Mapping the Digital Customer JourneyMapping the Digital Customer Journey

Mapping the Digital Customer Journey Transcript:

Announcer: You’re listening to The Kula Ring, a podcast made for manufacturing marketers. Here are Carman Pirie and Jeff White. 

Jeff White: Welcome to The Kula Ring, a podcast for manufacturing marketers brought to you by Kula Partners. My name is Jeff White and joining me today is Carman Pirie. Carman, how you doing, sir? 

Carman Pirie: All is well. Excited for today’s conversation. I guess it’s just a lot of people like to talk about experimentation and marketing, the requirement to try new things. And an awful lot of people like to talk about the importance of customer centricity. And today’s conversation, I think, brings those two things together in a more meaningful way than sometimes they get talked about, 

Jeff White: yeah, I’d agree with that. And I think a lot of people, like you’re saying, like to talk about it, but they don’t necessarily have a process in place for how to understand it and see it and track it and Figure it all out in a more proper way, more fulsome way. Indeed. Let’s get on with it. All right. Indeed.

So joining us today is Corey Peterson. Corey is the VP of marketing and sales operations at LED Lighting Supply. Welcome to the cooler and Corey. Thanks for having me. Corey. 

Carman Pirie: It is awesome to have you on the show. And I feel like I’d almost be remiss at this stage if I didn’t like. Congratulate you on the podcast for the recent nuptials, 2024 was a big year. So congratulations on that personal note. We were just before hitting record folks, getting all of the ins and outs of the recent travel from Cory. That was to reality. It has me thinking, I don’t want to record this podcast at all. We want to go, 

Jeff White: I want to book a flight. 

Carman Pirie: But this is about. A journey of sorts, Jeff, and really the customer journey that fuels in some way the work that Corey is doing. So why don’t we get into that Corey, before we do, however, maybe tell our listeners a bit more about you and LED lighting. 

Cory Peterson: Sure. Yeah, so as Jeff mentioned, I am a VP of marketing and sales operations at LED Lighting Supply. Over the past. Four years, five years, I’ve worked on developing a really strong process for experimentation and understanding our customers’ journey, and that really encompasses everything we do within marketing and sales ops. Sales team, even on the operation side of the business. So really excited to talk about that.

Within our organization, we’re a supplier and manufacturer of LED lights utility poles and industrial fans. So we’re touching a lot of those heavy industrial areas, not really the areas that you typically think about the customer journey in the same way as you might on more of the software side and that’s where we’ve tried over the past few years to really come in and flip that on its head and really think about, okay, we put the customer first. If we think about what the customer needs, we experiment based on the hypotheses that we’re building and the research we’re doing to build them. How can we really change the model and change the mindset?

Jeff White: As a VP of marketing and sales operations, is there a distinction that you draw within LED lighting supply and the sales operation side and is there a VP of sales counterpart as an example? 

Cory Peterson: Yeah. So we do have a VP of sales and so how we’ve structured the organization is to really have sales and marketing be a singular entity working together. And for that reason, whereas most marketing teams will look towards say marketing qualified leads as their main KPI that they’re working towards. Our marketing org actually does drive towards revenue and sales qualified leads. So because of that connection between the two teams, we’re always in sync together. And that has been certainly one of the reasons why we’ve been able to, mature our organization as quickly as we have. 

Jeff White: Cool. Thanks for the clarification. I thought it was an interesting distinction. Of course. 

Carman Pirie: So what? What kicked all of this off? I’m pretty sure four or five years ago, you guys weren’t sitting around thinking that you were completely ignoring customers or that you weren’t customer-centric. So what led you to think about taking a bit more of a systematic approach here? 

Cory Peterson: Yeah. So I think where it originally started is we at one point did some one-off feedback with a few one-off feedback requests with a few customers. So we basically did a few customer interviews and from there, we had at one point stumbled into an agency right?

I would say at the beginning of COVID that was offering this basically free sort of audit of your customer, your digital customer journey. And we went through that process. And it clicked in our heads that we were thinking about many of these things that they were starting to highlight and pinpoint, but we hadn’t actually really been doing anything with it. So we were always talking about, what the customer needed and what the customer’s pain points were, but we had never been able to bottle it. And that was. The launching point where after that initial sort of COVID audit, there were a number, I remember back then, a number of agencies that were doing these COVID packages to try to help companies at that point. And that was the launching point of us. Meandering our way and trudging our way through how we become a more, experimentation-minded and really customer-minded organization, so we initially actually dove in the wrong way, which is we dove into starting to run experiments It was great because we started testing things on the website.

It was bad in retrospect because we were not testing with the statistical rigour that we would today. So today we operate as a smaller organization with an enterprise. Process in place. The other area that we started then really looking into was we think we understand what’s happening with the customers throughout our digital journey. Cause we’re all digital. We do not have physical stores that customers walk into. We don’t have a supply house that they go walk into and pick out which products they want. And we started really thinking about the customer journey.

Jeff White: What process did you undertake to build that out? Was it something that you did physically, were you in front of a whiteboard or were you mapping it out in, Excel blocks, I’m just interested to know how you brought it to life and shared it with the rest of the team to get everybody’s buy-in and Input.

Cory Peterson: Yeah, absolutely. Initially actually just mapped it out on paper. So we took our digital journey and ended up back, using paper and pen and mapping it out in a first version, which was so slim and not representative of where we ended up, but it was that initial starting point and I think. Back to how our sales and marketing organization is connected. We did not want to just look at the marketing journey and we did not want to just look at the sales journey. So we ended up starting to build out over, it ended up taking about nine to 12 months for us to fully. Flesh it out to where it is today. We went from just on a piece of paper, moving it into a Google slide and building it out a little more effectively there versus starting over and scratching things out. It then got too big. We moved it over into Figma. At that point in time, we actually were working with Tufts University, a local college here in Boston that has an entrepreneurship class about entrepreneurial marketing and entrepreneurial sales. And we actually worked with a student group to help, do some of the legwork around building out the next iteration. And we got to a point where we were thinking in terms of the model of how it looked, we were still linear.

So we had the beginning of the journey. We had the end of the journey and having the digital tool to manipulate it as we were talking about it and thinking about it actually allowed us to, as we were sitting there scratching our heads, like this doesn’t make sense because it doesn’t end there’s repeat customers. There are referral opportunities. There’s lost customers who come back later. And so we. We ended up turning the journey into a flywheel with a number of deviating paths. One member of our team lovingly calls it the racetrack. And as we progress, it continues to get bigger and bigger to where we now include pain points that customers experience at each step of the journey. We include positive factors that us or. Another company can exhibit at that moment in time, different ways we can help the customer things that will be viewed positively at that moment in the journey. For example early trust building. If we don’t build trust early if we don’t build trust often, then why would a customer work with us versus someone they trust more? Or for example, a negative attribute might be on our first order. We have a major issue with shipping. It might be something that’s outside of our control, but because we’re the one who shipped it, there’s a negative trust factor there. So, so the, then the opposite piece is understanding what the customer, how we can be more, um, upfront. And have them part of the process of understanding, okay, we’re shipping five pallets of lights to you. Here’s what you can expect. Here’s how to track it. If something goes wrong, here are the right contacts, if it doesn’t show up when you think it’s supposed to. And, just understanding all of the different components there.

Carman Pirie: I was thinking that you maybe have it a bit easier than some because of course the fact that it is a fully digital journey and that, so it allows you to probably. Connect to have tighter revenue attribution, frankly, and to be able to connect the dots a little tighter. But then as I was thinking about that that doesn’t, it probably thinking like this has been anything but easy. So I should probably very often as I look at customer journey engagements and people trying to tackle that initiative one of the pieces of advice I often give is to start from the money and work back to begin to understand it. Because you basically, the further you get away from the financial transaction, oftentimes the fuzzier things become in terms of what you can see.

Have you noticed a similar pattern? Is it easier for you to wrap your arms around truly what that journey looks like just the closer you get to the transaction, but out there on the awareness side, you may still have a few question mark? 

Cory Peterson: Yeah I think you bring up a great point, which is there is that moment where someone is at a conference or they’re talking to others at their company. Someone is searching online randomly on an anonymous device. And how do we correlate that back when they, their boss, then a year later come on to the website to inquire with us, or you have someone who comes in via direct traffic from a company we might? No, but we can’t necessarily truly attribute it back because they might be on a location on the West Coast. We happen to have worked with a location on the East Coast where we know it’s an organization that’s decentralized. So there are certainly pieces like that. What we have done on our end to try and offset as best possible is very robust tracking. So we, of course, normal digital interactions are tracked form submissions and chats. We also track phone numbers. So we have very specific phone numbers for different areas. So for example, our spec sheets have a specific phone number, so we can actually track back to, okay, we might not know exactly who they spoke with that got them to us, but we know that they dialled in via seeing one of our spec sheets.

Okay. We might now invest some more time in optimizing our spec sheets to ensure that they have all the information someone might need if it gets printed out for them and it’s in a file and then pops up a year later. We also, one area we’re working on now and we’ll have, implemented within the next month or two is that same level of attribution for inbound emails. That’s a gap that most companies still experience, which is. I have this sales email. It’s great when I get RFQs to it, but I have no idea where any of these people are coming from. How are they finding us? Now, direct traffic isn’t necessarily bad in and of itself. It can mean that you have brand recognition, which is really the Holy Grail for any small company to get to. So I think, If you can knock out those attributes and really focus in there, you can get to 90 percent attribution if you’re an online company. Now, if you’re selling physically, I think that to your point, that’s where the complication comes into play, but you can only. Work off of the data you have.

So then I would move if we had physical locations, I think you then have to move to doing research around those people who are coming into the stores physically. And research is really that other piece outside of just building out the journey that becomes really important. 

Jeff White: The research piece, I think probably plays a little bit into my next question. You mentioned how, you’re tracking specific phone numbers, from a spec sheet, you probably have different numbers from paid ads and all of those different channels. So you know exactly where people are coming from as they’re coming inbound to you. I’m wondering, how are you prioritizing the iterations that you’re making to those pieces of content, to those areas of the digital journey? Are you able to use, the potential return on investment to prioritize your backlog of what you’re working on and is the research playing into that? Or is it, are you just working on what’s, uh, the next thing that’s interesting, I’m guessing you’re probably a little more buttoned-down than that. 

Cory Peterson: Yeah. So at this point where we have an engine that’s moving, so we, let’s talk about now and then we can talk about maybe for a newer organization trying to get into it. Now we’re in a process where we know what types of testing have proved most successful. So last year we ran. Lots of tests each quarter, and some tests perform great. Some tests became more learnings for us to iterate into future future tests. The focus areas are really based on that feedback loop of how tests have been done. So are we focusing on trust? Are we focusing on the clarity of content? Are we focusing on user experience? That is coupled with ongoing research of existing customers. Maybe prospects who didn’t become customers, independent cohorts who don’t know your business. So you remove any of that potential bias. Uh, the data from those sets are then also feeding back into the engine of thinking about what are the next opportunities we can look at.

And we really see two groups coming out of research. There are reinforcing pieces that reinforce this as a swim lane. We want to focus on more. And then there’s also pieces that come out of it, where it’s, this is a really interesting data point that has come up multiple times in this piece of research. It’s not something we’ve explored. Let’s open up a new swim lane and invest a couple of calories there, invest a few tests and see if we learn anything from it. We always learn from tests, even if they’re losers, we’re learning something about what the customers are thinking. And really how we can better serve them.

Carman Pirie: Are you always driving to tests that require that, that get to a level of statistical significance in the data that they’re returning? Or are you sometimes doing experiments that over a time horizon, just can’t get you to that level of statistical significance where you are maybe finding more directional nuance but maybe the data isn’t as clear? I’m just curious about that. 

Cory Peterson: Yeah it’s a really hard thing, particularly for smaller companies where, and it really needs, and not even smaller companies, but more boutique industrial products where. I might be a great player in the space, but there’s just not that many unique users who need to come to my website. We do plenty of revenue. We have plenty of customers that we’re working with, but I might only get 10,000 users a year because it’s a very specialized product. So I think in instances like that you actually. In my opinion, have more risk running a test below a level of statistical significance, because I could have something that looks like a winner, but if I actually then implement it and run it, my leads are going to go down because what looked like a winner was actually. Not to a level of certainty. And it was exactly, and it was an anomaly. We’ve in our past, when we were first starting out we did that. We made the mistake of doing that and paid short-term, the short-term price for it. As we’ve matured, we, this point today, we’ll not run a test. If we do not feel we can reach significance for those small organizations, they work around the, there are a couple of options that I’ve seen one focusing more heavily on the research side. The research can become statistically significant on its own, where we can make reasonable bets that if 75 percent of the respondents are all pointing to this one thing, if we improve it. It will be better for them.

That’s a bet that we can take, and then we can do a post-implementation analysis, looking at the period cohort time over time. Now it’s not perfect, but for a small organization, things like that are going to be the best option. 

Jeff White: We’ve always pushed those who don’t necessarily have the traffic or t any of that side of things to, if they’re going to test something, then you test a very large bet instead of more kind of one button colour against another for to use like the very basic example. But yeah, that’s really interesting. 

Cory Peterson: Yeah. And I think the other area that an organization with. And I shouldn’t say small organization. I should say organizations with lower traffic coming into their websites or maybe they don’t even have a website. There are so many organizations in this industrial space, which they really fully operate offline. So thinking about and building out the customer journey. It is such a great area for mapping it out and seeing those pain points that, your sales team knows your customer service team knows because they’re experiencing it day in and day out. And that’s why when we built out ours, we have long involved all parts of the team to build out this journey. We even at our sales conferences. We have a big eight-foot by 10-foot version of the customer journey. At each sales conference, we sit around it with the sales team and go through the journey and talk about, whether has anything changed at different points. Are there new pain points that have popped up that customers are experiencing that we need to think about? Those are things we don’t necessarily need to test. If customers are having a problem where they’re always receiving tracking the day that their products are being delivered. I don’t need to run an A-B test on the website to fix that. We can work internally to, solve that problem for the customer.

Carman Pirie: As you’ve as you’ve worked through this, it strikes me that the organization is very tight between sales and marketing. We spoke about that earlier. And you mentioned that, oh, your salespeople know what the problems are. Customer service people are hearing it on the phone or what have you. So I guess I’m putting this back to you to say, what have you discovered that you didn’t know? What has been the biggest surprise as you mapped out the journey, whether it be a point where you were delighting customers that you didn’t know you were, or maybe something you needed to work on that you didn’t see?

Cory Peterson: Yeah, so I think one of the most surprising pieces is we’ve always historically understood that as an inbound business, people come to us when they’re ready. People show up when someone shows up on our website because we’re not, say an enterprise brand, if they’re coming to us, they’re ready to go. They have a requirement, they need assistance, and they need expertise. They’ve come to the right place. We can help them. The really surprising thing in looking at the data on the backend, which then helped to inform the customer journey, the lag time between the different stages was that people came to us. Up to 12 months in advance of actually having a requirement and don’t necessarily reach out. They will browse through the types of products that they need, the types of service they need from us. We offer a complimentary custom lighting plan service for the lighting side of our business, which is often where many customers come to us first. And They’ll look at that. They’ll think about it. Sometimes they’ll submit a request and then just silence. And at first, we thought there was maybe an email deliverability issue on our end. So we investigated that. We determined that wasn’t the problem. We then poked around a couple of other areas and we really concluded that the, it concluded through the data and through them doing some research around it that the customers. Even on an inbound flywheel, they are coming a lot earlier than we expected. And that was very surprising because we thought the customer journey for us was actually tighter in terms of time. And there actually is this lag where someone’s coming through the customer journey and they’re almost looping back. And then they get to this point where they are doing research again, but now we’re a known entity because they came to us before and did some research and learned some things about. Converting to led or upgrading their fans or, what are the polls that will last the longest, whatever it might be, that was super interesting and has really helped us mature how we go after leads and say, on the paid side, where we’re focusing our spend to really optimize for generating a positive ROI.

Carman Pirie: I think that would cause you to build up some considerably more intense nurturing as well over those early stages. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Very cool. 

Jeff White: What does your tech stack look like, in terms of how you’re navigating, probably quite large data sets across a number of different areas of the customer journey? How are you pulling that together and making sense of it all? 

Cory Peterson: Yeah. So just as we were building out the customer journey really around an inbound flywheel, we, at the same time, were. Documenting the tech stack that we had built out and we built it around actually the same flywheel, just to really understand where all the pieces of the tech stack came together with that journey.

So our tech stack is completely interconnected. So from that first digital touch, through the referrals, through customers coming back, we have full visibility into that whole process where we’ve joined the data. It’s certainly joined within the CRM, but we’ve taken it a step further and have now joined all of our data a few years ago using BigQuery. And so we’re then able to normalize that data within BigQuery. And then report on everything at a normalized level. Certainly, an area we struggled with for a long time and others do too, is I look at one report in Google Analytics. I looked at another report in Google ads, it is somewhat close, maybe. Then I go into HubSpot and the HubSpot number is definitely different than how many conversions Google ads said I got and paid for. And then you look at the number of calls that Google ad said, but Call Rail is giving you a different number in terms of a number of people that actually called in. So we’ve, similarly in other areas, just as defining the customer journey, we really defined what the data. Looks like in what the rules are around, what data is considered primary data. What data is really backup data for if we have a gap or if there’s some sort of anomaly that pops up? I would, in terms of this whole evolution for a business, I think if you can do it early and connect everything early, it’s great. If you can’t, I think the better first step is focusing on the journey first.

If there’s limited resources focusing there first, then let’s go back and. And connect all the data together. But, and I say that as long as you are, able to already record conversions and you know that you’re able to track people coming onto the site and where they’re coming from. But the tech stack is certainly important because there, there’s just so many options out there and I’ve talked to many other marketers and sales leaders. And if you don’t have it, the tools don’t make you successful. It’s having the right tool in knowing how to utilize it. To the benefit of the team that does so I can go buy Salesforce today and Salesforce can do a lot of different things But it’s not going to help me move the needle further than what we’ve already built out 

Carman Pirie: Cory I’m this has been a fascinating conversation and then I don’t want to stop it to be fair, but Unfortunately, we have to at some point. I wonder you know, here we are turning the calendar another year and looking ahead to 2025. And of course, the nature of experiments and working in your business is that customers change products of all but also the landscape. Even how people will find your product is changing. And I guess what’s as you look ahead to the experiments coming up and and how the landscape is changing, what do you see as being the biggest question mark out there? Your biggest curiosity? 

Cory Peterson: Certainly an area that we’re watching closely, a few areas. One would be around how cookies continue to evolve. It’s been moving. Target for many in marketing and it is for us too. I think having the first-party sort of understanding of the customer journey helps that. For any companies struggling with that’s a good area to help support with that problem. We also are, continuing to watch how the AI component evolves. We are very closely monitoring how we can utilize it really to the benefit of the customers, but ensure we’re not utilizing it in a way that dehumanizes the experience that customers have. And I think for many that is going to become a real. Difficult conversation because if I have 10 people who sit on chat or who are BDRs answering calls, and there’s this great new program that says they can do just as good as any BDR on the team, and it’s a hundred dollars per seat versus the cost of a live human BDR, that might be a tough conversation for some companies to have with finance. But if you make the wrong choice, it can be really detrimental. So I think particularly in this industry where we’re not in high-tech SaaS, we’re working with industrial customers. We need to work with the customers the way they want to be worked with. And so we’ll step as far as we can to utilize AI in any other new technologies that come out, but we aren’t going to do it to the detriment of the customers. And so that gets back to, the testing the research and the real understanding of what the customer needs from us. 

Carman Pirie: Cory, it’s been great to unpack your thinking around this during today’s show. It’s been a lovely conversation. Thank you so much for sharing with us. 

Jeff White: Thanks for having me today.

It was great. Yeah. Great conversation. Thanks, Cory. 

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