Buyer journey mapping and the golden thread

However, what we see is that too many teams build their customer journey maps in siloes and do not get the advantage of a single thread that stitches everything together.

The process usually runs something like this:

1. Marketing drafts customer journeys based on campaign data

2. Sales builds their buyer journey around funnel stages and objection handling

3. Customer success leans on post-sale feedback and identifies pain points

Each team has their view, but rarely are those views stitched together.

The result? A disconnected or misunderstood experience that reflects internal silos more than it reflects how customers buy.

And in a world where buyers expect relevance, speed, and seamlessness across each touchpoint, that misalignment isn’t just inefficient, it’s expensive.

Today’s journeys aren’t linear, your teams shouldn’t be either

Buyer journeys today are non-longer linear but multi-threaded, and heavily influenced by peer-to-peer research.

Buyers loop in and out of discovery stage, engaging across multiple channels and stakeholders, and expect to pick up the conversation wherever they left off, even if that’s with a different team or on a different platform.

But when internal functions work from disconnected insight, things start to fall apart:

• Marketing promotes content that doesn’t reflect sales conversations
• SDRs engage accounts without knowing recent campaign activity
• Sales overlooks existing customers flagged for cross-sell or renewal
• Customer success misses’ signals from intent data and digital behaviour

Each team might be doing a good job individually. But together?

The experience feels disjointed, inconsistent and sometimes, irrelevant.

What’s missing? Shared insight and shared intent

Journey mapping shouldn’t be a marketing exercise. It should be a cross-functional, data-informed initiative that reflects how your customers behave, not how your teams are structured.

That means aligning around:

• Shared data: Unifying CRM, intent, campaign, and behavioural data into one view of the customer
• Shared definitions: Agreeing on journey stages, engagement signals, and how success is measured
• Shared ownership: Involving sales, marketing and CX from the beginning, not just reviewing the map, but co-creating it

When everyone owns the map, they also own the outcomes.

Three signals your journey map isn’t cross-functional enough

Not sure if your journey approach is working? Look out for these warning signs:

1. No one’s using it - if the journey map lives in a deck instead of  informing daily decisions, it’s not connected to reality.
2. Only marketing contributed - If sales and CX weren’t involved, you’re likely missing crucial context.
3. It’s  built around channels, not behaviours - Real journeys reflect buyer signals, not internal process stages.

Making journey mapping work across the business

Fixing a fragmented journey map doesn’t mean starting over.It means widening the lens, including broader perspectives, better data, and shared goals.

Here’s how we help B2B clients do exactly that:

• Start with real data, not assumptions: Using platforms like 6sense, we surface actual buyer behaviour across key accounts from early research through to sales engagement and post-sale signals.
• Build  a working group, not a handover process: Sales, marketing, and customer success co-create the journey, along with the signals, content and outreach that support it.
• Focus  on practical orchestration: We don’t just map the journey. We align assets, campaigns and outreach to follow it from LinkedIn to landing pages, SDR cadences to customer nurture. It’s all connected.

The result? A journey that actually moves buyers forward.

When your internal teams operate from a shared, data-led view of the buyer journey, the impact is felt quickly:

• Messaging aligns across all touch points
• Sales feels more confident in outreach timing
• Campaigns respond to real buying signals
• Buyers progress faster and with less friction

A journey map is only as powerful as the alignment behind it.

Built in silos, it gathers dust. Built collaboratively, it drives momentum.

Let’s build it right

Let’s co-create a journey that reflects how your buyers buy.

‍Join us for a Discovery Workshop and let’s map what’s next, together.

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