What is CRM Customer Relationship Management?

Outsourcing to a research firm provided us with insights we couldn’t have gathered on our own, like identifying demand trends that shaped our go-to-market strategy. Now, I know that talking to even five customers can uncover insights that hard numbers might miss. Based on insights from over 3,000 researchers across the globe, the 2025 Qualtrics Market Research Trends Report reveals that there is a growing demand for extensive research. I’ve seen companies match each other move for move because they’re all drawing from the same small pool of insights.

The future state map outlines the ideal interactions and improvements that should be made to create a smooth and engaging buying experience. Businesses use it to Business-to-business customer journey analyze real-time customer interactions and find opportunities for improvement. Finding out these barriers allows businesses to make improvements, such as providing clearer content, faster customer support, and transparent pricing. Creating a B2B customer journey map includes defining buyer personas, identifying key touchpoints, gathering information, and mapping the journey.

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Why Conduct Customer Journey Mapping?

• From a business perspective, this is where having a sharp understanding of your audience and target personas comes into play.
• Combining these insights, we propose that B2B CJMC exerts a stronger effect on customer loyalty but a weaker effect on customer-related coordination costs in B2B relationships, which are characterized by high switching costs.
• A customer journey map is a visual representation of these customer interactions with an organization.
• The B2B Customer Journey involves multiple touchpoints, lengthy timelines, and complex interactions.

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Day-in-the-life map

Armed with Strella’s insights, Ritual adjusted their pricing rollout. Ritual received immediate insights on where customers were confused about pricing, what they liked, and what worried them. Next, Ritual is hiring Strella’s AI moderator to conduct interviews and quickly gather actionable insights. Use the insights to refine financial forecasts, pricing strategies, and resource allocation. Focus first on high-impact, actionable items to ensure your plan drives real results.

Benefits of creating a customer journey map

After data analysis, it’s time to make sense of your findings, interpret the data, and extract key insights you need for different sections of your business plan. An important typical question regarding customer journey mapping is “How to map customer journey B2B? This blog will break down what is B2B customer journey and B2B customer journey map and why it’s a game-changer for your business. Companies that use tools like customer journey maps reduce their cost of service by 15-20%. For individual factors, what skill sets do top- and lower-level managers need to develop B2B CJMC?

Laying the Path: Modelling a B2B Customer Journey in Commodity Markets

The positive effect of B2B CJMC on customer-related coordination costs is stronger under a high number of touchpoints. Accordingly, we argue that a high number of touchpoints will increase the influence of B2B CJMC on customer loyalty but also on customer-related coordination costs. These new touchpoints offer additional benefits to the customer, but they also need to be managed and integrated into existing CJs. The positive effect of B2B CJMC on customer-related coordination costs is weaker under high switching costs. Drawing on the RBV and our managerial insights, we suggest that B2B CJMC's success is greater in relationships with high customer switching costs, due to the reduction of a supplier’s external dynamism.

To glean further insights into B2B CJMC’s overall impact, we tested for an indirect effect of B2B CJMC on ROS. Second, we compared archival data (i.e., ROS, Return on Assets (ROA), and ROI; firm level data from ORBIS) of our responding managers and the initial sample. Third, we controlled for the industry’s technological change, with managers assessing it within the last three years on a single-item 7-point scale (Jaworski & Kohli, 1993). To measure the third moderator related to the firm type, product versus service, managers split average sales for the last three years into product and service sales on a 100-point scale (Antioco et al., 2008). For the construct of number of touchpoints, we used three items that measure the number of marketing, sales, and service-related supplier-controlled touchpoints compared with competitors. More precisely, for switching costs, we used three items adapted from Lam et al. (2004) that refer to a customer’s required money, effort, and time to move to another supplier.

Even if you’ve enjoyed success in B2C, it’s time to reshape your customer journey for B2B. For organizational factors, we regard culture, structure, and digital capabilities, as facilitators and inhibitors of B2B CJMC, as particularly important. Thus, future research could investigate which organizational and individual factors drive B2B CJMC. The collection of data at scale from sources such as product reviews, blogs, and professional networks offer important opportunities to do so (see Berger et al., 2020). Regarding the internal forces, what company factors (e.g., margin pressure) drive the need for B2B CJMC? For example, what market-related (e.g., customer pressure) and industry-related (e.g., digital maturity) factors should be considered?

There’s a whole load of other steps to go through before committing to a purchase. Understanding that complexity is essential in planning your customer service and marketing strategies. The B2B customer journey is a complex matter, packed with a host of different touchpoints that affect customer experience.