Creating a B2B buyer journey map in 8 steps

When I started working with B2B companies, I quickly realized that understanding how your customers make purchasing decisions is just as important as knowing your product inside and out. This is where a B2B buyer journey map becomes an invaluable asset.

A well-crafted buyer journey map provides valuable insight into your potential customers‘ decision-making process. It helps you identify opportunities to nurture leads and ultimately drive more product sign-ups. This post offers an 8-step approach that consistently delivers results. But before then, let’s run through the basics.

Table of Contents

Every effective journey map begins with clearly defined buyer personas. These detailed profiles represent the different decision-makers and influencers involved in the purchasing process.

For B2B, this typically includes:

• Primary decision-makers (often C-suite executives)
• Technical evaluators
• End users
• Financial gatekeepers

For each persona, document:

• Demographics and professional background
• Job responsibilities and KPIs
• Pain points and challenges
• Goals and objectives
• Information sources they trust
• Decision-making criteria

Understanding these personas is essential because they behave differently across the traditional buyer’s journey stages — what motivates someone in the Awareness Stage differs significantly from what they need during the Decision Stage.

2. Identify all potential touchpoints.

Next, catalog every possible interaction point between your prospects and your business. This includes both digital and offline touchpoints:

• Industry events and conferences
• Website visits (specific pages)
• Content downloads
• Social media engagement
• Email communications
• Sales calls and presentations
• Product demos
• Customer testimonials and case studies
• Third-party review sites

Be detailed here — I’ve seen companies discover critical touchpoints they completely overlooked. Remember that touchpoints in the Awareness Stage (like blog content and social media) serve different purposes than those in the Consideration Stage (product demos, case studies) or Decision Stage (pricing pages, sales conversations).

3. Map core journey stages.

While every business has unique nuances, most B2B buyer journeys follow these core stages:

1. Awareness: The prospect recognizes a problem or opportunity.
2. Research: They begin investigating potential solutions.
3. Consideration: They evaluate specific vendors and products.
4. Decision: They select a solution and negotiate terms.
5. Onboarding: They implement the solution.
6. Usage: They use the product regularly.
7. Expansion: They consider additional features or products.
8. Advocacy: They become promoters of your solution.

These stages provide granular detail and can benefit your team in more ways than one. We spoke with Aurelia Heitz, a user research and strategy expert from Centigrade, about her perspective on the ways thorough mapping can benefit the customer and your business operations: “There’s the journey that someone takes through your product. And then there’s the journey that someone takes in their own real life outside of your product.”

You want to have a roadmap for reaching your customers, analyzing how you can better serve them outside of their primary objective, or positioning them for business growth in the future. In B2B, you‘re not just trying to get a business to buy; you’re working to build their success and make advocates who are impressed with your product.

For a deeper exploration, check out our comprehensive guide to understanding the buyer’s journey.

4. Conduct customer research.

Heitz goes on to say, “You understand their context and how they would integrate your product and like what they need. And so oftentimes that you know, helps you think of features that you didn’t even think of.”

You need data directly from customers to validate your assumptions, so a thorough analysis of your customers can not only improve your service offering but also change how you innovate for them based on information or trends you discover.

Practical research methods include:

• Customer interviews (both successful conversions and lost opportunities)
• Sales team interviews
• Support team feedback
• Website analytics
• CRM data analysis
• Heat mapping and session recordings
• Customer surveys

This research will help you understand not just what prospects do at each stage, but why they do it — crucial insight for mapping how the traditional Awareness, Consideration, and Decision stages play out in your specific market.

5. Document customer goals, questions, and pain points.

For each stage of the journey, document:

• What the customer is trying to accomplish
• Questions they need answered
• Concerns or obstacles they face
• Emotions they’re experiencing
• Information they require to move forward

This level of detail helps you create highly targeted content and interactions that directly address buyer needs.

6. Analyze current performance and gaps.

Now, assess how well your current marketing and sales efforts align with the journey you’ve mapped:

• Which stages have strong support?
• Where are prospects getting stuck or dropping off?
• What content or touchpoints are missing?
• Are there inconsistencies in messaging across channels?
• Does your CRM capture the right data points to track progress?

7. Design optimized touchpoints.

Based on your analysis, develop specific strategies to improve the buyer experience at each stage:

• Create new content to address unanswered questions
• Redesign website pages to better guide users
• Implement new lead-nurturing sequences
• Train sales teams on addressing stage-specific concerns
• Develop tools that help buyers evaluate your solution

For each touchpoint, clearly define:

• The content or interaction
• The channel or platform
• The responsible team
• The desired outcome
• Metrics to measure success

Our customer journey map guide provides excellent frameworks for organizing these elements.

8. Implement, measure, and refine.

The final step is implementing your optimized journey, measuring results, and continuously refining your approach:

1. Start with high-impact, easy-to-implement changes
2. Establish clear KPIs for each journey stage
3. Create dashboards to monitor progress
4. Schedule regular reviews to assess performance
5. Gather ongoing customer feedback
6. Test new approaches for underperforming stages

Pro tip: Make your journey map a living document. Incorporate quarterly reviews with your team to update your map based on new data and market changes. This prevents the common pitfall of creating a beautiful map that sits unused in a digital drawer.

For teams serious about journey mapping, I recommend checking out our comprehensive customer journey map template, which provides a structured framework that you can customize to your specific needs.