Your Customer Journey Map Is Probably a Fairy Tale

Before I found HubSpot and inbound marketing, my career looked like a bowl of spaghetti. Military guy, restaurant worker, furniture store employee, warehouse manager, water park manager, horse riding instructor, camp counselor, bouncer, youth pastor, designer, developer, video editor.

Fifteen-plus roles, none of them connected in any obvious way.

For the longest time, I thought I was broken. Like I was just shape-shifting into whatever role showed up, never finding my lane.

But here's the thing: all of those scattered paths eventually converged into one clear direction. HubSpot and inbound were the first things to last because they aligned with my purpose. Heck, maybe even my calling.Your buyer's journey works the same way.

It's not a neat little funnel from awareness to decision. It's a bowl of spaghetti. And if your customer journey map pretends otherwise, you're not mapping reality. You're writing a fairy tale.

Stop Trying to Map Every Possible Path

Here's where most B2B marketers get stuck. They sit down to map the customer journey and try to account for every possible path a buyer could take.

• Every Google search.

• Every review site.

• Every conversation with a colleague.

• Every competitor comparison.

That exercise will make you lose your mind.

The buyer's journey is inherently disjointed. A human might start on your website, jump to a third-party review site, talk to a peer at a conference, circle back to your competitor's blog, get an email from your sales rep, and then finally book a demo.

You can't control all of that. And trying to will paralyze you. Instead, think about your journey map through three lenses:

• What you fully control: your website, your HubSpot workflows, your email nurture sequences, your landing pages, your content. This is where you invest the most energy.

• What you partially control: reviews on G2 or Capterra (you can ask for them), social conversations (you can participate), partner channels (you can influence). Put effort here, but know there are limits.

• What you can't control: where buyers do independent research, who they talk to, and when they decide to enter the market. Let this go.

Seriously. Let it go.

Focus on what's yours. Optimize the heck out of it. And stop stressing about the rest.

That's not just good marketing advice. That's good life advice.

Sales and Marketing Is a Relay Race, Not a Handoff

For the longest time, we've drawn the funnel with marketing owning the top and sales owning the bottom. One clean handoff. Baton pass. Done.

That's not how it works anymore, and honestly, it probably never did.

B2B buying cycles are long. Six months, twelve months, sometimes longer. And the baton doesn't pass once. It goes back and forth between sales and marketing multiple times. A prospect might engage with a marketing email, then talk to a sales rep, then go quiet for two months, then re-engage with a webinar, then get a personalized follow-up from sales.

It's a dance, not a drop-off.

In 2026, this is exactly why RevOps is becoming the natural owner of customer journey strategy. With HubSpot's Smart CRM and Breeze AI, the system can now adapt the next step based on what the buyer just did, not what a preset workflow assumed they'd do.

Journey orchestration coordinates channels, teams, and systems for the next best action. If a human complained on a support ticket yesterday, they shouldn't get a marketing email pushing an upgrade today. That's not personalization.

That's tone-deaf.

HubSpot's lifecycle stages (Subscriber, Lead, MQL, SQL, Opportunity, Customer, and Evangelist) provide the framework. But the magic is in the automation between stages: workflows that trigger based on real behavior, not assumptions.

If your team is still manually updating lifecycle stages, you're burning hours every week on something the CRM should handle.

How to Actually Start Mapping (The Onion Method)

If you don't have a customer journey mapped out, here's how to start without losing your mind.

Peel the onion one layer at a time.

Ask the Right Questions

Start simple. How do humans find your product or brand? Write it down. Organic search, events, referrals, content, whatever it is. Then ask: what do they do next? And after that? And after that?

You'll notice something interesting. No matter how many starting points there are, the paths always converge. There are natural convergence points, moments where buyers merge into similar behavior patterns. Maybe it's requesting a demo.

Maybe it's downloading a specific resource.

Maybe it's engaging with a pricing page.

Find those convergence points. They're gold.

Map "As-Is" Before "To-Be"

Document what's actually happening right now before you design the ideal state. This is your "as-is" journey. Then create the "to-be" version, which is what the journey looks like when you've optimized it, automated the handoffs, and plugged the gaps.

The space between those two maps is your roadmap. In HubSpot, journey analytics is where this comes in. You can visualize up to 15 stages, analyze conversion rates between touchpoints, and see exactly where humans drop off. The dropoff report alone will show you where your journey is leaking, and that's where you fix first.

Data First, Assumptions Second

Here's the hard truth. When you start asking these questions, you'll realize you don't understand your buyers as well as you thought you did. That's normal.

But you have to be disciplined about going out, collecting real data, and coming back to validate your assumptions. Without data, your customer journey map is a fairy tale. It might look nice on a slide deck, but it won't drive results.

Too many assumptions make your journey fiction, not strategy.

Two Numbers That Tell You It's Working

You don't need a dashboard with 47 metrics.

Focus on two:

• Conversion rate. If your journey mapping is working, your conversion rate between stages should be higher than it was before. More humans are moving from MQL to SQL. More SQLs are becoming opportunities. More opportunities are closing.

• Deal closure frequency. Not just bigger deals, but more deals. A well-mapped customer journey increases the number of humans successfully moving through your pipeline. In HubSpot, your funnel reports will show you velocity between stages, conversion rates at each transition, and time spent in each stage. Build that dashboard. Watch it weekly.

Your customer journey isn't something you build once and forget. It's more like a relationship. You're not going to get it right the first time, and that's okay. Keep working on it. Keep peeling the onion. Keep refining.

Just as my career path, which looked like spaghetti, eventually converged into something that made sense, your buyers' messy paths will converge, too. Your job is to be the guide through that jungle, not pretend the jungle doesn't exist.

If you need help mapping your customer journey in HubSpot, building workflows to automate your stage transitions, or finally making your CRM work for your humans instead of against them, that's what Sidekick Strategies does. Let's talk.