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“My conversion rates are dropping really fast, and leads are falling off midway. Help!”
A typical SaaS customer moves through at least a dozen touchpoints and several stages before hitting the buy button or switching to another alternative. One unarguably big truth is that anything can happen in between.
That includes your prospects taking longer at a stage than usual, getting completely stuck, exiting the conversion funnel, or even canceling instead of renewing their software subscription.
However, these are only the implications of something wrong at a more granular level. And the best way to figure it out is by mapping your customers’ journey.
In this article, we’ll explain why and how to conduct efficient SaaS customer journey mapping in 2024.
Source: Customer Journey Maestro
A SaaS customer journey map is a detailed and visualized outline of all the stages passed, touchpoints interacted with, and associated problems your customer faces before eventually making the big purchase. Let’s break it down:
Let’s say Prospect A struggles with managing customer data and relationships. They search online for solutions and find your blog post on “How to Strengthen Customer Relationships and Boost Sales.” The blog also highlights your CRM product and explains how it can address their challenges. In this scenario, Prospect A is in the awareness stage and has engaged with a blog post (touchpoint) that presents your product as a solution. We’ll explore this further in the next section.
Every SaaS customer goes through five major stages, but there’s a usually unspoken one—the discovery and acceptance stage. In this section, we'll explore each stage of the SaaS customer journey, highlighting the unique pros and challenges that arise along the way.
This is the stage where your customer realizes they have a problem that needs to be solved. Sometimes, this can be through intentional discovery—like an audit to compare year-on-year (YoY) sales performance and lead generation.
It could also be unintentional, such as an unexpected crash of a client's data management software due to data overload or a spike in customer complaints within weeks.
Whichever it is, whether through data analysis, customer feedback, or unexpected issues, they identify the need for a solution, leading them to explore SaaS options that can resolve their challenges.
This stage is critical as it initiates the entire journey of evaluating, selecting, and ultimately purchasing a SaaS solution.
Assume Prospect A’s project teams face delays and miscommunication due to the lack of a unified task management and collaboration platform. Now that Prospect A has identified the problem, the next step is to find a solution.
So, the awareness stage is where prospects become aware of your product. But an SEO blog post is not the only point of interaction; other touchpoints include:
Google ad by Bitrix24 (Awareness stage)
Immediately after awareness, the client assesses whether your product solution is worth the hype and can solve their pain points. That’s the evaluation stage, and it usually involves touchpoints like:
Review websites and testimonial pages also play a key role here. Prospects also check out comparisons and “best Xs” content to determine if there are better alternatives available, making this a typically lengthy process.
Note that prospects also consider pricing at this stage, which means they’ll interact with your pricing pages or reach out for a quote.
If there’s a green light from the evaluation and comparison, Prospect A will call in, negotiate, and acquire your project management software. At this stage, traditional marketing material such as blogs and case studies becomes less influential. Instead, direct communication— team calls and in-person discussions—between the sales team and your prospect takes precedence, allowing for discussions about features, pricing, and implementation.
After the acquisition, onboarding begins. This is when your customers must thoroughly learn about the solution, integrate it into their organization’s existing system, and equip employees on usage. Successful onboarding not only enhances user adoption but also sets the foundation for long-term satisfaction and retention.
Source: RocketBots Dashboard
Touchpoints at this stage include:
For a SaaS company, the lifetime value of every converted lead is crucial. The higher it is, the higher your ROI. And that means customers’ journeys do not end after making the first purchase.
It’s essential to encourage them to renew their subscription, consider advanced plans for more functionalities, and prevent any downgrades if they’re already on the highest subscription tier.
At this stage, touchpoints include:
Advocacy represents the pinnacle of customer satisfaction—when your SaaS customers embrace your vision and solution, believing they can recommend it to others who face the same problem that initially brought them to you.
Touchpoints for advocacy include:
We’ve all used Google Maps at some point, whether to explore the app’s features or to navigate our way—usually the latter.
We see all the routes to move from point A to point B, key landmarks, potential delays like road accidents or closures, alternative pathways to enhance our travel experience, and other technical details. It provides us with valuable insights about what to expect when we travel and solve any issues that may arise.
That’s exactly how a SaaS user journey map works. Here are more reasons why mapping customer journeys in a similar way is crucial for your SaaS business.
The SaaS customer journey is often long and complex, and working without a map is like wandering with your sales and marketing strategies. You may end up presenting anything that seems appealing to your prospects, even if it’s not helping.
In contrast, well-defined user journey maps help you visualize even the most granular details of your buyer’s journey and determine where they will likely get stuck. For instance, if there is an increased volume of visits to your product’s trial page but a significant drop in active subscriptions, it indicates a problem between the evaluation and acquisition stages.
Once you figure out where prospects are getting stuck, identifying their problems becomes much easier. Every stage of the journey presents its own difficulties. A journey map doesn’t just show if there’s a problem; it also tells you the stages where customers are doing well and if further improvements are needed. This makes it a dual-purpose tool for both assessing challenges and evaluating overall progress.
The insights you get from mapping your customer journey help you provide an appropriate solution, such as:
Eventually, it all comes down to optimizing your product—from its presentation to its functionalities. Once that’s accomplished, your product becomes an automatic lead magnet, attracting and converting more leads efficiently.
Mapping your business’s SaaS customer journey isn’t rocket science, but you must take some specific steps to be effective. We’ll discuss them below.
The typical stages of a journey map include discovering and accepting a problem, becoming aware of the solution, evaluating a product, acquiring and onboarding, retaining, and, lastly, advocating.
However, remember, we said the SaaS journey is often complex—nothing is straightforward and absolute for all businesses. Your product will determine if you need to break these stages into even finer ones.
For example, if your product is highly modular, complex, or involves a high-touch sales process, you might choose to include an additional stage like Engagement immediately after problem discovery. In this scenario, prospects require significant time and resources to fully understand the solution you offer, making it a central focus of your marketing efforts.
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on comprehensive market research and data.
Source: Delve AI
Buyer personas help you to anticipate customer challenges, understand how they will navigate through the conversion funnel, and identify which pain points to emphasize when marketing your solutions.
To develop one:
Note that you can create as many personas for different buying groups as possible. Each buyer persona should have a different map since they will have a different buying experience.
We’ve outlined the major touchpoints earlier, but based on your persona, you can determine which ones are unique to your target audience.
When it comes to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, most manufacturing companies in need of your product are unlikely to discover or engage with you through SEO blog posts or podcasts. A more realistic touchpoint would be cold calls and emails.
If it’s a CRM solution, typically used by sales and marketing teams, authority content, podcasts, social media ads, and a strong referral program often meet their needs, as this audience frequently engages with website blogs and social media.
To identify the most effective touchpoints for each stage, use your personas to understand where potential customers are most likely to search for solutions.
Key milestones represent what defines the transition from one stage to another. These milestones can include signing up for a product demo, renewing a subscription plan, or sharing positive reviews.
By attaching timelines to milestones, you can track whether a lead is stuck in a particular stage, how long they’ve been there, or how quickly they’re progressing. Similarly, the milestones you establish should align with your business goals and product offerings.
Again, B2B SaaS customer journey maps are not in a straight line. Since you’re dealing with a longer sales cycle, creating a loop between your stages and ensuring your customers stay within it is important if you want a high customer lifetime value (CLV).
Source: Userpilot
For instance, there should be a repeat cycle from initial purchase to renewal and back to continued engagement. Here’s how to do that:
The whole process iterates maintaining and optimizing continuous customer relationships throughout their lifecycle.
Once your map is ready, review it for possible oversights and errors before systematically implementing it across your teams from the top down. Set up training sessions and tutorial walkthroughs to ensure departments like sales and marketing understand how to implement it in their campaigns.
Lastly, measure and optimize outcomes regularly. After successful integration, assess the results, identify any gaps that may impact the final outcome, and address them to enhance your customer experience.
That's a wrap! You now understand what SaaS customer journey mapping is, why it's essential for your business, and how to create one.
However, we understand how complex the whole process can be, and that’s why we want to help you. At TripleDart, we’ve built a one-hit SaaS customer journey mapping strategy that consistently delivers results, drawing on our decades of experience with various SaaS brands.
Our team analyzes your customers’ needs and evaluates your business workflow to design a result-oriented map that moves the needle.
Ready to start? Let’s one, two, build!
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