In this article, I am going to introduce the basic principles we need in order to create useful reporting of your buyer's journey and customer journey in your CRM. A lot of companies talk about these interchangeably, but properly differentiating between these core concepts is an important step towards gaining the insights your company needs.
The difference between the Buyer's journey and the Customer journey
The buyer- and customer journey are different phases of the same process, and the split will sometimes even depend slightly on the specifics of your business. For software companies or similar service business models you may also encounter talks about the user journey, which often overlaps with one or both of these.
The buyer's journey happens first, and represents the basic stages a potential buyer will typically go through on their way to becoming a customer. It starts with any person or company from the first time they hear about you, and follows the key conversions until they become a customer. As the name suggests, this is where the customer journey begins and the buyer's journey is thereby completed.
Why lifecycle stages should not replace status fields
...
