Why you NEED a Customer Journey for your CRM Implementation

If you’re thinking about implementing a CRM like HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho, etc.. Before you touch automation, dashboards, or integrations…

Have you mapped your customer journey? Because without it, your CRM is just a fancy Rolodex.

What Is a Customer Journey?

A full end-to-end customer journey map is a visual or documented outline of every touchpoint your customer experiences, from discovering your brand to becoming a raving fan (evangelist). This includes how your customer might interact with technology and people at your company. 

What information is flowing into your CRM and when? how can you leverage this? You learn all this and more simply by mapping out each step. This can often bring a lot of clarity to internal teams as well. It's very easy to duplicate functionality between similar systems and as it turns out the same is true of people! Multiple employees might be holding on to the same responsibility when it comes to those customers or no one holding other aspects. 

When you skip this step you end up building systems for your team’s convenience, not for the customer’s actual experience.

This means:

• Leads stuck in limbo because no stage was defined or they were defined poorly 

• Bad segmentation are therefore irrelevant follow-ups

• Marketing automations triggered at the wrong time or sent to the wrong person

• Support teams working blindly without context

And worst of all? You miss opportunities to build trust, loyalty, and lifetime value

How Get to Market Can Help

When clients come to me at GetToMarket.io to implement HubSpot, we don’t jump straight to the tech.

We start by asking:

• Who is your buyer?

• What steps do they actually go through before buying?

• Where are you currently dropping the ball?

• What should the ideal journey look like?

Then we can build a CRM structure around real events and hit the ground running by gathering real data. 

TL;DR

By mapping the journey first, your CRM becomes a strategic engine, not just a database. With an accurate customer journey you will capture better data, build smarter automations

and empower your team to create more effective human experiences. 

Want Help Mapping Your Customer Journey?

I’m Alysha Gail, founder of Get to Market, a go-to-market and HubSpot consultant helping small teams scale smarter. Visit GetToMarket.io