Customer Engagement Blueprint

One of the three, core go-to-market frameworks, the Customer Engagement Blueprint describes, at a very high level, the stages the key customer roles go through in buying, using and exploiting your product.

Anyone that follows my work will know that I am not a fan of detailed customer journeys.  I have never met a customer that follows a supplier’s proscribed journey: they are too busy on their own paths.  That said, it is important to build a shared understanding of the major  stages a customer goes through in their interactions with your company.  This is the role of a customer engagement blueprint.

So what exactly is a Customer Engagement Blueprint?  It is:

• a high level description of the stages each of the key customer roles goes through in buying, using and exploiting your product and services.  By high level, I mean, something like a 10,000 meter view;

• described from the customer’s perspective - outside-in;

• a common base from which teams across the organisation can design their own processes;

It differs from a traditional customer journey mainly in the degree of detail.  A Customer Engagement Blueprint is not designed to to say in detail what is required at every stage of the customers journey. In fact, as I've already said customers just don't follow your journey; they are, rightly, focused on their own paths.

The Blueprint answers the following questions:

• What are the major stages a customer or user goes through?

• Who from the customer is involved (this ties to key roles described in the Ideal Customer Profile)

• What are their concerns and challenges at that stage?

• What obstacles prevent them achieving their aims at that stage?

• What do we want to achieve at this stage?

• Who is our primary owner for this stage?

As you can see, the list is devoid of specific interventions or content. This is intentional. The Blueprint, sets out the overall framework that guides different teams. This common base allows different teams to apply their unique expertise in a way which is coherent across the customer lifecycle. This coherence is crucial to building a joined-up experience for customers. That coherence is centred on the measurable results you communicate, sell and deliver to the key roles in your target companies. It is the red thread that runs the customer lifecycle.

Remember this is a Customer Engagement Blueprint; everything should be written and thought about from the perspective of the customer, particularly the first three bullet points. They should be written in terms that the customer would use: not that we use internally. This is another way of reinforcing a culture of customer focus.

Developing your Customer Engagement Blueprint.

A CEB is a high-level perspective and it's also cross-functional. For this reason the best approach to building it is to get a cross functional team together to sketch out the stages that the customer goes through from experience. A first draft can be done in a day, although that is not the end of the task. Your team should include:

• Marketing

• Sales

• Customer success

• Professional services

• Product

• CEO

Don't just get your managers in this workshop. The best people are those who deal with customers, either the marketing sales or usage stage. I always seek to get the CEO involved as she/he is crucial in its implementation.

Once you've got this high-level view, tidy it up and share it widely across the organisation to seek comments and to improve it. This also is invaluable in socialising the ideas on which it's built.  Make any appropriate changes and then document the final result.

To help, I've provided the structure of the framework I've used on many occasions. Remember to adapt this to your own specific needs.

Using your Customer Engagement Blueprint

A CEB is not designed to sit in a repository and gather dust. Its applications are numerous; here’s just a few:

• A core element of training;

• Titles for lead, opportunity and value enablement stages in CRM;

• A guide to the design of processes in each team;

• A structure for achievement paths - user flows in the product;

• A content taxonomy and subject guide.

CEB does not exist in isolation.  As one of the three GTM frameworks, it is a key partner of your Ideal Customer Profile,