The B2B Customer Journey: Touchpoints from First Search to Repeat Purchase

Why is looking at sales no longer enough?

Many businesses describe their selling from the first conversation to the signature. What happens before is marketing to them, what happens after is fulfillment. The customer experiences it differently. For them, the relationship begins when they first search for a solution, and it ends only when they stop buying. In between lie search results, recommendations, the website, a proposal, the invoice, the first service call.

This guide answers the question: Which touchpoints does a business customer experience from first search to repeat purchase, and how do you arrange them so you know where work pays off? We first clarify the terms and the customer journey model by Lemon and Verhoef (2016). Then we look at what research says about the particularities of B2B and weigh two views. At the end there is a map you can use to draw your own customer journey on one page.

The customer does not distinguish between marketing, sales and accounting. They experience one business.

What is a customer journey? The model by Lemon and Verhoef

The customer journey describes a customer’s path through all contacts with a supplier over time. A touchpoint is each individual encounter along this path: a search result, a phone call, an invoice, a review written by another customer. The customer experience is what arises for the customer from all these encounters together.

In a widely cited review in the Journal of Marketing, Lemon and Verhoef (2016) brought together what research knows about this. They describe customer experience as multidimensional: it includes cognitive, emotional, physical, sensory and social responses to a supplier. Their starting point is an observation that applies to small businesses as much as to corporations: customers now encounter companies through many channels and media, experiences are becoming more social because other customers have a say, and companies have much less control over the journey than before. They conclude that a company must bring together several functions and even external partners to create a good customer experience.

Their model divides the journey into three stages: prepurchase (from the first need through search to selection), purchase (order, contract, payment) and postpurchase (use, service, repeat purchase or churn). Previous experiences feed into every new journey. In addition, they assign touchpoints to four groups, depending on who owns them.

What is different in B2B?

Lemon and Verhoef’s model comes largely from consumer markets. Mora Cortez and Johnston (2025) criticize that many studies of the B2B customer journey have not moved away from this. They reviewed 38 publications from three decades and developed their own model for business customers with three layers: the course of the business relationship in seven phases, the customer’s expectations and customer service. Their main point: in B2B a customer team travels, facing a supplier team. The journey consists of many encounters between people, supported by digital touchpoints. The authors themselves stress that their model still needs empirical confirmation.

That the early phase in B2B is largely digital is well described. Marvasti, Huhtala and Yousefi (2021) start from the premise that business buyers complete more than half of the buying process through digital touchpoints before having significant contact with a supplier. They show that a prospect’s buying stage can be estimated fairly accurately from their browsing behavior on the supplier’s website. Based on interviews with executives and buyers, Kalwey and colleagues (2025) describe customers jumping between phases instead of passing through a fixed funnel. How this affects sales is described in the article on how business customers buy today.

If you want to work on these roles, the article on B2B personas explains the buying center model. For the customer journey this means: the managing director, the buyer and the later user experience different touchpoints. A good website helps one, a clear proposal another, a good onboarding the third.

Two views: plan the journey or accompany it?

There are two readings of how to deal with the customer journey. The first sees it as a funnel designed by the supplier. You define stages, plan content for each stage and measure how many customers move from one stage to the next. The advantage is that it can be managed and measured, as the article on aligning marketing and sales describes.

The second reading sees the customer journey as a path the customer chooses. The supplier cannot prescribe it, only be helpful at the right points. Lemon and Verhoef support this view by pointing to companies’ reduced control, Kalwey and colleagues with the finding that customers jump back and forth between phases.

I consider both views necessary, but for different purposes. For measurement, the funnel is the better tool because it shows where customers are lost. For design, the map is better because it shows which touchpoints the customer needs along the way, in whatever order they visit them. If you only know the funnel, you overlook external touchpoints and everything after the purchase. If you only know the map, you do not know where to start.

You cannot determine the customer’s path. You can only make sure they find what they are looking for at every station.

The touchpoint map: your customer journey on one page

For practice, I translate the model into the touchpoint map. It is a grid with four stages as columns and the four kinds of touchpoints as rows. Compared with Lemon and Verhoef’s model, I split the postpurchase stage in two, because in B2B use and repeat purchase are separate tasks.

You do not fill in the map at your desk but with your team and with customers. The best clues come from three questions to your last five new customers: How did you first hear about us? What did you check before contacting us? What surprised you after the order, positively or negatively?

1. Collect touchpoints

   For each of the four stages, note every point where a customer encounters the business, including those you do not own.

2. Assign responsibility

   Enter a name for every brand-owned touchpoint. Where no one is named, no one takes care of it.

3. Mark gaps

   Mark in red where the customer looks for something and finds nothing or waits a long time.

4. Choose three points

   Choose the three red fields closest to the order or affecting the most customers.

5. Review after a quarter

   Repeat the questions with the next five new customers and adjust the map.

Where does the B2B customer journey lose customers most often?

Every business has its own gaps, but some recur again and again. Three lie at the transitions between stages, because responsibility changes there. The fourth lies with external touchpoints, which many businesses do not have on their radar at all.

• From search to evaluation: the customer finds the business but no answer to their question, for example on price range, process or service area. They continue evaluating elsewhere.
• From evaluation to purchase: the proposal arrives late, or nobody follows up. This is the area sales knows best and still often neglects.
• From purchase to use: sales hands over the order, and the project team does not know what was promised. How to prevent this is described in the article on handover from sales to the project team.
• External touchpoints: reviews go unanswered, references are missing, the business does not appear in trade media or AI answers.

What follows beyond the individual case?

The customer journey shifts the question of who in the business is responsible for selling. If the customer’s experience arises from all touchpoints, accounting sells with an understandable invoice and the technician with a punctual appointment. Lemon and Verhoef (2016) conclude that companies must connect their functions more closely. For a small business this is easier than for a corporation, because the paths are short.

You should also know the limits of the approach. A map is a model, not a measurement. It shows where gaps probably lie, but not how large they are. For that you need figures, such as inquiry rate, proposal win rate and repeat purchase rate. The article on growing existing customers shows how to make the postpurchase part measurable.

First steps for this week

• Draw an empty grid with four stages and four kinds of touchpoints on a sheet of paper.
• With two colleagues from sales and fulfillment, enter all known touchpoints in one hour.
• Call your last five new customers and ask the three questions: how found, what checked, what surprised.
• Enter a responsible person for every brand-owned touchpoint.
• Choose the three red fields closest to the order and define one measure for each.

Conclusion: which touchpoints count on the B2B customer journey?

The guiding question was which touchpoints a business customer experiences from first search to repeat purchase and how to arrange them. Lemon and Verhoef’s (2016) model provides the structure: three stages and four kinds of touchpoints, only one of which fully belongs to the business. In business markets, several people are involved on both sides, and the relationship really begins after the purchase.

For practice this means: draw the journey on one page, ask customers instead of yourself, give every brand-owned touchpoint a name and work first on the transitions between stages. The customer journey is thus less a marketing instrument than a view of the whole business through the customer’s eyes.