Latest / Customer Journey with Fexingo: Touchpoints, Mapping, and Multi-Channel Marketing / How Customer Journey Maps Miss the B2B Buying Group
Transcript
- Lucas: So, a few weeks ago I was talking to the VP of Revenue Operations at a mid-market SaaS company—around 200 employees, selling a compliance platform to other businesses. And she told me something that stopped me cold. Luna: I'm ready. What was it? Lucas: She said their customer journey map was actually making their deals worse. Not irrelevant—actively worse. Because it was designed for a single decision-maker, but their average deal involved six stakeholders. Luna: Six. That's a lot of people to get aligned. And I bet their map only showed the champion or the economic buyer. Lucas: Exactly. They had a beautiful, polished journey map—awareness, consideration, decision, post-purchase. All the classic stages. But every single touchpoint was built around one persona: the IT director who'd been their initial contact. Meanwhile, the CFO was getting bombarded with technical whitepapers, and procurement was being asked to approve a deal they'd never even heard of. Luna: That sounds like a recipe for stalling. Did she have data on how often deals got stuck? Lucas: Yeah—about forty percent of their sales-qualified leads were going dark after the demo stage. Not lost to a competitor, not 'no decision.' Just silence. When they dug into it, the reason was almost always the same: a stakeholder outside the mapped persona had a question or objection that no one addressed. Luna: So the map was creating blind spots. It showed them exactly where they expected friction to be, but not where it actually was. Lucas: Right. And this is the problem with a lot of B2B journey maps. We borrow the frameworks from B2C—one person, one journey—and just slap a 'business' label on it. But in B2B, the customer isn't a person. The customer is a group. Luna: And the group doesn't move in lockstep. The CFO might enter the journey at the evaluation stage, while the end-user has been there since awareness. Lucas: Exactly. So what this team did—and I think this is really smart—is they built what they called a 'buying group overlay.' They kept their original journey map as the backbone, but then they created parallel tracks for each key stakeholder: the champion, the economic buyer, the technical evaluator, the procurement manager, and the executive sponsor. And they plotted those tracks against the same timeline. Luna: So it's like five journey maps stacked on top of each other. That sounds complicated. Lucas: It does. But the VP told me it didn't have to be perfect. They started with just three personas: the IT director, the CFO, and procurement. And by overlaying them, they immediately saw a problem they'd missed for two years. Luna: What was it? Lucas: There was a gap between when the IT director got the demo and when the CFO got a business case. In their old map, that gap didn't exist because they only saw the IT director's journey. But when they added the CFO's track, they realized there was a seven-day period where the CFO had zero engagement. No email, no call, no content. Meanwhile, the IT director was eager to move forward, but the CFO wasn't ready. So the deal stalled. Luna: Seven days of silence—that's an eternity in a sales cycle. Especially if the competitor is filling that gap with their own cfo focused messaging. Lucas: Yeah. And the fix wasn't complicated. They created a one-pager specifically for the CFO—three bullet points on ROI, a simple payback period calculation, and a risk assessment. They started sending that to the CFO on day three after the demo. And within a quarter, their deal velocity from demo to close improved by twenty-three percent. Luna: Twenty-three percent just from adding one touchpoint for one persona. That's a huge return on a pretty small effort. Lucas: And that's the thing—most B2B teams already have the content. They have the ROI calculator, they have the case study for procurement, they have the technical spec. But they're not mapping it to the right person at the right stage. The journey map, when it only shows one path, hides that misalignment. Luna: It reminds me of something I read about Gong's research—they analyzed thousands of sales calls and found that deals with five or more stakeholders involved had a much higher win rate, but only if all stakeholders were engaged before the proposal stage. If they entered later, win rates dropped. Lucas: That's the same dynamic. Early engagement across the group is the key. And the journey map can be the tool that reveals whether you're doing that or not. Luna: You know, these conversations we have about customer journeys—they really do change how you see your own business. If you're finding that these episodes spark ideas you've actually applied, that's exactly why we do this. And listener support is what keeps the show ad-free and independent. If you've gotten value from Fexingo Business, you can support us at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's a small way to keep these deep dives coming. Lucas: Yeah, and we mean it—no pressure, ever. But knowing that people find this useful is what keeps us going. So thank you to anyone who's already chipped in. Luna: Alright, back to the buying group overlay. So what other insights did they get from adding those extra tracks? Lucas: One of the biggest was around content handoffs. They realized that their procurement team was receiving a proposal that assumed the technical evaluation was complete. But in many deals, the technical evaluation was still ongoing. So procurement was trying to negotiate terms on a solution that hadn't even been fully validated yet. That created friction and delay. Luna: So the journey map revealed a sequencing problem. The technical and commercial tracks were out of sync. Lucas: Exactly. They changed the process so that procurement didn't enter until the technical team had signed off internally. That alone cut the average sales cycle by eleven days. Luna: That's a great example of why the overlay matters. It's not just about adding more touchpoints—it's about ordering them correctly across the group. Lucas: Right. And the VP told me that once they had the overlay, they started running what she called 'stakeholder health checks' at the end of each week. They'd look at each active deal and ask: who have we not engaged yet? Is there a persona that's missing from our communication? That became a routine that prevented deals from going dark. Luna: So it shifted from reactive to proactive. Instead of wondering why a deal stalled, they had a system to catch it early. Lucas: Yeah. And the data backed it up. Within two quarters, their win rate on deals with five or more stakeholders went from thirty-eight percent to fifty-two percent. That's a massive improvement. Luna: Fifty-two percent is solid for complex B2B. I'd take that any day. Lucas: So the takeaway here isn't that you need to throw away your existing journey map. It's that you need to ask: who are we not seeing? Because the map is only as good as the personas it includes. Luna: And in B2B, that means going beyond the champion. Map the economic buyer, the technical evaluator, the implementation team, and procurement. Even if you start with just two or three, you'll likely find a friction point you didn't know existed. Lucas: Exactly. Start with the personas that cause the most stalls—usually the CFO and procurement. Build their tracks. And then look for the handoff gaps. That's where the quick wins are. Luna: It's almost like you're building a dependency map of the buying group. Each stakeholder has their own timeline, and until all dependencies are resolved, the deal doesn't close. Lucas: That's a great way to put it. And once you see it that way, the journey map becomes a tool for orchestration, not just documentation. You're not just describing what happens—you're designing what should happen, for each person, in the right order. Luna: So for anyone listening who's dealing with B2B pipeline leakage, where would you tell them to start? Lucas: Pull your last ten lost deals. For each one, list every stakeholder who was involved. Then ask: at what stage did each stakeholder first engage? If you see a pattern—like the CFO always comes in after the demo, or procurement never gets contacted until the proposal—that's your overlay gap. Fix that one handoff, and you'll see movement. Luna: Simple audit, high leverage. I like it. Lucas: And if you already have a journey map, add a column for each key persona. Just a lightweight version. You'll be surprised what you find. Luna: Alright, that's a wrap for this episode. Next time, we're going to look at how customer journey maps can reveal hidden pricing friction—something a lot of teams miss because they're focused on the product side. Lucas: Looking forward to it. Until then, keep mapping.