How B2B Companies Can Optimize the Customer Journey Online

When it comes to the customer journey on online platforms, there are several factors that we need to consider. On this week’s episode, Lukas Hänsch (Buying Journey Specialist, Pathmonk) elaborates on what B2B companies can do to continuously improve the customer journey online. He also talks to us about the importance of leverage data to qualify leads and enhance conversions, why it’s crucial to understand at which stage of the journey potential prospects are, and how to nurture leads the right way.

Topics discussed in this episode:

• 
  
  • The complexity and challenges of understanding and improving the customer journey online [5:00] | [9:22]
    
  • How to use data to improve conversions and lead generation. [11:53] 
    
  • How technology helps us to understand and improve the customer journey. [21:14]
    
  • Lukas on the (mis)use of chatbots. [26:15] | [27:54]
    
  • Lukas’s advice:
    
    • Have a good measurement in place that you can read simply. [30:16]
      
    • Create personas based on actual data. [31:04]
      
    
    
  
  

Companies & links mentioned in this episode:

• Lukas Hänsch 
  
• Pathmonk
  
• Workday 
  
• Hasso Plattner Institut 
  

Click here to access the episode key takeaways.

SPEAKERS

Christian Klepp, Lukas Haensch

Christian Klepp  00:08

Hi, and welcome to the B2B Marketers on a Mission podcast. I’m your host, Christian Klepp, and one of the founders of EINBLICK Consulting. Our goal is to share inspirational stories, tips and insights from B2B marketers, digital entrepreneurs, and industry experts that will help you to think differently, succeed and scale your business.

Alright, welcome, everyone, to this episode of the B2B Marketers on a Mission podcast where you get your weekly dose of B2B marketing insights. I’m your host, Christian Klepp. And today, I’m thrilled to welcome a guest into the show who is specialized in UX and UI design, and who now helps businesses to improve the buying journeys of their customers in real time. Or as he likes to put it, he does that for every visitor, every stage, and every device. So coming to us from Germany, Lukas Haensch, schoenen guten Tag und herzlichen Willkommen.

Lukas Haensch  01:01

Schoenen guten Tag, thanks a lot for having me.

Christian Klepp  01:03

It was nice to get to meet you. And once again, on platforms like LinkedIn, and you know what started out as a product demo, then became an increasingly interesting conversation. And here we are. So I’m really looking forward to this conversation.

Lukas Haensch  01:22

Likewise.

Christian Klepp  01:23

All right. So let’s start out with… Lukas, you built your career around working to improve the user experience via online platforms, which, I mean, here comes the understatement of the year, it’s become increasingly important, right? Because, well, face to face meetings are not possible at the moment, trade shows are gone. Who knows when they’re gonna come back. So of course, B2B marketers and organizations are going to spend a lot of time acquiring business through digital means and online, which means that they’re gonna have to improve their customer journeys. So, in a previous life, you were responsible for mobile UX at Google, and Workday. And now you’re one of the co-founders at path monk, right. So talk to us about the customer journeys on online platforms as you see it, and why it’s so important for B2B organizations, not just to understand them, but to continuously improve them.

Lukas Haensch  02:23

I think you put it right there. Like it has been a fascination across all my career, really, because I think that came to that realization, when they were I felt there is a very heavy focus typically, on what you’re building, and what you’re putting out there, the next website, the next product, and very often very little consideration with how little attention or how little time under which real life stress situations, people actually move through those platforms, right, you know, is, every time you speak to somebody, they have what, like 20, tabs open, and your website might be just one of them. So I was always fascinated by this whole idea of communicating information into the journey of somebody very accurately and very precisely, because if you give somebody a wall of information, they really have to dedicate a lot of time. And I think it’s becoming less and less likely that even if you have to do an important decision that you’re going to do spending a whole lot of time on just one particular page and like, trying to get all the answers from there. So I think that is the thought that always accompanied me, right. And when I was, at Google, we focused a lot on mobile page optimization. And that’s the whole concept of PageSpeed optimization even exists, it’s exactly because of that scenario, right? If the page loads longer than three seconds, what 56% of the users are gone. So there’s going to be no journey, if the content is not there. And this is not even having achieved communicating an important idea from your team, your marketing team through the website into the brain of the of the individual on the other side, it’s just like that they’re staying around. And yeah, so I think it’s all has been forming a journey of focusing on improving the consumer journeys, the buying journeys on pages from all these different aspects. And with Google, like I said, it’s been a focus on mobile, but mobile is not the only part of the journey. But it has been a great time actually focusing on those.

Christian Klepp  04:24

That’s fantastic. And thanks for sharing that. Where do you think organizations get it wrong? Because let’s face it, whether it’s in your personal circle and your professional circle, I mean, how often have we heard these stories that somebody is going onto a platform or going onto a website and they are frustrated with the user experience? So what is it that organizations are getting wrong like why do you think some of them are not are not taking that market feedback and and improving on their on this experience that will improve in turn the customer journey?

Lukas Haensch  05:00

I think this has so many dimensions, and I can pick a couple of them and to speak about them, but it has a lot of dimension. So why do they even want to say they get it wrong? I think there’s just so many things you have to take into consideration. It’s a very, it’s a complex task to actually do it. Right. So I think the first thing would be, for example, starting off, let’s say we’re talking about the website, right? Even knowing other people that are coming to my page, are they from the right types of ICPs? Are they even the companies that I should be designing estate for, right? It’s already one thing that is not for everybody trivial to understand, and figure out, so starting at the very first point – ‘are the people that I’m designing for are even the people that I should be designing for’ can be a difficult task, if you asked a lot of marketing teams, what’s the percentage of people on your website that actually match your buyer persona.

Christian Klepp  05:53

Will they really know.

Lukas Haensch  05:56

So this is where it starts at the first place. And then it goes through a lot of layers from there, but I think that has been… that’s one difficult element. The other thing is actually focusly or attentionally designing those journeys, is neither an easy task, because there is a lot of challenges in that, right. So let’s say you want to, I don’t know, you want to have a blog post, and then you want to trigger a pop up, you want to guide them through the journey, you have to do a lot of pre thinking with a lot of steps, and you have to do a lot of manual setups, and then you have to continuously completely measure that whole journey, and then figuring out “Is the journey right?” “What is the wrong piece in the journey?” So there’s a lot of manual work required to actually get to a solid understanding of the journey. And I think, depending on the size of the team, depending on the attention that the team has, for this type of task, it’s very easy to not have it fully even fully tracked, for that matter, right. Even though we have all the tools available in the world, there would be enough marketing teams out there that probably wouldn’t even know where the tracking does not fully reflect the actual journey and some very simple answers about the journey. And I’m not just talking about a funnel, I’m talking about the journey here are difficult to give. So yeah, I wouldn’t put it in the way that they’re doing it wrong. I just think it is a complex task as conversion optimization is a complex task. It’s just something that requires input from a lot of areas, from you know, designers that are there scientists sometimes, the development team, the people that know the personas really well like in order to actually properly lay that out. And probably the only thing that I could add there, I think there’s probably also a mindset that is very fixed still on buying journeys, right like and pretty much, a lot of websites that you’re getting to, they will have the same information ready for you, no matter where you are in the journey. It’s gonna be exactly the same information. Now, obviously, this website personalization, which can have a different case study if you’re coming from a particular industry, but still, it’s a journey that somebody is going through, and they don’t want to just do the same thing. It’s not that we, you and me talk three times, and they keep on repeating the same thing. I should be up upgrading what I’m telling you, or changing, adapting to what I understand about you.

Christian Klepp  08:26

That was a great answer. And yes, granted that if there is no law, I would say, straightforward answer to like, okay, these are the problems. And this is how you should fix it. Because it really depends on, as you said, the size of the organization, the scope of the work involved. And if I’ve understood everything that you’ve been saying in the past couple of minutes, there’s a lot of work involved. And there’s a lot of I would say the term is like a lot of moving parts in this ecosystem. But I think if I understood what you were saying, it’s about making these improvements incrementally based on what organizations are seeing on their platforms, how users are interacting with it, where there are roadblocks, and I guess prioritizing too, right, because there’s a temptation to try to fix everything, but we all know that that’s a road to nowhere, right?

Lukas Haensch  09:22

Yeah, I think one thing is, I didn’t try to make it sound too complex because we can break it down into simple rules right. Let’s talk about the CTA on the website right. The CTA on the website is essentially what you want the user to do on your page. So does your CTA at all evolve with the stages of the journey? If I’m at the very beginning of the journey, typical buyer journey out there for everybody who’s listening, there’s many models out there, but typically it consists of a couple of stages, awareness, consideration making, decision making and then conversion. If I’m not a user in the awareness stage, why do I ask this user to now book a call with me? They’re just getting to know me. And this is where we’re starting with very simple concepts. And when you ask me what organizations are getting wrong, I think that is something that this very often been taken wrong. There’s one conversion goal that I as a business have, which is book a demo with me. And then there is stages that individuals are walking through. And I should be probably really catering what I want from them, or what I want to give them practically based on the stage and the journey. And I think, I don’t want to make it sound too complex. Because those principles are simple. There are stages, you want something from your visitor, you provide something. But does that map? Is there a mapping between what you do and where they are? And that mapping is, I guess, the first steps to getting it right.

Christian Klepp  10:54

That’s really insightful. And I think that’s really helpful, especially for the listeners out there who I know, from talking to them, many of them are currently in the process of improving that experience on their websites. And as you said, maybe maybe perhaps, the best way to go about it is to try to take a step back and simplify the approach. Right? Okay, fantastic.

Lukas, we can’t really talk about improving customer journeys without mentioning data. Alright. So we know that data is an important component, all right, when it comes to the customer journey, and it helps to improve conversions, as well as lead qualification, which is just as important, right? So just from your experience, give us an example of how you use data to improve conversions, lead qualification, and so forth.

Lukas Haensch  11:48

It actually ties into the concepts that we’ve been speaking about, right? If you know by behavior on the page, and that is data, right? That is number of scrolls, that is clicks, that is number of visits, right? If you know by data, in which stage this user most likely is, then you know what information you can provide. Or you can try to provide or you can get a give it a shot and providing right, might it be somebody in the awareness stage, you give them an introduction about what you do, versus asking them for a call. It’s pretty simple, in a certain way. And data drives, really, I mean, I don’t want to talk too much about what you know, Pathmonk does in detail. But that is exactly what Pathmonk is focused upon – understanding that data in real time, figuring out what would be the next piece of information, and then providing that information to the user. And it’s completely data driven, behavior driven, I should say, and that results, obviously, you know, you’re seeing in data, information, the buying journey, awareness, stage, consideration stage, decision making stage, where users are actually at in their journey, and what percentage of your visitors even gets down to the decision making stage and starts to sincerely consider your product and not just having spent a couple of seconds and then heading off again. So yeah, I think data can be used there in two ways – to analyze what has been going on to identify gaps in the journey. So if you know, people pushing really nicely through your first couple of stages, because the content that you’re providing is really helpful and insightful. But there is a challenge in, somebody moving from, let’s say,  the consideration stage to actually deciding to contact you guys, it might be that there is something that you would have to tweak, and that you will only see by data by where do the drop off is like really.

Christian Klepp  13:38

That’s really interesting. And I think, I think one thing that you’ve also mentioned, during our last call, which I thought was really interesting is that the data can also help you to like, I don’t know if predict, is the right word, but like, anticipate what the visitors behavior is going to be. And that will also help you to improve the current experience, am I right to say that?

Lukas Haensch  14:02

Yeah, think about it. I mean, we can make it very simple. Think about a shopping mall, right? Think about a shopping mall, and people moving through shops, like, there is certain predictability about what people do and not do in shops. Right? And there’s a certain predictability if somebody comes in five times into your shop, that they’re looking at one particular piece that they might just need one more information about that particular piece in order to make the decision. So yeah, so there is definitely the chance to analyze behavior and derive from there and patterns are emerging to figure out like, what would be the next piece of content that could actually help them. Might it be a testimonial, for example, when they’re studying to consider you guys but they don’t, you know, haven’t really gotten to the trust, the full trust for example, in your offering. So again, I think people behave in certain ways relatively predictable, like, if you look into the next I mean, right now it’s difficult to look into the shopping malls. But when this is going to be happening like normal again, like it’s very… you rarely going to see somebody all of a sudden sprinting through a shop.

Christian Klepp  15:16

Yeah, exactly.

Lukas Haensch  15:18

So and this is how it translates, there’s certain patterns that are likely guiding towards a certain direction that a visitor is doing. And if they’re spending certain amount of clicks that certain amount of time, and there’s always outliers, that’s not the question. But there are patterns that are emerging that the system could pick up.

Christian Klepp  15:35

Okay. Okay. Right. I’m just gonna throw this question in there. Because, some of the points you brought up in the past couple of minutes are so interesting, but I’m just gonna ask this from your experience, like from what you’ve seen, working in your business, and also working with your customers. But on average, and you can give me an estimation, on average, how many touch points does it require in the journey before a before a visitor converts, would you say.

Lukas Haensch  16:06

Oh, that’s a difficult question. But I can give my best to give you the answer from what we’ve been seeing. Number one, it really depends on the product in itself, right? If we’re talking about high ticket service products, typically the journey is going to be over a longer period of time with more touch points, right? You’re just not going to go there and buy, I don’t know, $50,000 software, all of a sudden on different touch points. Right. And there’s tons of studies actually, like, I think Gartner is bringing up great studies on the B2B buying journeys and how complex it can be. There’s actually a Google study that has been showing the car buying journey can have… I think it was up to 900 digital steps, until the decision has been made. Right?

Christian Klepp  16:47

How many? 900?

Lukas Haensch  16:49

I think that the thing that added… I have to have to pull up the report. It’s somewhere between 600 and 900 digital steps, right?

Christian Klepp  16:55

So in other words, several? (laugh)

Lukas Haensch  16:57

Yes, exactly. And, like, I’m not saying every journey is that complex. And I’m not saying that this 900 steps, or 600 steps I would have to check up on the exact number now, are all happening on your assets. They’re happening across, you know what the comparison platforms, YouTube, whatever it is, but there’s longer journeys, and there’s micro moments micro touchpoints that are happening. And that was… also was very exciting. And within the time at Google, because that’s what the whole mobile optimization topic is all about. These are micro moments, somebody needs a piece of information right now to do that next step in the journey. That’s why page load is important. That’s why you know, all of these kind of places… it is there because it makes sense. SEO is not for SEO because of its own sake, it’s there so that the user can actually progress in the journey, because the page has information ready, for example.

But to go back to your question, and I think there’s also a lot of patterns emerging, right? There’s different cohorts and groups, there might be cohorts that are going through a really long journey, there might be cohorts that are going through a very short journey, very quick touch points and submitting their information. And then it’s obviously interesting to figure out like, where do the quality requests sit, depending on your journey. So I can’t really give you like, this are six touch points – because it depends on the product, it depends on the price, it depends on the complexity of the decision that is involved. But definitely, the journey is becoming more complex and more complex, because there’s more information available. And, you know, within 10 seconds, I can have a couple of tabs open, that already makes what, like 10-15 touch points.

Christian Klepp  18:37

That’s fair enough. And I think you broke it down really well, in terms of how you explain that. Okay, this is something that you can’t always quantify, which I totally understand. And I think you brought up another point, which is equally important about these, what did you call them micro moments, right? Because it’s all about, especially in B2B, where we all know that the sales cycles can usually be a bit longer, because as you said, people are not just going to take out their credit card and, and buy something for $5,000 or $10,000. It’s gonna take, it’s gonna take a longer time, it’s going to take… there’s multiple elements involved that will help to influence that person to make that purchasing decision at the end of the day. Right.

Lukas Haensch  19:17

What I would say, though, is it is important for every team out there to start to get an understanding of their journey as good as possible. Right. And it is possible to understand from when my first visit to my last conversion point, what was the time in between? That is hugely important to understand and how many visits have been in there between to even be able to remotely think about something like a customer journey that is based on facts and imagination. So I think it’s possible to really approximate to this is I think a very important point as well to really start looking at what does it journey actually look like versus what do I think it looks like that they’re coming to my patients sign up and then have a conversation with sales versus, they might be coming a couple of times – one times from the from the bus, they pick up the phone, they just read one piece of our website, then they’re gone again, and they’re coming back. So working on getting a really good understanding of this. I think it’s a really great exercise on everybody who’s involved in those teams working on the journeys.

Christian Klepp  20:25

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Hey, it’s Christian Klepp. Here, we’ll get back to the episode in a second. But first, is your brand struggling to cut through the noise? Are you trying to find more effective ways to reach your target audience and boost sales? Are you trying to pivot your business? If so, book a call with EINBLICK Consulting, our experienced consultants will work with you to help your B2B business to succeed and scale. Go to www.einblick.co for more information.

Talked us about… because I know that you know at Pathmonk, you guys also use this type of technology. So for example, like there’s AI involved. So just, you know, talk to us about how technology has been helpful in understanding and improving the customer journey for companies in the B2B space.

Lukas Haensch  21:14

Yeah, I mean, there’s a couple of elements, one is really to get an understanding of where somebody in the journey actually is on the website. Right? That’s the first place. That’s the first thing like if you if I asked you today, you got 5000 visitors, 10,000 visitors, 50,000 visitors? Could you break me down: How deep they are actually in the journey? You know, it will take you a lot of work to get to the answer. And so that will be one thing, understanding where people are in the journey.

And I think it helps on the second layer, figuring out, what is the next best piece of information to show them. And that is very hard to just make up, right? I mean, you could say, yeah, after 30 seconds they being on my page, I’m going to be showing a pop up that is asking x or saying y. And I would question you and ask or would question that and ask how do you know? How do you know that this is the next piece of information that that user needed? Like, what made you think that? And if you can give a good rational answer based on the research of users in your journey, because you know that I don’t know, after a certain period of time on your page, users come to that conclusion, because you’ve seen that again, and again, and I don’t know, for example, user studies, then I would say great, you really understand the study, and you didn’t need any AI to figure that out. But I would say in many, many cases, that’s not the case where information is brought to the user, not really based on the journey thinking mindset. And this is where I can jump in and you know, pick up information, this user now needs a testimonial, this user now needs a comparison table about products, like this is where I can start kicking it.

Christian Klepp  23:05

Yeah, that’s really interesting, at least from some of the things that you’ve been describing in the past couple of minutes, it sounds a little bit like a design thinking approach, right? Because like, I mean, design thinking is obviously also used for product development. And one of the things that they keep saying, which is extremely important is empathy, but it’s also like, okay, putting yourself in the shoes of this customer that is going through this platform. And to answer your question about like, what stage they’re at right now, what would they be needing? Well, you won’t know that unless you’re, unless you put yourself in the shoes of that customer to understand. Okay, so these are the steps that they have to go through. This is the process, right?

Lukas Haensch  23:48

I mean you can shortcut that work a little bit. I’m not saying that you can completely ignore it. But there’s already like, the idea of the buyer journey is not a new concept. It goes way back. It goes way back. It’s just how do you translate that into the digital environment so that it makes sense and that it actually translates over. So there’s some knowledge there, you will find, you know, even a tons of blog posts, right. For certain stages, there’s just like certain things you should do, and you shouldn’t do right. In let’s say in the awareness stage, don’t do a hard sell. As a very simple example, don’t just have your main call to action, ask for like I said, a demo or stuff like that, but actually provide educational information. This is how you can go through in the consideration stage, you can provide testimonials, reviews, like just thinking through like, even yourself, what information do you need? That’s the simplest like what do you call it in UX design heuristic evaluation, right? An expert goes through and says what do I think are distinct from immediate in that stages, you don’t need AI for this. You just need an understanding of which pieces of information map to which stage in the journey and I think that is already a big leap forward without a huge research that. Just that simple thinking of there’s stages, there’s content pieces that map. Which ones should we be bringing up best and which one we should put at the stage? In which situation?

Christian Klepp  25:23

That was such a great answer, I have to say. And the other thing is like, yes, of course, buyers journey, customer journey mapping, these are, like you said, these are nothing new. But I think the trick and the challenge, and the value that people like yourself or anybody else that’s specialized in this field, bring to the table is how to translate that into the digital environment, right? Because that is a competency that’s becoming increasingly in demand for lack of a better term. Right?

Lukas Haensch  25:54

I think there’s actually there’s an interesting one, I think, if that is ok I’m interrupting, that translation is really key. And it’s not to be underestimated. Let’s take one very simple example. Let’s take the chat that you find on websites.

Christian Klepp  26:12

The chatbot, or the chat?

Lukas Haensch  26:15

The chat, chatbot, whatever, right. It’s being used in many different contexts at the moment, but where it originates from is customer support. It was there that when you go somewhere and ask a question that you can get an answer real quick. This is how it works offline, right? If you have an information stand in a shopping mall, you can go there and ask a question. It’s not that that person is going to sell you… it’s not going to sell you a product right now. Right? So but when we in the digital world, like sometimes it seems that concepts are easily to be misunderstood and mistaken in purpose. So for example, a chat is being understood by many teams as a lead generation tool, but has originated from the support function. Right. So now it’s up to each company to evaluate how much leads and how much business have been actually been created to chat. I’m not the one to judge, every company should check on their own data. But I can definitely say that it seems that those purposes sometimes are misused, right? Or change when they move into the digital environment. Why you wouldn’t have an information receptionist being the salesperson, the customer chat out of a sudden takes on that role? Right.

Christian Klepp  27:29

We’ve all seen those platforms, right? Absolutely, totally agree with you. In every field of expertise, and yours is definitely no exception. There’s something you call conventional wisdom, or commonly held beliefs that people have. So why don’t you talk to us about one of those beliefs that you strongly disagree with and why?

Lukas Haensch  27:54

I’d put one confirmative statement out there, and we’ll say chatbots are not the great way to generate leads. And that has a couple of reasons. Because you were bringing, pieces of information that you could directly serve to the users into a conversational interface that they necessarily didn’t ask for. Right. So they have to go through a conversation while they were maybe just wanting to book a demo, as an example. And so that will be probably one that I would put out there. I mean, I think it’s a topic that can be discussed. I mean, data always gives the answers, but I think that definitely has some merit. And there is I mean, there is a lot of factors to it that pointed it right, a lot of people have challenges interacting, which I thought that I mean, it’s not difficult to find users who have a challenge to walk through the flow of a chatbot to then come to the desired outcome. Hence, there’s still a challenge for them to be converting through that channel. So it’s actually interesting, because we grew from that. Pathmonk itself, in its original days, has been actually been a chatbot building service, way back. So we started and based on that chatbot has been a big hype in 2016 2015 2017. There was a big push. And but what we’ve been seeing back then is, this is a passive… I’m not here to like dutch shepherds. This is just the experience that we had, like there is a passive element that requires the user to make a proactive decision to go into a chat, which is typically a support function, to then go through all of those steps to get to the final end result. And that’s where we started rethinking and that’s why we put out there like chatbots probably, it could be challenged that they’re the greatest way to generate leads.

Christian Klepp  29:58

Right, right. Exactly. Exactly. Just as a little bit of a piece of advice for people out there that are trying to improve the customer journey of their organizations, what would you say is one thing that you think people should start, and one thing that people stop doing?

Lukas Haensch  30:16

So I think one thing that they should start is having a good measurement in place that you can actually read simply. That you can actually get to the insights that you need to be able to say, how is our journey performing at the moment. And I would say, I mean, in very sophisticated organizations, that shouldn’t be a problem. But you know, as soon as experts are missing, that can be a challenge, right. So I would say that’s one thing that you should really start with, like having just a very simple set of analytics or insights in place that will tell you what is currently even going on with the journey. That would be one.

What they should be stopping doing is making up personas. And I think everything that should be happening should be data driven. Even if it comes down to creating your personas. I think as a designer, and I’ve been confronted with personas all the time. And what I noticed is, especially product managers, business leaders can stop the relief in personas very easily. And I always found to be the main reason is because the information just wasn’t believable. Right? It was no real insights about the persona that made that persona real, like in terms of what is the keywords that they’re actually looking for, rather than, do they have… I don’t know, do they play soccer in their free time? Right? Moving away from the things….

Christian Klepp  31:56

Things that are not going to help your work? Right?

Lukas Haensch  31:58

Exactly. Moving away from the high level personas, because I think they have a bad rap. The personas have a really bad rap in certain circles, because I think they have been created again and again and again, on a very unbelievable framework. While if you feed them only with actual real data that comes from customer interviews, that comes from the insights from your website, that comes from whatever other sources that you can take from, I think you’re gonna have much better conversations, how to even create a buyers journey because how do you want to create a journey for somebody where you know that they’re playing soccer in the afternoon, but you don’t know what they’re searching for? So it’s very difficult. I’d say that I would say would be the one thing to stop, doing bullshit personas. Sorry.

Christian Klepp  32:48

But that’s a really good point. And I think what you’re trying to say Lukas is like, it’s not it’s not that you should stop making personas, it’s just you should do them the right way.

Lukas Haensch  32:57

Yes, making them data-based, making them believable that you see, like, every marketer themselves, every designer themselves should really deeply ask themselves, do I believe in that persona that I’ve just built up here? And if so, why? And if the data is solid, great, that’s where you have to go. Personas are crucial. Like I think it’s very difficult to design any journey if you don’t know who you’re designing it for. And what are the parameters that they’re, that makes the journey, but as I mentioned, as long as the data is low quality, the output will be low quality.

Christian Klepp  33:29

Exactly. That’s absolutely right. That’s absolutely right. I mean, Lukas, this has been such a great and insightful and informative session about like customer journeys and how to improve them. So could you please do us the honor of introducing yourself to the listeners?

Lukas Haensch  33:45

Oh, very good. Let me start with that. (both laugh)

I’m Lukas, I am a part of Pathmonk. It’s a tool that supports and customizes automatically buying journeys on websites in order to generate more leads. Previously, I’ve been part as we were touching upon in the conversation being part of Google’s mobile UX team have been in Workday’s UX team and have been… actually been you brought up the design thinking, I’ve been part of Hasso Plattner, design school way back when it was running his courses. So yeah, I think that’s all I need to say.

Christian Klepp  34:25

Fantastic. As I said, this has been such a great session. So what’s the best way for people out there to get in touch with you?

Lukas Haensch  34:35

I’d say head to pathmonk.com and obviously on LinkedIn, Lukas Haensch.

Christian Klepp  34:46

Fantastic, Lukas. Thanks again, you know for coming on and sharing your experience and expertise with the listeners. Really appreciate it. Vielen herzlichen Dank. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.

Lukas Haensch  35:01

Gerne. Thanks a lot.

Christian Klepp  35:01

Alright, thanks. Bye for now.

Thank you for joining us on this episode of the B2B Marketers on a Mission podcast. To learn more about what we do here at EINBLICK, please visit our website at www.einblick.co and be sure to subscribe to the show on iTunes or your favorite podcast player.