I will shout this from the rooftops for as long as I’m in the Customer Success (CS) space: Customer journeys don’t end when a contract is signed — that’s when they start. 

Somewhere over the years, it became the norm in SaaS to haphazardly assign CSMs to new users and start working toward the next shiny logo. This strategy appeared to work in strong market times, but it never really did—and it definitely doesn’t prioritize existing customers enough. As CS leaders, we need to ruthlessly maximize value for our customers and build their journey around that value. It’s not enough to just deliver a product and provide firefighting support. 

Practically, this means diving deep into your customer journey to secure long-term retention and increase expansion rates. 

There’s just one problem. Too many CS teams are clinging to the old playbook: offering support, fire-fighting customer issues, and hoping for the best. 

On the other hand, some CS leaders think it’s impossible to stay commercially-minded and be a customer ally. These leaders think they’re above getting their hands dirty and talk their way out of solving problems. (We think that’s BS, by the way.)

If you design your customer journey around maximizing value for your customers—and cutting out anything that doesn’t bring legitimate value—you’re offering them the best possible experience while also proving the ROI of your solution. 

In this article, we’ll walk you through how to fix a low-performing customer journey, stop churn before it starts, and drive consistent growth post-sale.

Customers changed how they buy, so let’s change how we respond

To say the buyer journey has changed over the past decade is a gross understatement. Said differently, if you’re still thinking in terms of a linear sales funnel, you’re risking the future of your business. 

Today’s B2B buyers are already well on their way to a purchasing decision before they’re even talking to vendors. More than 80% of B2B customers already have a list of preferred vendors before they start the buying process. They’re looking for consultation and collaboration, not a sales pitch. 

With that in mind, the old model of selling first and consulting second makes very little sense now, right? 

The customer journey also looks a lot different after the point of sale, too. Customer Success used to be about showing the maximum possible value a customer could get out of a solution, as quickly as possible. Naturally, this led to an information dump where CSMs shot a firehose of “value” at new customers within their first 60 or 90 days. 

The problem with that approach to the customer journey is that there’s a limit to how much your customers can absorb, learn, and implement at any given time. Most will only adopt a fraction of what you show them during the initial onboarding. 

Value starts to plateau and eventually starts to atrophy over time—and you’re going to struggle when you come into a renewal cycle.

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If that’s what you’re doing, your customer journey will look like the red line in the chart above. You hit the customer with a lot of new information, features, and functionality upfront with the hope of getting them to maximum value as quickly as possible. Everyone’s excited, adoption ticks up, and you’re all happy…until you aren’t. 

Over time, your solution starts to feel like business as usual. The customer’s perception of value actually diminishes when they’ve received it all upfront—and there goes your chance of a renewal. Of course, your product team is likely developing new solutions to make sure you consistently have new value to offer, but what I’m getting at here is simple: Meter how much value you show a customer all at once. There’s no need to gatekeep information that would help them, but there’s also no need to bring up features that aren’t relevant (yet!). 

What you need is a customer journey that guides customers through: 

• An initial conversation to define and capture their desired outcomes and understand how they (and you) can measure your progress toward those outcomes
• Close collaboration between Sales and Success so that the customer’s desired outcomes are communicated clearly and effectively 
• A steady post-sales journey toward those desired outcomes, broken down into small, incremental steps that help customers realize the value of your solution in phases

Let’s look at this new and improved customer journey in more detail. 

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The three building blocks of a successful customer journey

To transform your customer journey from a leaky funnel into a compelling, value-driven pathway to mutual success, consider these three steps: 

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1. Define your customer’s jobs-to-be-done (JTBD)

Your customer journey should be about what your customers want—and how you can help them get there. 

This starts with your understanding of your solution and why most people buy it. Here at Catalyst, we’re pretty opinionated about why customers would invest or should invest in a customer growth platform like ours. 

There are really only a few key jobs those customers are ever going to need to do with a Customer Success Platform (CSP). So, to build our customer journey, we defined those seven key JTBDs, the core reasons why someone would buy a solution like ours. 

Then, we mapped exactly how our platform solves for those particular jobs. 

Then, for each job category, we created a sample maturity model to show what a customer’s growing return on investment (and, subsequently, ours) would look like.

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2. Design a journey that offers continuous value

Time to value is an important metric—but the goal shouldn’t be time to get every customer to the maximum possible value as fast as possible. It’s intuitive to want to, but there’s a better way. 

Instead, offer progressive levels of value as the customer matures on each of the core jobs your solution supports. If you want your revenue growth to look like the quintessential hockey stick, start treating customer journeys like a staircase.

For each job, define a “crawl” stage and a way to measure value and talk about business impact at that level. Then, a “walk” phase, and so on. 

For example, one of the jobs that someone might want to do with Catalyst is to get more insight into their post-sales data so they can make better decisions about the right ways to retain and expand existing accounts. 

The first thing we want to do in this situation is help the customer get a single source of truth from their customer data. That means pulling their data from Salesforce, from their data warehouse, and so on, right into Catalyst. Just being able to integrate their customer data immediately adds value—and that’s step one of our customer journey.  

Then, when we’ve got the data, we build out some critical layouts that align to the six other core JTBDs that our solution addresses. We’re going to move incrementally, edging toward maturity in each core area rather than prioritizing everything at once. 

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3. Focus on business impact 

If you want to orient your customer journey around value delivery, then you have to remember that the customer’s perception of value will atrophy over time. Even if your solution is providing great business value to the customer, that isn’t enough—because over time, the value you’re delivering becomes the baseline. 

Your customers will start saying, “Okay, that's what you did for me yesterday. I need to understand what your platform is going to do for me tomorrow.” 

Here’s another example of how we handle this at Catalyst: 

Anyone who invests in a CSP likely wants to know which accounts have growth opportunities and which ones are at risk. That’s why we always show new customers how to capture, demonstrate, and report on places where there's either risk or growth in their book of business. 

At this point, the CS leader can show up to an executive meeting and easily report on where they see growth, where they see risk, and so on. That's a great “crawl” phase.  

But we don’t stop there; we’ll start to add some automated playbooks to alert the CS team about the actions to take if an account is at risk or ready for expansion. 

And next, maybe we’ll add a full automation sequence—for instance, to start serving up particular content to a specific persona that’s ripe for expansion. 

That’s what we mean by a progression of value delivery. It makes sure customers are gradually adopting what you’re building for them and seeing transformative results from your solution. 

This is the secret to a customer journey that delivers long-term growth. 

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How to determine whether your customer journey needs attention

So, how can you know if your customer journey is outdated? Here’s a series of questions you can ask yourself to benchmark your current journey against industry best practices:

Are you taking a Jobs To Be Done / Job-Solution-Outcome approach?

• Do you and your team understand the key jobs that your solution was built to do? 

• Do you and your team understand the business impact of each of your product’s core features (collaborating on Product and Marketing as needed)? 

• Does your Sales team successfully uncover the customers’ desired outcomes during the discovery process? 

• Is there a mechanism or tool in place to capture those outcomes and convey them to your CS team? 

• Do you have a customer journey broken down into steps that help guide customers toward maturity across each of their JTBDs? 

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Do you have good, clean data? 

• Is there a scalable way to capture starting point data from each customer so it’s easier to track and share their progress in the coming quarters and years? 

• Do you have the ability to measure customer progress toward their desired outcomes? 

• Have you defined relevant KPIs or metrics that truly convey customer value?

• Are you measuring customer business outcomes or just CS team activity? 

• Can you aggregate the relevant data into a single source of truth?

• Do you have sufficient data to draw conclusions and take action?  

• Do you have the data to understand which of your CS playbooks are the most effective? 

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Are you focusing on impact? 

• Have you defined the potential impact of your software for your customers? 

• Have you defined the core functions of your solution that everybody should adopt? 

• Do you have customer feedback to confirm your assumptions about the key areas of impact that your solution provides? 

• Do you have a customer journey that provides incremental moments of impact, over weeks, months, and years? 

• Is your customer journey representative of your customer’s optimal adoption of your platform and interaction with your business? 

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Fix your customer journey with Catalyst 

Unless you checked every single box above, there’s probably room to optimize your post-sales journey and make both your CS organization healthier and your customers’ lives better. 

If you’re ready to create a compelling customer journey, Catalyst can help. Our product, Journey Builder, enables CS leaders to: 

• Define your ideal customer journey for each customer segment
• Communicate the goals and target durations for each stage of the customer journey
• Track customer progression based on clear outcomes
• Use personalized playbooks to build efficiency and repeatability into your processes 

‍Want to see Catalyst in action? Set up your custom demo today.

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