Critics call journey maps “assumption maps,” and say they only lead to “expensive guesses”.
Customer journeys are complex, so ask yourself: do customer journey maps not work, or do we not have enough information about these journeys to do anything but guess?
Reframe your approach: Use maps to challenge intuition
We all trust intuition, but ask three teammates how to improve LTV and you’ll probably get three answers.
So whose intuition is right?
We had a call with Santiago Melluso, 20-year marketing advisor and CEO at TakeFortyTwo. He shared a distinction worth noting to fellow marketers: “We need to drive conclusions not out of our own biases, but what the actual reality of data is saying.”
When done well, journey maps help teams challenge assumptions. Otherwise, businesses will base decisions on what they think customers need (or around KPIs they’re trying to improve - we’ve all been there).
Take a look at these two pitches:
Pitch A (Assumption)
“Let’s put another $50K into lead-gen ads. More clicks = more revenue.”
Pitch B (Map-driven strategy)
“Our journey map shows 42% of trial users drop off during onboarding, long before they can generate revenue. If we fix that drop-off, we could earn $1.2M in ARR without raising ad spend.”
Which pitch addresses an issue with the customer experience? And which strategy wastes budget?
A journey map filters hunches through evidence. That’s how businesses discover strategies that benefit customers.
A Hanover Research study backs this up, indicating that “79% of companies say their maps have allowed them to become more customer-centric.”
Don’t think in silos
Not understanding the end-to-end experience makes it a lot harder to improve it. Teams can look at KPIs, but without the full picture, they decide with tunnel vision.
Santiago shares that “When you focus too much on a certain area because you don’t know the path of that customer, that leads to misplaced budget.”
To bridge silos, identify customer touchpoints at every stage in the journey.
- List all discovery channels (ads, referrals, SEO).
- Audit decision-phase messages (who sends what, when?)
- Document post-purchase workflows (upsell support, loyalty nurturing, referrals).
Conceptually, this is easy. But there are a lot of touchpoints, and journeys aren’t always perfectly linear.
This is a good time to pull out a journey map template and help your team think of phases and interactions that might have gone under the radar, and know when it’s time to reach out to other departments for input.
Do use data to support claims
If you aren't bringing your data into your map, you're making assumptions. You won't ever have 100% of the story, but if you map what you have, your strategy is that much less guesswork.
Marketing veteran Oliver Weinstock, Managing Partner of Nemuk AG, says one of the biggest barriers to successful customer journeys is the lack of data. "[Businesses] don’t know enough about their customers. They know it in theory, but they have so many different databases or Excel sheets, it’s just not there, or they need to bring it all together."
Data is a broad term, so here’s what your team can focus on.
- Qualitative data that describes experiences. Often obtained through observation and investigation, such as interviews, surveys, customer support tickets, and so forth.
As Santiago shared with us, not all of your audience will respond to surveys or create tickets with your support team. So, it’s important not to let them represent your entire customer base.
- Quantitative data based on numbers and metrics. This can be found in your marketing and CRM software (sales figures, website visits, email clicks, social media engagement statistics).
Quantitative data helps explain qualitative data. It also reveals patterns that aren’t voiced by your customers, such as LTV, RFM values, etc. It’s much easier to allocate budget when you know it’s the website and not the price that is killing conversions, for example.
- External data. Studies, competitor research, benchmarks.
There will be times when you don’t have as much of your own data. Doing some research will help you see from the outside in and fill in those gaps. Oliver recommends paying attention to “what the marketing experts think, what the market says, and how the market is changing.“
The sooner you start, the less you’ll guess
If you want to be successful long-term, you’re going to have to map. It doesn’t need to be perfect, but the more you fill in, the more opportunities you’ll discover for optimizing budget and improving the customer journey.
When you’re ready to start the mapping process, here’s a couple of tried and tested templates and a brief walkthrough we created in collaboration with CRM agencies.
