Creating Value for Customers: Customer Journey Mapping through Marketing and Sales Alignment

• The purpose of this research is to find out how customer journeys help to align the Marketing and Sales departments. The general knowledge about effective sales and marketing alignment is too thin, since there is too much silo culture in organizations. While the term customer journey is widely used, and customer journey approaches are commonly applied, there does not seem to be a common understanding of what customer journeys are and how different customer journey approaches may support marketing and sales management. This is, for example, seen in the current body of knowledge on customer journeys that reflects a mix of related perspectives rather than a single commonly acknowledged customer journey perspective. Some view customer journeys as clearly delimited service processes with marked start- and endpoints, others see customer journeys as more open-ended processes comparable to the customer loyalty staircase. Sales and marketing activities become isolated from one another, which leads to a disconnected customer experience. With this exploratory research we would like to understand customer journey mapping as a tool to integrate/re-connect sales and marketing perspectives through a qualitative study in the form of interviews.