How To Achieve Financial Sustainability Without Sacrificing Impact
Explore practical approaches to achieve lasting financial sustainability for your social innovation
TABLE OF CONTENTS
B2B Customer Journey Mapping: A Missing Link
Discover the missing link in B2B customer journey mapping. Learn how to transform ideas into action with strategic backlogs and roadmaps.
For more on effective customer journeys, see this series
North Star Metric Framework: Five Key Changes to Make Today
The North Star Framework for Effective Member Retention
B2B Customer Journey Mapping: A Missing Link
How To Get Results With Business Process Optimization
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The Crucial Missing Link in B2B Customer Journey Maps
Sarah, a social impact executive at a growing EdTech startup, stared at the colorful B2B customer journey map adorning her office wall. The map, a result of weeks of collaborative effort, showcased every touchpoint and interaction their product had with educational institutions. Yet, as she prepared for the upcoming board meeting, a nagging feeling persisted.
Despite the visual appeal and comprehensiveness of the map, Sarah couldn't shake the sense that something was missing – a crucial element that would transform this static representation into a dynamic tool for driving meaningful change.
What Sarah and her team needed was a strategy that would not only tackle the customer journey but also provide a clear path forward. This is where our approach comes in, offering a more effective way to use B2B customer journey maps.
By focusing on three key elements – the backlog, wish lists, and roadmaps – we can transform static journey maps into dynamic tools for driving business growth and enhancing customer retention.
In the following sections, we'll explore each of these components in detail.
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How a Strategic Backlog Sharpens Your B2B Customer Journey Mapping
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At its core, a strategic backlog is more than just a to-do list.
It's a central source of truth, a carefully curated inventory of prioritized problems and their corresponding solutions. This powerful tool aligns your team's efforts with overarching business goals, ensuring that every action taken is a step towards transforming your B2B customer journey.
However, the journey to creating an effective backlog is fraught with pitfalls. A common misstep is to dive headfirst into solutions without fully grasping the underlying problems. This approach, while tempting in its promise of quick fixes, often leads to misaligned priorities, ineffective resource allocation, and overlooked root causes.
The result? Wasted efforts and missed opportunities for meaningful improvement.
Success Metrics
To sidestep this trap, we must reframe our approach. Begin by establishing a clear definition of success and an accompanying target that reflect your goals, such as improved margins and scalability in your SaaS model.
For some ideas for metrics, check out:
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Problems
With these criteria in place, the next step is to develop a prioritized inventory of problems. This is where many organizations falter, rushing to solutions before fully understanding the challenges at hand.
Starting with solutions instead of core problems can lead to misaligned priorities, ineffective resource allocation, and overlooked root causes, resulting in spending too much effort on superficial problems.
So resist this urge. Instead, focus on identifying and ranking the core problems and bottlenecks in your current processes.
For more on this, see the below
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Solutions
Only after clarifying your top problems and processes should you move on to brainstorming and prioritizing solutions.
An additional benefit of starting with problems is that you are encouraged to brainstorm a wide set of options to solve the problem (instead of getting hooked on the first one or two solution ideas you generate).
Difficult problems can lead to costly or risky solutions. I recommend you brainstorm broadly, using ideas to reduce scope creep and achieve results faster.
By following this sequence, you ensure that your efforts are directed at solving the most pressing issues rather than addressing symptoms or implementing unnecessary features.
For more on this, read the below:
Resource Allocation
Once you have your prioritized list of problems and respective solutions, you can begin to allocate resources effectively.
This initial resource allocation will serve as the foundation for your roadmap (see the last section below), providing a clear picture of where to invest your time and energy for maximum impact.
For more on effective goals, backlogs, and roadmaps, see How to Build Accountability in a Team: Your Essential Guide
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It's important to note what falls outside the scope of this initial backlog creation.
While tempting, avoid diving into detailed technical specifications, precise cost estimates, or comprehensive project timelines at this stage. These elements, while crucial for implementation, can distract from the primary goal of identifying and prioritizing your most impactful problems and solutions.
To make this process easier, consider using a structured backlog template. This tool guides you through the steps of problem identification and prioritization before moving on to solution generation.
👉 If you want a template, reach out here or untoggle by clicking
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Example
Let's return to Sarah's EdTech startup to see this approach in action. Rather than immediately jumping to enhance their onboarding process, Sarah first led her team through a thorough problem identification phase. They discovered that their most pressing issue wasn't onboarding itself, but rather a mismatch between customer expectations and product capabilities. This insight led them to prioritize solutions that better aligned their product offerings with customer needs, a move that promised to improve both margins and scalability in their journey towards a SaaS model.
By embracing this problem-first approach to backlog creation, Sarah's team transformed their B2B customer journey map from a static document into a dynamic tool for strategic decision-making. They now had a clear, prioritized path forward, rooted in addressing core challenges rather than implementing superficial solutions that sound good but could be expensive distractions.
Amplify Your B2B Customer Journey Mapping with Collective Wisdom
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A major question remains: What to put into your list of problems and solutions?
If you are the CEO, the fastest answer might be to simply put what you think.
However, doing so would miss an opportunity to enrich ideas with diverse perspectives.
By tapping into the collective wisdom of your team, particularly those closest to your challenges, and seeking input from advisors that understand your business, you can uncover insights that might otherwise remain hidden.
The primary goal of this exercise is to collect and consolidate existing ideas, both about problems faced and potential solutions. This comprehensive approach ensures that no valuable insight is overlooked, regardless of its source within your organization.
Existing Data
To begin, start by reviewing existing data and feedback. This step is crucial as it allows you to leverage the wealth of information you've already gathered. Examine customer surveys, support tickets, sales call notes, and any other relevant data sources. This review process often reveals patterns or recurring issues that might not be immediately apparent when looking at individual pieces of feedback.
Customer Journey
Next, consider translating your existing Customer Journey Map into potential action items. While the journey map itself is a valuable tool, its true power lies in its ability to highlight areas for improvement. Focus on identifying crucial interactions and pain points along the customer journey. Remember, the aim here is not to create a visually elaborate representation of the journey, but rather to extract actionable insights that can inform your backlog.
For instance, you might notice that customers consistently struggle with a particular step in your onboarding process. This observation could lead to both a problem entry ("Complex onboarding process related to uploading student dataset causes customer frustration") and potential solution entries ("Simplify onboarding UI", "Create step-by-step onboarding guide", "Implement onboarding chatbot") in your wish lists.
For a simple example, check out
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Survey and Interviews
To further expand your pool of ideas, consider creating and distributing a survey to your team and advisors and interviewing them on key points. This step, while optional, can be incredibly valuable in surfacing problems and solutions you might not have considered. Design the survey to collect top problems observed by team members and any solutions they've contemplated.
For more on quick feedback and validation, see this series
Quick Micro Feedback with a Well-Crafted Voice of Customer Survey
Micro User Interview Questions for a 10 minute Innovation Process
48 hour Business Validation for Innovators
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Distribute this survey to a diverse group within your organization, ensuring you capture perspectives from different departments and levels of seniority. Don't forget to include your co-founder and key advisors in this process, as their strategic viewpoint can be invaluable.
External viewpoints
While internal insights are valuable, relying solely on them can be limiting. Your team's perspective, while informed, may not capture an understanding of true customer experiences and needs. To create a truly comprehensive and effective wish list, it's crucial to incorporate external viewpoints, using tools like Customer surveys and interviews, for your most important and risky items to improve evidence quality.
For more on evidence quality, see Strategic Decision Making Framework: Don’t Miss This Essential Tool
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Categorize
As responses come in, categorize and consolidate the feedback. Look for common themes and unexpected insights. You might find that team members from different departments have identified the same issue, indicating a systemic problem that needs addressing. Alternatively, you might uncover unique solutions proposed by team members who interact with customers in ways you hadn't considered.
Remember, the goal of this wish list process is not to immediately implement every idea collected. Rather, it's to create a comprehensive repository of problems and potential solutions that can inform your product backlog. This approach ensures that your backlog is grounded in real-world observations and diverse perspectives, rather than being limited to the insights of a small group.
Example
To illustrate the power of problem and solution wish lists, let's return to Sarah's EdTech startup. Sarah decided to implement a company-wide survey to gather insights from her team. She sent out a simple questionnaire asking about observed customer pain points and potential solutions. The responses were illuminating. The sales team highlighted that educational institutions often struggled to integrate the startup's platform with their existing learning management systems. Meanwhile, the customer support team noted frequent requests for more customizable reporting features. These insights might have been overlooked if Sarah had relied solely on her own observations or those of her immediate team.
Armed with this feedback, Sarah organized a workshop with representatives from different departments, including her co-founder and a trusted advisor from the education sector. During this session, they mapped these insights onto their customer journey, identifying critical touchpoints where these issues had the most impact. This process not only validated the survey findings but also generated innovative solution ideas. For instance, the team proposed developing an API for seamless LMS integration and creating a user-friendly report builder tool. These ideas, born from diverse perspectives and grounded in real customer needs, became valuable additions to Sarah's product backlog, setting the stage for meaningful improvements in their B2B customer journey.
Turn B2B Customer Journey Mapping into a Strategic Roadmap
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The final crucial step in maximizing the value of your B2B customer journey map into a plan of action is the development of a comprehensive roadmap. This roadmap serves as a strategic guide, translating the insights from your backlog and wish lists into a concrete plan of action.
It's not merely a timeline of features; rather, it's a carefully sequenced strategy that considers technical requirements, business priorities, and resource allocation.
Technical
The roadmap development process begins with a thorough review of your prioritized backlog. The top items in your solution backlog now needs to be examined through a technical lens.
This involves collaborating closely with your development team to understand the technical requirements for each feature or improvement.
For each backlog item, consider the following elements:
- Technical Specifications: Outline the key input and output requirements. What data or user actions are needed for the feature to function? What should the feature produce or change in the system? This level of detail helps prevent misunderstandings and ensures that the development team has a clear target.
- Dependencies: Identify any technical prerequisites or dependencies between features. Some improvements may need to be implemented in a specific order due to shared components or data structures.
- Resource Requirements: Estimate the human resources needed for each item. This might include developers, designers, QA testers, and other specialists.
- Cost Estimates: Develop detailed cost estimates for each feature. This should include not just development costs, but also any additional infrastructure, licensing, or operational costs associated with the feature.
- Timeline: Create a detailed project timeline for each item, breaking it down into phases such as design, development, testing, and deployment.
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Sequencing
With this information in hand, you can begin to sequence the items in your roadmap. This sequencing should balance several factors, such as dependencies, business priorities, resource availability, and risk management (e.g., break out and tackle high-risk items earlier to build more evidence quality.)
Regular Review
As you develop your roadmap, it's crucial to maintain flexibility. While detailed planning is important, the ability to adapt to changing market conditions or new customer insights is equally vital. Consider building in regular review points where you can reassess your roadmap based on new information or changing priorities.
For more on effective goals, backlogs, and roadmaps, see How to Build Accountability in a Team: Your Essential Guide
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Example
Let's return to Sarah's EdTech startup for an example. After prioritizing her backlog, Sarah worked with her technical team to develop a roadmap. They identified that improving their platform's integration capabilities was a high-priority item that would significantly enhance their B2B customer journey.
The technical specifications for this feature included defining API endpoints, developing authentication protocols, and creating data mapping tools. Sarah's team also recognized that this integration feature had dependencies on their data structure. They needed to refactor their database before beginning the integration work.
This insight led them to sequence a database optimization project earlier in their roadmap, even though it wasn't directly visible to customers, because it was a crucial enabler for the high-priority integration feature.
B2B Customer Journey Maps: Bridging the Strategy Gap
By implementing these strategies, you can transform your B2B customer journey map from a static diagram into a dynamic engine for continuous improvement.
The strategic backlog ensures that insights are translated into actionable plans. Collaborative wish lists tap into the collective wisdom of your organization and customers, generating innovative ideas for enhancement. Finally, a well-crafted roadmap provides a flexible yet structured plan for bringing these improvements to life.
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