Hupspot Guide to Customer Journey Maps

Using Hubspot to design a customer journey map helps you understand how people move from first touch to loyal advocacy, so you can remove friction and improve every experience.

A customer journey map is a visual story of your customer’s relationship with your brand over time. By documenting each step, emotion, and question, you can align teams, improve service, and build a repeatable process that consistently delights customers.

What Is a Customer Journey Map in Hubspot Context?

A customer journey map is a diagram that shows how customers move through stages with your company, including their goals, touchpoints, and obstacles. When connected with data you already track in Hubspot, it becomes a powerful tool for managing experience, service, and retention.

Instead of assuming what customers want, you document their real behaviors and needs, then design your process around them.

Why Customer Journey Maps Matter for Hubspot Users

Mapping the journey gives structure to all the data you collect in Hubspot. It turns contacts, tickets, and feedback into a clear story you can act on.

Benefits include:

Aligning marketing, sales, and service around the same stages.
Identifying friction that causes drop-off or churn.
Prioritizing high-impact improvements for your team.
Supporting better automation and segmentation.
Clarifying expectations at each step of the relationship.

With this foundation, any workflow or campaign you build around Hubspot can directly support a better customer experience.

Core Stages of a Customer Journey Map

While every business is unique, most maps follow similar stages. You can adjust labels in Hubspot properties or pipelines to match these phases.

Awareness
The customer realizes they have a problem or need. They discover your brand through search, ads, referrals, or content.
Consideration
They compare solutions, read reviews, attend demos, or download resources.
Decision
The customer chooses a product or service, interacts with sales, and commits.
Onboarding
They learn how to use your solution, receive training, and set up their account.
Adoption
The customer starts using your product regularly and experiences initial wins.
Retention
You continue delivering value through support, education, and check-ins.
Advocacy
Loyal customers share feedback, refer others, and participate in case studies.

In your Hubspot environment, you can map these stages to lifecycle stages, ticket statuses, or custom objects to track movement and performance.

How to Build a Customer Journey Map Step-by-Step

The article on the Hubspot blog about customer experience maps outlines a simple process you can follow. Use that as a reference while tailoring the steps below to your organization.

Step 1: Define Your Goal and Scope

Decide what you want to improve first. You might focus on onboarding, renewals, or the entire end-to-end experience.

Clarify:

Which product or service the map will cover.
Which segment or persona you care about most.
What outcome you want, such as higher retention or more referrals.

A clear goal helps you decide what to track and which Hubspot reports will matter.

Step 2: Choose a Primary Persona

Customer journey maps work best when they are tied to a specific persona. Pull insights from your CRM notes, ticket history, and surveys to define one primary customer type.

Document for this persona:

Demographics and role.
Main goals and success criteria.
Key challenges and objections.

This persona becomes the “main character” for your map, guiding how you interpret each interaction you log in Hubspot.

Step 3: List Stages and Touchpoints

Next, outline the stages your persona goes through and the touchpoints at each stage. Touchpoints are any interaction they have with your brand.

Common touchpoints include:

Website visits and blog posts.
Emails, nurture sequences, and support messages.
Calls, demos, and live chat.
Knowledge base articles and training sessions.
Billing or account management interactions.

Compare your list of touchpoints with what you can already log or automate through Hubspot properties, pipelines, and activities.

Step 4: Capture Customer Thoughts, Feelings, and Actions

For each stage, write down what your customer is doing, thinking, and feeling.

Actions: What they actually do (click, call, sign up).
Thoughts: Questions they ask and assumptions they make.
Feelings: Emotions like confusion, excitement, or frustration.

Use qualitative data from interviews, surveys, and support tickets to stay grounded in reality. You can centralize this feedback in Hubspot to keep insights connected to actual contacts.

Step 5: Identify Pain Points and Moments of Delight

Now scan the map to highlight where the experience breaks down or shines.

Look for:

Points where customers frequently drop off or go silent.
Questions they repeat often in tickets or chats.
Steps that confuse customers or require manual help.
Interactions they praise in reviews or CSAT responses.

These pain points and delightful moments will later inform what you automate, improve, or double down on inside Hubspot workflows and sequences.

Step 6: Prioritize Improvements

Not every issue is equally important. Rank potential changes based on impact and effort:

High impact, low effort: Quick wins to tackle first.
High impact, high effort: Strategic projects to plan cross-functionally.
Low impact: Keep in view but avoid immediate investment.

Create a short roadmap and assign owners. Document specific actions you’ll implement through tools such as ticket automation, email campaigns, or pipeline updates.

Bringing Your Journey Map into Hubspot

Once your map is drafted, integrate it with your system so it becomes a living asset instead of a one-time exercise.

Map Stages to Lifecycle and Pipelines

Align journey stages with existing lifecycle stages or create custom properties that match your map. This lets you:

Segment contacts by where they are in the journey.
Trigger targeted communication and support.
Generate reports that show conversion between stages.

Ensure every team member understands how these stages connect to the visual journey map you created.

Use Automation to Support the New Experience

Translate high-priority improvements into automation and repeatable processes.

Examples include:

Automated onboarding email sequences tied to specific triggers.
Task creation for account managers at risk milestones.
Surveys sent after key interactions to capture satisfaction.
Alerts for support when high-value customers show signs of friction.

Each workflow should map back to a clear point on the journey and a specific customer need.

Measure and Iterate Using Hubspot Data

Use analytics, dashboards, and feedback channels to test whether your new experience is working. Track:

Time to value and onboarding completion rates.
Ticket volume by stage or topic.
Renewal, upgrade, and churn trends.
CSAT, NPS, and review sentiment.

Review your journey map regularly and refine it as your offerings and customer expectations evolve.

Best Practices Inspired by the Hubspot Blog

The original article on the Hubspot customer experience map resource at this page emphasizes that maps are most powerful when they are shared across the organization.

Keep these practices in mind:

Co-create the map with marketing, sales, and service.
Validate with real customers, not just internal assumptions.
Use plain language so everyone understands each stage.
Update your visual map when processes or products change.

By treating the map as a living blueprint, you ensure every change you make in your tools and processes improves the overall experience.

When to Get Expert Help

Sometimes you need an outside perspective to translate your journey map into a scalable system. Specialist partners can help connect strategy, operations, and your CRM setup.

For expert support in aligning your customer journey with Hubspot and other platforms, you can explore consulting partners such as Consultevo, which focuses on building experience-led revenue operations.

Next Steps

To put this into action:

Choose one persona and one goal to focus on.
Sketch each stage of the journey and key touchpoints.
Capture customer actions, thoughts, and feelings at every step.
Highlight friction points and opportunities for delight.
Align stages with your lifecycle and pipelines.
Build targeted automations and messaging.
Measure impact and refine over time.

With a clear customer journey map and the right implementation inside Hubspot, your team can deliver experiences that feel thoughtful, consistent, and genuinely customer-centric.

Need Help With Hubspot?

If you want expert help building, automating, or scaling your Hubspot , work with ConsultEvo, a team who has a decade of Hubspot experience.

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