The Customer Journey Scorecard

I found that B2B businesses tend to have most of their challenges with their marketing program at either end of a spectrum:

Either it's up front when they're trying to figure out what is important. What are their priorities? How can they do the right things? What are those right things to make marketing work in their business?

Or it's at the back end, once they have a plan: being efficient and effective and productive with their tactics and moving the needle with their marketing programs to help the business.

I want to talk about that second challenge and share a hack that I have found to be very useful - the customer journey scorecard.

What it is

The customer journey scorecard draws from the same strategy that I talk a lot about from "up front", where you use your customer's journey to figure out what your priorities are. You use that journey as your dashboard for operationally delivering on those tactics.

Each of the seven stages it has metrics - one or two and no more - that are necessary to help move that customer forward at that stage and then just a couple of critical actions that are currently on the table to move things forward.

Why it works

I found this works because of a couple things.

One it's organized around the customer so it keeps you externally focused and avoids navel gazing and thinking too much about arguments between sales and marketing about what's a good lead.

It's focused on external behavior of your customer.

Secondly, it's simple.

One of the biggest challenges with marketing execution is just too much right?

So easy to end up with dozens of metrics across different platforms, different groups, different functions.

This focuses the metrics on these seven stages and you end up with just three or more or so that are the most important.

And because their customer focused, they tend to be more actionable.

And your team can be more accountable because rather than being in a silo and being marketing, uh, metrics or marketing priorities, they are customer metrics that the sales team and the marketing team and account management and even product team can rally around and team up on to deliver progress.

An example

Here's an example of a scorecard that I'm using with one of my clients. You can see it's not fully filled in because it's a work in progress - we're early in the program; we're focused first on the Demand and Awareness stage.

You can see that we have two metrics per stage at most. For some stages we haven't even defined a value yet. But we've agreed on the metric we're going to use to show progress in the funnel.

The critical actions are limited, and even the few that are there are prioritized. The red items are the actions that we are focused on this week. It's got an agile, scrum-like feel to it. It's keeping us focused on the day and showing deliverable results together.

Get things done

When it comes to getting things done, I have found that less is more and using a scorecard like this is one way to take that concept and convert it into action, and ultimately more results for the business.