Half Your Customers Are Already Using AI to Find You Are You Findable?

In today's digital world, people are bombarded with messages and offers. Storyblok is a headless CMS that enables marketers and developers to create with joy and succeed in the AI-driven content era. Our community of 215,000+ content marketers shares camaraderie and conversation. Organizations from around the world send teams to Content Marketing World, the largest content marketing-focused event, and CMI virtual events. This article reports on the 1,015 B2B marketers, mostly from North America.

It also helps sales and marketing teams work together, keeping messages clear and follow-ups timely, which improves conversion chances. Finding problems in the customer journey, such as a confusing website or slow responses, helps businesses fix issues that stop potential customers from moving forward. Businesses use survey tools such as Hotjar, Typeform, and Zendesk to gather CES data and make necessary improvements.

In B2B ecommerce, the sales funnel is typically longer and more complex—decisions are made by multiple stakeholders instead of one person making an impulsive purchase. B2C companies target a broad consumer market, while B2B companies focus on a smaller, industry-specific audience. You need to deeply understand your prospects’ decision-making process—the path they take to becoming customers. Learn how to map and optimize B2B customer journeys for modern buyers.

CRM tools such as Salesforce and customer success platforms such as Gainsight help businesses track retention rates and take action to improve customer loyalty. Companies use tools such as Google Analytics, Crazy Egg, and Hotjar to track bounce rates and identify areas for improvement. Tracking user activity helps businesses improve self-service options and enhance user experience. The technologies used to enhance your B2B customer journey include CRM, AI chatbots, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), and marketing automation tools. For example, a B2B software company provides step-by-step guides, video tutorials, and live support during onboarding to assure customers get started easily. Continuous feedback helps businesses quickly address pain points, keeping prospects engaged and increasing conversions.

The Decision stage includes product demonstrations, proposal reviews, and direct conversations with sales representatives. The Consideration stage helps narrow the field to a small group of preferred vendors. The Consideration stage also includes consulting internal stakeholders for B2B customer journey alignment and feedback. The Awareness stage focuses on research into problems, industry trends, or available solutions. The B2B Customer Journey develops progressively, with each stage adding depth and building trust.

Current state map

The best setups connect customer data platforms, marketing automation tools, and product analytics into a unified system that tracks behavior across the entire journey. “Complexities of managing modern B2B SaaS sales from Product Led Growth to complicated enterprise campaigns across each stage of the customer lifecycle has organizations drowning in a sea of fragmented data,” said Chris Hillock, Investor, Dell Technologies Capital. “Today’s tools leave a critical gap between sales and customer success, resulting in misalignment, delays, and missed revenue opportunities,” said Matt Hickey, CEO of MaxIQ. Rob and Matt’s experience include senior leadership roles in scaling multiple category-disrupting technologies including Data Domain, XtremIO, and CloudGenix. Unlike traditional revenue intelligence tools that are rigid and lack actionable context, MaxIQ integrates predictive analytics and agentic-driven workflow automation to increase Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and significantly enhance revenue forecasting accuracy. As the industry shifts toward consumption-based models, businesses need a unified, AI-driven approach with real-time intelligence to accelerate adoption and maximize customer lifetime value.

While you can create a journey map using simple tools like PowerPoint mind maps, or sticky notes on a wall (never underestimate good ol' pen and paper), dedicated software can enhance collaboration and keep your map updated. This level of detail helps you create highly targeted content and interactions that directly address buyer needs. This research will help you understand not just what prospects do at each stage, but why they do it — crucial insight for mapping how the traditional Awareness, Consideration, and Decision stages play out in your specific market. And so oftentimes that you know, helps you think of features that you didn't even think of.”

Buyer’s journey vs. customer’s journey

The next step is to identify all customer journey touchpoints — where do your customers come into contact with your business throughout the buying process? It helps sales and marketing teams better identify your target audience to reach more potential new customers. Creating a map of the buying journey helps you identify each place where a potential customer might come in contact with your business. This helps us remember that the customer journey doesn’t end with a purchase. It helps businesses better understand the path a customer takes during their decision-making process and how they ultimately become customers.

• The B2B Customer Journey gains efficiency when tools measure touchpoint effectiveness and conversion paths.
• They just deliver consistent value and trust that when listeners are ready to build an online store, Shopify will be top of mind.
• Her work focuses on elevating customer support through messaging, automation, and omnichannel strategies.
• These findings underline the importance of digital content across the entire journey, not just at the top of the funnel, and challenge the assumption that sales conversations are the primary driver of B2B purchase decisions.

With the rise of “everything-as-a-service” models like SaaS, businesses need to convince customers to renew their subscriptions either monthly or annually. Gartner found that 44% of millennials don’t want to interact with a sales rep when it comes to making B2B purchases. Being digital natives, millennials are used to cloud-based software and collaboration tools, and the experience of using these services has shaped their expectations of B2B products and solutions. B2B customer journeys are becoming more complex, as more business users now expect a customer experience similar to that of B2C brands.

Heat-mapping performance

A B2B Customer Journey Map helps businesses identify opportunities for improvement and strengthen long‑term relationships. For example, understanding which channels drive the most engagement allows businesses to focus on high-performing strategies such as SEO, paid ads, or email campaigns. Personalization helps businesses build stronger relationships with potential leads, which increases trust and the chances of conversion. Creating a B2B customer journey map includes defining buyer personas, identifying key touchpoints, gathering information, and mapping the journey. A B2B customer journey map helps businesses understand how potential buyers move through the sales process, what challenges they face, and what influences their decisions.

When a South Korean device maker rebuilds its entire portfolio around assistance rather than apps, the direction of travel is settled. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity are no longer chat tools that occasionally answer questions — they have become the new search engines, the new front door to markets. Every funnel, every customer journey map, every landing page was built on that behavior. How manufacturers can use Qualtrics XM Institute’s CX Maturity Model to build a winning B2B customer experience program They challenge us, they give us thought-provoking questions, and really they make us better people. It takes a level of expertise to not only thoroughly understand what it takes to build a customer journey, but how to use it within the organization to influence key decisions.

The performance map is similar to the tactical journey map, though it goes into more detail about the performance at each step of a process, and provides key recommendations at each stage. The tactical B2B customer journey map focuses on a particular touchpoint (or cluster of B2B touchpoints) to highlight the journey that the customer goes on at that stage. The use of AI in customer journey mapping is on the horizon, to allow us to more accurately predict customer behavior based on past data – which can in turn help organizations to improve customer experience and satisfaction through anticipating what the customer will need. To effectively build the map, it is crucial to step into the shoes of the customer to try and understand how our processes impact on the experience that the customer has with the supplier. The B2B Customer Journey improves when businesses monitor results continuously.