In the world of enterprise B2B recurring revenue companies, designing a customer lifecycle that drives retention, growth, and efficiency is a complex challenge. It requires input and alignment from multiple departments, including Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, Professional Services and Product. Many companies fall into common traps when attempting to design their customer lifecycles, leading to inefficiencies, risk and missed opportunities. This article explores the top five pitfalls we see in B2B customer lifecycle design and how to solve them.

Pitfall 1: Designing in Silos Without Cross-Functional Input

One of the most common mistakes in customer lifecycle design we’ve observed is a lack of alignment between the departments critical to the success of the customer on the details of how the customer lifecycle should function. Often, Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, Professional Services and Product teams work independently when designing their approaches to engaging and managing customers through the different stages of the lifecycle. This leads to a fragmented customer lifecycle design that lacks cohesion, making it difficult for customers to move seamlessly between each stage and progress towards achieving outcomes.

According to Forrester, organizations that align Sales and Customer Success teams see a 36% improvement in customer retention rates. To achieve these sorts of gains through the design of your customer lifecycles, it’s essential to enable all relevant departments to participate and collaborate in the design process. A centralized approach using a system of customer lifecycle design like ValueFlow ensures that the customer lifecycle design supports each team’s goals while creating a consistent experience and achievable path to value for customers.

Pitfall 2: Focusing Design Efforts Only on Customer Acquisition

Working across the B2B recurring revenue economy, we see too many companies investing heavily in designing the acquisition phase of the customer lifecycle but neglecting to give equal attention to the equally critical phases of adoption, expansion, and renewal. This is despite the sustainable growth and valuation of these companies being highly dependent on key metrics like Net Revenue Retention. Under-investing in the design of how customers, once acquired, will successfully adopt your products and services and therefore renew and expand, is a one-way ticket to a customer lifecycle that fails your business.

To avoid this pitfall, establish a clear customer lifecycle design charter centered on the creation of value for your customers and the retention and expansion of revenue for your business. This does not dismiss the importance of designing an effective and efficient customer acquisition phase. Rather, this charter emphasizes the need for designing how acquisition activities will support the later phases of your customer lifecycle. For example, how does the design of your sales discovery and qualification processes support the creation and agreement of a Success Plan for each prospect which, in turn, facilitates a seamless transition into adoption once that prospect is acquired as a customer.

Pitfall 3: Using Static Tools for Dynamic Design Needs

To date, B2B companies have almost exclusively relied on tools like PowerPoint, Visio, Miro or spreadsheets to attempt to document, collaborate and iterate the designs of their customer lifecycle. While these tools are familiar and widely available, they are not purpose-built for capturing and visualizing the complex details of B2B customer lifecycles. Documenting the objectives of each phase of your customer lifecycle in a set of slides is very different to capturing and visualizing the interconnected hierarchies of stages, playbooks and tasks that make up the real design of how your customer lifecycles work.

Companies limited to these tools lack the flexibility needed to collaboratively interact with designs across departments and different customer lifecycle stages as customer needs and business demands change. This leads to these companies finding themselves stuck with outdated lifecycle designs that no longer reflect reality or that are effective.

To avoid this, consider adopting a customer lifecycle design platform that is purpose-built for documenting and connecting the different building blocks from customer outcomes, phases and stages, down to playbooks, RACI maps and system architectures. This will enable your teams to interact with your customer lifecycle designs in a way that drives collaboration and accuracy of implementation.

Pitfall 4: Treating Customer Journey Maps as the Entire Design

Customer journey maps can be an excellent tool for understanding how customers experience your company at specific moments, but they are not a complete customer lifecycle design. Traditional customer journey maps often fall short in depth and scalability. They tend to capture a specific moment in time rather than the full complexity of an operationalized B2B customer lifecycle. As a result, they lack the cross-functional perspective needed to drive meaningful change. This gap is reflected in a Gartner survey, which found that while 82% of organizations have created customer journey maps, only 47% are effectively using them.

To counter this limitation of journey maps, we recommend a multi-disciplinary approach that we call Customer Lifecycle Design (CLD). CLD is the strategic process of planning, designing, and refining how customers are managed from acquisition through renewal and expansion. It integrates the best elements of journey mapping, blueprinting, and process engineering, creating a more effective and adaptable approach to designing B2B customer lifecycles.

The disciple of CLD is especially critical for enterprise B2B companies with recurring revenue models. Here, aligning internal processes, roles and systems with customer experiences and outcomes can directly impact long-term growth and valuations.

Pitfall 5: Failing To Continuously Measure & Iterate

The design of your customer lifecycle is never finished. In fast-moving markets, customer needs and expectations change constantly and constraints and demands on your business fluctuate. Your lifecycle designs must evolve to reflect those changes. Yet, many companies design key stages of their customer lifecycle once, save it on a shared drive and then fail to measure whether the designs are working or if iteration is needed. This leads to individual playbooks and even entire stages of the customer lifecycle that become outdated and ineffective.

To mitigate this risk, connect your customer lifecycle designs to intelligence that will guide you on what parts of your customer lifecycle are working and not working as intended. The source data for this intelligence exists within the systems that operationalize your customer lifecycle such as your CRM, Customer Success Platform and Professional Services Automation tool.

These systems enable your teams to execute the processes and playbooks you’ve designed within your customer lifecycle. Therefore these systems are generating the data that will provide intelligence on whether those designs are being adopted and efficiently executed by your teams, and positively impacting the health, success, retention and expansion of your customers.

Use An Intelligent Design Platform

ValueFlow is designed to help enterprise B2B recurring revenue companies overcome these common pitfalls and build customer lifecycle designs that adapt with their business. With ValueFlow, you can:

• Integrate Cross-Functional Design Efforts: Bring together insights from sales, marketing, customer success, and product teams to create a unified customer lifecycle design.
• Emphasize Value Delivery Across All Stages: Design lifecycle phases that ensure customers continue to experience value, increasing their likelihood of renewal.
• Adapt Your Design in Real-Time: Move beyond static tools with a dynamic platform that allows you to iterate on lifecycle design based on real-time feedback and data.
• Design for the Long Term, Not Just Touchpoints: Create a comprehensive lifecycle design that integrates journey insights into a bigger-picture strategy for long-term success.

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