B2B marketing is like the proverbial iceberg. Above the surface, you see a gleaming, glossy website—all rounded edges and easy user experience. But below the waves, there is a huge, complex architecture that guides B2B buyers toward sales, reviews, and renewed subscriptions.
This is the B2B customer journey. It’s often more complicated than B2C customer journeys, with complex technical demands, long sales cycles, and multiple stakeholders.
The secret to its success? As many touchpoints as possible. Think of them as facets on the iceberg’s surface—each one is another opportunity to catch a potential customer’s eye.
In this extensive guide, we’ll explore how connected technologies like QR Codes can increase and improve customer engagement with more touchpoints throughout the B2B customer journey.
Note: The brands and examples discussed below were found during our online research for this article.
What is the B2B customer journey?
The B2B customer journey is the entire lifecycle of a customer: from initial awareness of a problem to purchasing a solution, onboarding, and the ongoing customer experience.
The customer journey is more than the B2B buying journey. It goes beyond sales to include things like customer retention, advocacy, and constructive feedback. From a marketer’s point of view, it’s the progress from lead nurturing to post-purchase relationship management.
SaaS and B2B prospects have a very different experience than that of the B2C customer journey. Where B2C products are designed for a mass market, B2B marketing strategies focus on a highly segmented, niche audience. And while many B2C purchases come down to an impulsive decision from one buyer, B2B sales can take months of discussion with multiple stakeholders.
The other thing that defines the B2B customer journey is its high value. The small pool of leads and extended sales cycles are worth it because B2B customers have a significant lifetime value.
This is especially true for B2B companies that get to know their audiences, map the customer journey, and commit to delighting and retaining their customers.
Why are touchpoints so important in customer journeys?
A “touchpoint” describes any interaction that a client or potential client has with a business. Seeing an ad in search results, stopping by an expo stall, and opening a customer service chat are all touchpoints. And they’re all opportunities to build trust and encourage customer loyalty.
The B2B customer journey generally contains more touchpoints than the B2C journey. Because it’s longer and involves more stakeholders, you need more opportunities to build relationships and share information ahead of a potential sale.
Understanding the many touchpoints in the B2B customer journey is key to customer experience optimization. If even one touchpoint falls below the standards that your customers expect, then the spell is broken. They could lose trust, get frustrated, or decide to buy from someone else.
In the next sections, we’ll review common stages and touchpoints in the customer journey so you can start mapping out your own unique version.
Key stages in the B2B customer journey
There are five stages of the customer journey: awareness, consideration, decision-making, onboarding, and retention. The first three describe the buyer journey, while onboarding and retention are about how you handle clients after the sale.
Awareness
The B2B customer journey starts when someone realizes that they have a problem—and becomes aware that your business is a potential solution.
Ads are a major channel for awareness. Social media ads, search ads, and out-of-home (OOH) advertising are all ways potential customers discover new B2B solutions. However, people might also come across your brand more intentionally through search results, content marketing, organic social media, or in-person industry events.
It’s up to you to build on those touchpoints and capitalize on that first moment of awareness. For example, you might display a QR Code that links to your social media pages at an in-person event so that potential customers can stay in touch with you. Then you might include a short, branded link in your social media profile that guides visitors to a landing page featuring your services.
Consideration
In the next stage, competition kicks in. Chances are that your sales prospects are considering more than one solution to their problem. Your competitors will undoubtedly try to reach these leads with their own ads and content.
You’ll need to convince potential clients that you are the best option through educational content, case studies, and testimonials. These types of content establish your expertise, authority, and credibility in the industry. Each content asset is a touchpoint that can lead potential customers further down the marketing funnel.
For example, reading one informational blog post might lead them to read a whole series. Watching a video case study might inspire them to sign up for a product demo.
Decision
Over time, potential customers get closer to choosing a solution. They understand their problem, and they know about the different options available to them. It’s up to you to trigger their final decision.
This is when customers are ready to interact with your business directly. Proposals, offers, and personalized product demos are used to drive a purchase decision. It’s important to follow up regularly during this stage, especially given the long sales cycle of most B2B procurements.
To close the sale, you need to make the decision as simple for customers as possible. Once they’ve gone through the trouble of reading a proposal or watching a product demo, give them an opportunity to sign up right away. Use connected touchpoints, like purpose-built landing pages, so that they can follow up on the purchase decision immediately.
Onboarding
Congratulations, you made the sale! But it would be fatal to forget your customer at this point. In fact, B2B companies report that nearly 35% of prospects drop off after sign-up and before their first session with a new product. In other words, without onboarding support, your new client may soon want a refund.
You can reduce the drop-off rate by offering comprehensive, timely customer support across a range of channels, including phone, live chat, or even in-person assistance.
For digital products, you can include branded short links to ensure that customer support is only a click away. For physical products or guides, QR Codes mean that customers can access support with a simple smartphone scan.
Retention and growth
Once you’re past onboarding, it’s time to think about customer retention. According to live research from Baremetrics, B2B companies of all sizes have an average revenue churn rate of 5–8%.
That’s only a couple of percentage points below their average growth rate—meaning that improving customer retention could reduce losses and boost growth significantly.
You can retain customers through an effective customer service strategy that includes regularly checking in with clients. Over time, you might also be able to upsell them or transform them into customer advocates for your business.
Common touchpoints at each stage
Every brand has its own strategy and preferred communication channels, but here are some of the most common touchpoints for each stage of the B2B customer journey.
You can connect customers with these touchpoints through QR Codes, short links, purpose-made landing pages, or even print versions of content. The goal is to make it easy for customers to discover, learn about, and trust you.
Marketing touchpoints
Marketing touchpoints are the first contact that potential clients have with your business. They usually include things like:
- Website visits, including specific landing pages
- Organic social media engagement
- Impressions of social media ads
- Search ads
- Organic search results
- Industry events, such as trade shows
Your goal for these touchpoints is to make leads aware of your business and draw them down the marketing funnel. Next, you can nurture them toward a sale with persuasive content marketing, including:
- Blog posts
- Whitepapers
- Webinars
- Podcasts
- Conference appearances
- Email marketing
Your audience is the largest at this stage of the B2B customer journey. More people will interact with marketing touchpoints than your sales, onboarding, or retention touchpoints. But even at this stage, don’t ignore the value of personalization. Including leads’ names in emails or personalizing content based on their needs can make a big difference in conversion rates.
Sales touchpoints
Over time, some leads will progress toward making a decision and purchase. It’s crucial to strengthen relationships at this stage and offer more direct touchpoints, such as:
- Virtual calls
- In-person meetings
- Product demos
- Proposals
All of these touchpoints are an opportunity to establish a relationship and showcase your expertise, authority, and customer service. It’s also important to keep personalizing your message to each potential client’s needs, pain points, and goals.
While the B2B purchasing process can take months, you’ll need to follow up regularly to keep leads engaged and show them how much you value their business.
Onboarding touchpoints
The touchpoints for onboarding new customers are more complex and interactive. You have several goals at this stage—not just creating an easy user experience but also setting expectations and building confidence in your products and services. The post-purchase experience can seriously affect how customers feel about your business, good or bad.
Post-purchase touchpoints might include:
- Training sessions.
- Virtual or live support for implementing a solution.
- Kick-off meetings.
- How-to guides for customers to use at their own pace in text, video, or visual formats.
- Customer service channels to handle issues as they come up.
- Progress tracker tools so that you can spot problems and intervene right away.
Support touchpoints
Throughout a customer’s relationship with your business, customer support will be an important part of their experience. They should be able to turn to you when they have new needs, want new functionality in a product or service, or discover new problems.
Common customer service touchpoints include:
- Helpdesk tickets.
- Live chats.
- Live phone lines.
- FAQ pages on your website.
- Customer forums.
- Self-service knowledge bases in text, video, or visual format.
B2B customers have the same expectations of personalized omnichannel service as B2C customers. However, they’re also unique because they increasingly prefer self-service options. It’s a good idea to have a mix of help resources so that clients can choose whether to handle an issue by themselves or get assistance.
You can add more support touchpoints—and increase customer satisfaction—by following up after customer service interactions. This includes things like:
- Satisfaction ratings on self-service content.
- Follow-up emails after support chats or helpdesk tickets.
- Customer satisfaction surveys.
Retention touchpoints
Retention touchpoints are how you keep the customer relationship alive and well. Instead of leaving customers on their own after onboarding, you should check in regularly to assess their satisfaction and changing needs.
Retention touchpoints might include:
- Quarterly check-in calls or visits.
- Performance reviews of the product or service.
- Customer success updates.
- Exclusive offers for existing customers.
- Loyalty programs.
- Email newsletters.
Customer loyalty helps maximize the value of each customer over time. You can get even more from long-term customer relationships by cross-selling and upselling as you learn more about each client and their business goals.
Advocacy touchpoints
If you get onboarding, customer service, and retention right, then you may be rewarded with a customer advocate. This is when a client is so delighted with your service that they actively recommend it to other prospects within their network.
Customer advocacy is immensely valuable. Word-of-mouth has always been one of the most powerful and persuasive marketing channels, but it’s especially important in B2B, where 75% of buyers consult at least three advocacy sources before they make a purchase.
However, if you wait for customer advocacy to happen on its own, you might be waiting a while. Instead, you can use advocacy touchpoints to invite your customers to speak up.
This might include:
- Requests for testimonials.
- Requests for referrals.
- Invitations to participate in case studies.
- Featuring clients in blogs or events.
- Offering incentives for testimonials and referrals.
Digital touchpoints
So far, we’ve talked about a range of touchpoints for each stage of the B2B customer journey. But, at a time when customers increasingly prefer a self-service, omnichannel experience, it’s worth exploring digital touchpoints.
Digital touchpoints are self-service opportunities for customers to learn about your business or use resources that you provide. While you create these digital experiences, you don’t have to interact directly with customers each time. The touchpoint is there for customers to use when they want.
Digital touchpoints include things like:
- Interactive calculators for customers to see how much money a solution will save them.
- Interactive configurators for customers to customize a software product or service on their own.
- QR Codes that customers can scan to access resources, guides, or product demos. You can use a QR Code generator like Bitly to create branded codes that link to videos, forms, landing pages, and more.
- Email campaigns that customers can read on their own schedule and refer back to over time.
- Chatbots or live chats for customers to request help when they want it.
How to identify and map touchpoints
The unique journey that your B2B customers follow will depend on who they are, what content they consume, and their needs, pain points, and goals. Here’s how to research and create your own B2B customer journey map.
Define your customer personas
Most B2B companies have a highly specific audience. That audience will also contain individual segments, each with its own specific needs.
A SaaS company might create fundraising software designed for education nonprofits, charities, and schools. Each of those segments will have its own demographics, customer needs, and goals.
Start by gathering data about your different audience segments, including:
- Demographics of the people who make purchase decisions.
- Job roles of the people who make purchase decisions.
- Industry or company challenges.
- Industry or company goals.
- Common pain points.
You can use customer interviews, surveys, and focus groups alongside market research to gather data. Primary information from your ideal customers is essential.
While you could just invent buyer personas to describe your audience—or ask a generative AI to do so—the results would be based on your own assumptions and past experiences. In contrast, your real, live audience might surprise you.
Outline your sales and marketing funnel
Once you know your target audience, you can start outlining their journey.
Start simple with the flow from initial awareness to purchase to customer retention. Then you can start filling in more details. You might list touchpoints and customer interactions for each stage of the customer journey or highlight pain points and emotions that customers are likely to feel at each stage.
Consider any moments in the decision-making process where customers are likely to convert—or drop out of the funnel. You need to know these points so that you can design the customer journey to carry people through those “moments of truth.”
Finally, it can be helpful to identify which people or departments own specific moments in the customer journey. You could label the point in onboarding where sales reps hand contacts over to customer service so that you can make sure customers don’t fall through the gap. You might even rate your performance across different touchpoints or highlight areas for improvement.
Analyze customer feedback
Direct customer feedback is some of the most valuable data you have. It can show you weak points in the customer journey or uncover how you stand out from the competition. You’ll need to collect feedback from a range of customers to identify recurring themes.
Some common ways to collect feedback include:
- Regular surveys about the user experience.
- One-on-one interviews to understand customer expectations, customer needs, and how they were met.
- Quick thumbs-up/thumbs-down ratings after customer service chats or calls.
It’s also important to follow up on the feedback you receive. If a customer is unhappy with the service they’ve received so far, you can turn things around by acknowledging their concerns and what you did to address them. And customers who love your business will become even more loyal if you thank them for positive reviews and ratings.
Leverage analytics tools
As customer journeys get more complex and multi-channel, you need a way to track customer interactions over time. Most large customer relationship management tools (CRMs) help you track the customer journey, or you can use a purpose-built customer journey platform.
Basic data includes things like how and when someone contacted you, so you understand the history and preferences of individual customers.
However, you can also use analytics to understand the customer journey on a larger scale and discover which channels, content, and messaging are most effective for your target audience.
This includes aggregate customer data, such as:
- Engagement and conversion rates from individual touchpoints or pieces of content.
- Time spent with content assets.
- Heatmaps and click tracking to understand customer behavior.
- Drop-off points in the marketing funnel.
- Customer churn rates.
Visualize the journey
There are two reasons to make your customer journey map visual.
First, it can help you understand the journey more clearly, turning written research and metrics into an instantly meaningful diagram. Flowcharts or customized journey mapping software can help you create readable visual guides.
Second, visual representations can be a valuable reminder for customer service, marketing, and sales teams. You could create videos, slide decks, or even physical posters depicting the customer journey to help keep everyone in alignment.
Challenges in managing B2B touchpoints
The B2B customer journey includes some unique challenges that B2C companies rarely face.
Multiple decision-makers mean that you’ll need to offer multiple touchpoints to keep potential customers engaged. You’ll also need a customer journey map to guide you through the long, slow decision-making process. And you’ll need to integrate different sources of customer data to monitor your progress.
Let’s take a closer look at the three main challenges for managing B2B touchpoints.
Fragmented systems
B2B companies have access to more data than ever. Ad metrics, heat maps, click tracking, customer feedback, and customer relationship management platforms produce significant amounts of information. But that information is only useful if you can understand and process it.
What’s more, in a time when people expect a connected customer experience, you need to have all the data at your fingertips whenever you interact with clients. No one wants to waste time re-stating their account details or explaining their customer service issue over and over again.
The B2B customer journey has to balance multiple omnichannel and personalized touchpoints with seamless data sharing. That means a demand for sales, marketing, and customer service platforms that integrate well with other tech.
Long sales cycles
The average B2B sales cycle takes over a month—and in some cases, the buying process can last much, much longer. B2B marketers and sales teams face the challenge of keeping customers engaged throughout that time.
You can keep up the momentum by continuing to offer valuable content and personalized interactions. You’ll need a CRM platform that tracks individual leads’ progress through the buyer’s journey, as well as a deep reserve of content and digital resources to draw on.
Multiple stakeholders
Think about the last time you stepped into a café and ordered a coffee. You didn’t consult anyone but yourself. You looked at the options, chose one that sounded good, and placed your order.
Now compare that to the B2B customer journey. The CFO is in your ear, asking why you walked into this coffee shop instead of one down the street. Did you compare prices before you walked in? The IT team is complaining that they don’t like the payment systems at this location. Customer service is tugging at your sleeve, reminding you that some people prefer oat milk over dairy. This decision is going to take a while.
The average B2B enterprise buying group has 5–11 stakeholders. Each one of those decision-makers is going through their own buyer journey—even if you never interact with them directly.
That’s why it’s important to include a range of digital experiences and resources, both for stakeholders who want to do their own research and to support stakeholders who are championing your solution to their fellow decision-makers.
Tips for optimizing B2B customer journey touchpoints
You need multiple cross-channel touchpoints to guide B2B customers from brand awareness to brand advocacy. Follow these tips to make those touchpoints even more effective.
Personalize communication
Over 70% of customers expect personalization from the brands they buy from. That expectation translates into increased revenue and growth from companies that focus on personalized messaging.
You can personalize touchpoints throughout the B2B customer journey in a variety of ways.
First, you should address leads by name and track their past interactions with you. You can tailor email campaigns, content recommendations, and proposals to potential customers based on the pain points and goals they share with you. You can even create personalized landing pages or Dynamic QR Codes with content designed for specific audience segments.
If you don’t have much data on an individual prospect yet, audience segmentation helps predict which content, communication channels, or offers will likely appeal to them. This is where buyer persona research really pays off.
Streamline processes
Offering multiple touchpoints, personalizing each one, and following up with clients throughout the customer journey is a lot of work. You’ll need automation tools to make it possible.
You can utilize tools that auto-schedule follow-ups and reminders, so your team just has to pick up the phone or write an email when prompted. You can set up automatic workflows so that when someone fills out a registration form for a product demo, their details are automatically added to the CRM, and a sales email campaign begins.
The most important part of automation is integration. Transferring data between your CRM, marketing tools, and customer service platforms should happen automatically, without any manual intervention from your team.
Ensure consistent messaging
One straightforward way to make touchpoints more effective is to make them consistent. Your brand image, values, and tone of voice should be uniform across every communication channel, from website landing pages to sales emails. And once a potential customer is identified within a particular audience segment, they should receive consistent messaging.
A consistent brand experience reassures customers and builds trust. Without even realizing it, they come to expect the same level of service and support across every touchpoint.
To ensure that all touchpoints are consistent, you’ll need a brand style guide that outlines your messaging for different segments, tone of voice, and visual identity. This should be accessible to everyone on your team so that they speak to customers in the same way.
Act on feedback
Just like automated reminders to follow up with customers, you can set up regular reminders to collect, review, and analyze customer feedback. You might send out annual customer satisfaction surveys or commit to speaking to each client annually about their experience.
Seeing the data over time will help you spot trends and common pain points. What’s more, you’ll build trust with clients when you address feedback visibly through feature updates and changes to your service.
Measure touchpoint performance
Customer feedback is valuable qualitative data. However, you’ll also need quantitative data to assess your performance over time.
Choose a few key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor, such as conversion rates, your net promoter score (NPS), or time-to-response metrics for customer service. You can break down the data to see overall performance, compare the performance of different teams, or even assess individual content assets or touchpoints.
For example, the data might show high levels of customer satisfaction during onboarding but a decline after that. In that case, you could look at improving post-purchase customer service performance.
Or you might find that a particular touchpoint gets a lot of traffic but has low conversion rates. The touchpoint is clearly valued by customers, but its content or messaging needs an update to drive more viewers to act.
You can also use these metrics to run A/B tests on new touchpoints and assets. In other words, you might test different versions of a product demo landing page to see which one achieves a higher conversion rate.
Embrace technology
From personalization to automation, integrations, customer feedback, and performance metrics, the bottom line is this: Technology makes better B2B customer journeys possible.
CRM systems, smart chatbots, automated workflows, and QR Codes are all examples of technology that streamlines touchpoint management. They all provide a more connected, omnichannel experience for customers while feeding valuable data back to you.
The most effective tools are those that cooperate with others. Look for customer journey software that integrates with other tools, updates in real time, and has built-in personalization features to support your touchpoint strategy.
Master the B2B customer journey
B2B customer journeys are long, complex, and involve many stakeholders. But you can guide potential clients along the way with touchpoints that build trust and provide added value.
Improving the customer journey starts with mapping. You can trace your clients from awareness to loyal customers—then create targeted, personalized touchpoints to match. With connected technology, you can give each client a consistent experience across channels and measure your performance over time.
Bitly is a trusted platform for creating, customizing, and tracking touchpoints, from QR Codes to landing pages and short links. You can use Dynamic QR Codes to place touchpoints anywhere, off- and online, and tailor content to individual leads, while custom landing pages and branded short links help you drive audiences toward the content they’ll value most.
Best of all, you’ll get analytics that help you understand how, when, and where potential customers interact with your business.
Join Bitly today to optimize your B2B customer journey and improve sales, customer satisfaction, and customer retention rates.
