The customer journey is the general process followed by a person when becoming a customer. Here we’ll group customers into four primary stages and then dig deeper into managing customers in HubSpot using lead scoring. In the beginning, the lead score and staging will be used to help focus on the leads that are the furthest along. As teams grow, those help define who’s working on a lead, where leads are getting stuck (so we can develop ways to get them unstuck), and ways to automate communicating with leads so sellers can swap out those manual tasks with tasks that require a human.
The general stages of a customer journey include the following:
Awareness: People are looking for answers, insights, resources, education
Consideration: People are looking for justification, determining if we’re a good fit
Decision: People are making a final purchase decision
Nurturing: People are now customers and should be retained
There are two sides of the customer journey: That of the customer and that of the organization in dealing with the customer. The organization's side of that journey might look like the following:
Mapping these activities to stages is the CRM will require some work in engineering and will likely end up displacing some other items in the roadmap, but the insight will be invaluable. This mostly involves using a webhook or API call to CRM to transfer pieces of information.
Below is a modified SiriusDecisions Demand Waterfall that has been tailored for a pretty generic SaaS-provider use. In it, we removed the TAL and SAL stages in order to accommodate for a much smaller sales team and no split between Sales Development Representative (SDR) and Account Executive (AE) roles.
Note that the first three stages of this lifecycle are nurturing a customer into becoming a marketing qualified lead. A smaller organization can shorten this by having a rep reach out sooner and thus inorganically moving leads through the funnel faster. Given the stage we are in, this makes sense; however, we should have the technology put into place to allow for a more granular funnel before it becomes too difficult to do so.
Once a lead is being worked on by someone on staff, then how to deal with each is part of what’s covered in the daily meetings. Listen in on at least a couple of calls per week in the beginning, providing a great time to take notes and offer feedback on how the seller is doing at working with each customer. But be careful not to interfere so as to let the seller grow in their discipline. Additionally, workshop various product ideas with the people making those calls and sending those messages.
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