How to Use Journey Builder at B2B Companies

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Many B2B companies know they need marketing automation to stay relevant and reduce the workload for their teams. What they don’t always know is which tools they need and how to use them to drive transformative business value.

Salesforce Journey Builder is a Marketing Cloud feature that integrates with your Sales Cloud and Service Cloud to provide a seamless experience. Although Journey Builder is often associated with strategies for abandoned carts and B2C companies, in my six years of experience using it, I’ve seen how powerful it can be for B2B companies. 

Read on to learn more about Journey Builder, how it works, and how you can use it at your B2B company to streamline your customer experience and internal processes.

What is Journey Builder and How Does It Work?

Journey Builder is a feature of Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud that helps companies engage with their customers at every step along the path from lead to loyalty. While B2B companies often choose Pardot for their needs, I’ve seen how effective Journey Builder — and Marketing Cloud as a whole — can be for B2B companies.

Journey Builder tracks each lead’s behavior and includes your marketing, accounting, sales, and customer service teams in the lead monitoring experience. Nearly anything a lead does, from downloading a whitepaper to logging a service request, can update the lead’s data and trigger the next appropriate touchpoint for that individual. This gives your company greater visibility into customer activity and allows you to make key decisions with real-time information. As a result, your teams are better able to sell to leads and your customers enjoy a better experience, no matter where they are on the buyer’s journey. 

Because Journey Builder is part of the Salesforce suite, it is integrated with other Salesforce products, such as Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. This ensures all your data is stored in one centralized location, providing a seamless experience for your employees and customers alike. It also boosts internal productivity, as your teams can complete work in other Salesforce products through the Journey Builder tool.

How Can Your B2B Company Use Journey Builder?

There are many ways for B2B companies in a wide range of industries to use Journey Builder. Here are just a few of my favorite ways to boost ROI with this feature.

Optimize Leads and Opportunities

Journey Builder helps your company make the most of leads and opportunities without requiring more time from your sales team. For example, if a lead hasn’t changed status after 30 days, Journey Builder can automatically add them to a nurture campaign and send the lead personalized content based on their behavior. You can also use the tool to update lead status. For instance, you may decide that any lead who engages with a specific link in one of your nurture emails will be converted to a contact with an opportunity in Sales Cloud. 

Automating these actions with Journey Builder not only saves effort for your sales team, but also ensures they can spend their time on the leads most likely to convert.

Automate Simple Communications

Journey Builder can use data from any standard or custom object that has a lookup relationship to your Leads and Contacts. 

This means you can use Journey Builder to: 

  • replace sales calls with automated surveys from lost opportunities;
  • send upcoming renewal reminders for customer subscriptions;
  • notify customers to upgrade to your latest product;
  • and more.

Leveraging Journey Builder for these tasks ensures that your consumers get these notifications and updates in a timely fashion, while freeing up time for your sales and service employees to focus on more intensive tasks.

Manage Partner Relationships

If you’re working with partners and wholesalers, Journey Builder can help with the onboarding process for these relationships. By setting up an automated journey that all new partners receive, you can easily provide your new contacts with introductions, media kits, and everything they need to make the partnership successful.

Create Drip Campaigns

Instead of sending out one manual email announcing a new product, use Journey Builder to strategically piece out your announcement with a drip campaign over 1 to 2 weeks. This will likely drive more interest among your customers and over the course of this campaign, you can see who’s engaging with your emails. Journey Builder provides statistics and updates every step of the way, so you can easily conduct reporting and continually inform your marketing strategy with this valuable data.

Improve Internal Processes

Journey Builder doesn’t only help boost your customer experience — it can also streamline workflows for your internal teams. 

For instance, Journey Builder can:

  • Reduce workloads. Replace the repetitive tasks your sales and marketing teams perform, such as manually sending emails, with the automated processes. 
  • Update leads. This ensures better data hygiene and more accurate customer information. 
  • Support your sales team. Journey Builder can email users from the sales team when they are close to reaching their targets to keep them updated on their progress.
  • Assign tasks on time. If a lead reads your whitepaper, for example, Journey Builder can automatically assign a salesperson with the task of reaching out to that lead.

With so many diverse use cases, Journey Builder is a powerful tool for B2B companies — provided you have a solid foundation in place.

Getting the Most Out of Journey Builder

If you want to take full advantage of Journey Builder at your B2B company, you need more than just the technology. Although Marketing Cloud implementation is essential to using Journey Builder, your marketing strategy will ultimately determine your success with this tool.

Defining buyer personas ensures you have a sound understanding of your target customers. You can then use these profiles to create workflows for the different buyer’s journeys to make sure you provide leads with the right messaging, at the right time — which is the exact goal of using Journey Builder.

As a full-service Salesforce Platinum Consulting Partner and digital agency, RelationEdge can help your B2B company implement Marketing Cloud and get the best ongoing results from Journey Builder. Contact our team of technology experts and marketing specialists to get started today.