Audit Your Own Customer Journey Before Your CEO Does

Here’s a conversation that happens in companies every day, and nobody wins it.

The CEO looks at the P&L and asks why the numbers are off. The marketer points at the dashboard and says the campaigns are working.

They’re both telling the truth. And they’re both missing it, because nobody in that room has walked the path their customer walks. Nobody’s pointing at the broken road between the ad and the sale.

I’ve never met a marketer, myself included, who walked their own customer journey and didn’t find it broken somewhere.

THE PROBLEM: WE BUILD THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY FROM THE INSIDE OUT

You can navigate your own website with your eyes closed. You know where everything lives because you put it there.

That’s precisely the problem. Come at it the way a stranger does, someone who’s never heard of you and is trying to solve a problem at 2 pm on a Tuesday- and it’s a completely different experience.

We build customer journeys from the inside out: planning docs, creative briefs, channel decisions, a launch. Then we live inside those decisions for years without ever experiencing them the way a human being does.

So things that made perfect sense in a doc feel jarring in real life. The ad promises one thing and the landing page talks about another. The nurture email leads with features when the person cares about a transformation. The follow-up after purchase is either nonexistent or weirdly tone-deaf.

And the worst version of this is when your CEO finds it first. Submitting forms across your own site, looking for the reason the numbers are down, and finding a broken one. I’ve been on the wrong end of that conversation and there’s no recovering inside the meeting. You’re explaining, and everything you say sounds like an excuse, because it is one.

The fix is a customer journey audit, and it takes an afternoon. Start where a stranger starts. Google what they’d Google. Click the ad they’d click. Fill out the form. Buy the thing. Then see what shows up in your inbox over the next two weeks.

The results are usually devastating, which is exactly why it’s worth doing before someone else does it for you.

THE FRAMEWORK: SEVEN CUSTOMER JOURNEY STAGES, FIXED FROM THE BOTTOM

The customer journey has seven stages: Awareness, Interest, Consideration, Decision, Purchase, Retention, Advocacy.

Most marketing obsesses over the first five and abandons the customer the second the money clears. That’s why retention leaks and referrals never materialize, and it’s why you’re always hunting new customers instead of growing the ones you already paid for.

Once you’ve mapped the stages, two things determine whether this work is worth anything.

The first is where you start. When a CEO wants growth, scaling awareness feels like the obvious answer. Resist it. If the bottom of your funnel leaks, more awareness just means paying to fill a bucket with a hole in it. Fix the bottom first and you convert more customers out of the spend you’re already running, with no new budget at all. Then when you scale to the top, it converts more efficiently the whole way down.

That’s the argument that lands with a CEO, by the way. Not the customer experience case. The one where you get more out of money already committed.

The second is what you put in each stage, and the tool for that is three questions per stage:

• What should they feel here? 
• What do they need to know here? 
• What’s the one thing you want them to do here?

Feel first, because people decide emotionally before they decide rationally. At awareness, they need to feel seen. At consideration, safe. After purchase, they need to feel like they made the right call.

Know, because trust is built with clarity. Exactly what they need for the next step, and nothing beyond it.

Do, because clarity is kindness. One next step per stage. Not two, not seven. If someone has to guess what to do next, most of them won’t do anything.

Map those three questions across all seven stages and the gaps become impossible to miss. You’ll find where you’re asking for the sale before you’ve earned the right, and where you’re drowning someone in information when they just need to feel understood.

THE PROOF: FIXING THE BOTTOM OF THE FUNNEL BEFORE SCALING AWARENESS 

When I took over marketing here, my instinct was to spend more on awareness. Jake asked me to walk the journey first.

The handoff from marketing to sales was broken. Onboarding was inconsistent. We had no system for turning happy clients into referrals. I spent two months fixing the bottom before I touched the top, and going back to Jake to say I wasn’t going to scale awareness yet did more for his trust in me than any campaign I’ve run.

But here’s what I’d tell any marketing leader before they start.

Three of the five broken stages weren’t mine to fix.

The sales handoff belonged to sales. Onboarding to product. Retention lived with customer success. So I was holding a map of everything wrong with the company while owning maybe half of it.

If I’d walked into Jake’s office with that map, it would have gone sideways in about ninety seconds. What he’d have heard is marketing found problems in other departments, and by the end of the week it’s Marketing versus Sales versus Product and the trust I was trying to build is gone.

The framing matters more than the findings.

So I went to the leaders who owned the broken stages first. Showed them what I’d found, asked for their read, and made them part of the fix. Then we walked into the CEO conversation together.

And we framed it as a revenue problem, not a marketing one. A customer who leaks at the sales handoff has a CAC you already paid and an LTV you’ll never collect. Put that number on the table and it stops being anybody’s department. Revenue problems get cross-functional attention. Marketing complaints do not.

One more thing: don’t open with a grand strategic overhaul. Fix the obvious leaks first. The broken handoff, the unclear next step, the form nobody’s tested since March. Those quick wins buy you the room to do the deeper work.

TAKE THIS AND USE IT MONDAY

🎯 For Marketing Leaders: Block two hours this week and walk your own customer journey cold. Search what a stranger searches, click your own ad, fill out your own form, buy your own product, and then read every email that arrives for the next two weeks. Write down each place you got confused. Then before you take any of it to your CEO, take the leaks you don’t own to the leaders who do own them and go in together. Put the CAC and LTV math on every leak so it reads as revenue rather than criticism.

📊 For CEOs: If your marketing leader comes to you saying they want to fix the bottom of the funnel before scaling the top, that’s not hesitation. That’s the most valuable thing they’ll do this quarter, because it makes every dollar you’re already spending work harder. And if they bring you leaks in other departments, how you handle that first conversation decides whether anybody in your company ever tells you the truth about a cross-functional problem again.

THE TRUTH

Your dashboard and your CEO’s P&L are describing the same customer from two different ends of a road neither of you has walked.

Walk it. Find where people who were ready to buy are quietly leaving. Then fix it in the order that makes the money you’re already spending work harder.

That’s the whole job, and most people in it have never spent an afternoon doing this.

We put both sides of this on the Indispensable Marketer show this week. Jake’s solo episode is the door with no handle and the seven stages. The conversation episode is what to do when the leaks aren’t yours.

Both are on YouTube now. 

— Chad de Lisle
Head of Marketing, Disruptive Advertising

P.S. The Indispensable Marketer book comes out Tuesday, October 6th. Everything Jake and I have been working through on the show, the Trust Gap and the full VSET system, in one place.