Customer Journey Mapping Checklist

Pull firmographic and behavioral data from the CRM (Salesforce or HubSpot) and the CDP if you have one (Segment, mParticle). Confirm the ICP definition with the RevOps lead — segment criteria drift between marketing and sales is the most common reason journey maps get ignored downstream.

Walk through 3-5 competitor journeys end-to-end: ad → landing page → form → nurture → sales touch. Capture screenshots, email cadences, and pricing-page patterns. Tools like SimilarWeb and Mailcharts help; nothing replaces actually signing up with a burner email.

Combine NPS verbatims, support-ticket themes (Zendesk / Intercom tags), G2 / Capterra reviews, and win-loss interview notes. Aim for 50+ data points per segment before declaring a pattern. Sales-call recordings (Gong, Chorus) are gold for objection language.

Target 5-8 interviews per persona — recent customers, churned customers, and stalled opportunities. Coordinate with CS to avoid interview fatigue on the same accounts. Offer a $50-$100 incentive per the standard research-ops rate.

Record with consent, transcribe (Otter, Fireflies, or built-in Zoom), and code by theme. Watch for the moment in each story when the customer says 'and then I…' — those are the unprompted journey transitions, more reliable than asking 'what did you do next?'

List every owned, earned, and paid touchpoint by stage: organic search, paid social, blog, email nurture, webinar, sales SDR call, demo, onboarding email, in-app message, CS check-in. Include the tool that owns each (HubSpot, Marketo, Iterable, Intercom) so handoffs are obvious later.

Use stages that match how your funnel is actually instrumented in GA4 and the CRM — typically Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Onboarding, Adoption, Advocacy. Don't invent a 9-stage framework that doesn't map to any dashboard you already run.

Use Figma, Miro, or Mural with a swim-lane format: stages across the top, persona thinking / doing / feeling / channels / metrics down the side. Keep version one ugly — a polished v1 invites feedback on aesthetics instead of substance.

Mark each touchpoint with the emotional state in the customer's own words from interviews — 'overwhelmed by pricing tiers', 'frustrated by the demo gate'. Highlight the 2-3 worst friction points; those become your prioritization candidates in the next phase.

Moments of truth are the touchpoints where the customer decides to continue or leave — pricing-page bounce, free-trial day-1 activation, first renewal. Cross-reference with GA4 funnel exploration and product-analytics drop-off (Mixpanel, Amplitude) to validate the hunches.

Triage feedback into must-fix (factual errors, missing personas) vs. nice-to-have (visual polish). Re-circulate the revised map only to reviewers who flagged must-fix items; don't restart the full review.

Walk marketing, sales, CS, product, and support through the final map. The goal is shared language ('a Stage 3 lead' should mean the same thing across teams) — not a vote on whether the map is correct.

For each friction point flagged in design, name the owner, the change, the deadline, and the success metric. 'Fix the pricing page' is not an action plan; 'PMM rewrites pricing-page hero by Sept 30, target 15% bounce-rate reduction' is.

Each stage needs a leading indicator (traffic, MQL volume) and a lagging indicator (conversion rate, CAC payback). Confirm GA4 events, UTM conventions, and CRM stages support the metric before claiming it as a KPI — otherwise the dashboard goes up empty in week 4.

Lock in the baseline numbers before any action plans ship — visit-to-MQL, MQL-to-SQL, SQL-to-opportunity, opportunity-to-close, onboarding-to-activation. Without a baseline, you can't claim the journey work moved anything.

Review whether the action-plan items shipped on time and whether early metrics are trending. Most action plans slip; flagging that at 30 days is recoverable, at 90 days it's not.