats that you cite in the book “Do B2B Better”, is that 80% – 80%! – of B2B companies are stuck at the lower end of the CX maturity curve. Why is it so hard for B2B companies to get this right, to improve? Is it simply the complexity of the organizational structure? What have you seen that really represent the things that are holding companies back from getting the experience right?</p>
