3 Problems with Your Client Journey that are Actually Breakdowns in your Brand Strategy
Discover how operational tension is a symptom of a missing brand framework and learn how to build a more consistent, reliable, and powerful brand experience.
Every CEO wants it: a client journey that flows effortless from first impression to loyal advocacy.
But, as companies grow, a tension often emerges. Processes become clunky, communication gets fragmented, and teams find themselves wrestling with inconsistencies.
These types of challenges are often misdiagnosed as operational growing pains—a breakdown somewhere in the systems of the work.
The reality is that a lack of connectivity between the touch points of the client journey are symptoms of a structural problem: a breakdown in the brand framework.
Your brand is the scaffolding for the client journey. It gives the journey shape and creates connections between every touchpoint by delivering on your brand promise every step of the way. When teams don’t understand the ultimate brand goal of the journey, the sum total of the individual steps won’t add up to the overall experience you desire.
This post dives into three common client journey problems that expose these deeper cracks in your brand strategy. You’ll learn how a robust brand framework can alleviate operational tension, streamline your client journey, and ultimately forge a more powerful and cohesive brand identity that resonates internally and externally, from start to finish.
BREAKDOWN #1: Inconsistent Messaging Across Touch Points
In fast-growing start ups, the client journey is very often created on-demand.
Think about it: You need a pitch deck, so you create one. You need a drip email campaign, so you create one. You want to send a personal thank you, so you create one and send it.
In the early days of a business, developing and discovering what your client needs during the buying process is the focus on your work. A quick and responsive approach effective. It’s agile. It’s resourceful. The client journey is created one-piece at a time, often by different people at different times on an as-needed basis. Many hands make light work, and there’s plenty of work to go around.
For awhile, this approach is effective. But as the business grows and more people get involved, this ad-hoc system gets put under pressure:
No one is quite sure who the authority is on the client journey.
Clients encounters different information, tones, or visual styles depending on whether they're on your website, speaking to sales, or interacting with customer service.
New team members struggle to learn the ins and outs of a piece-meal system.
The priorities for improvement are ranked differently by everyone, and when improvements do happen, they are “siloed” by department.
Suddenly, you reach a milestone where a down and dirty, quick and responsive approach to crafting the client journey is a liability. People—inside and outside the organization—struggle to make sense of the inconsistencies.
“In fast-growing start ups, the client journey gets created on demand. This approach works. Until it doesn’t.”
—AMELIA ELLENSTEIN
As a business grows, consistency is required to deliver an “on brand” result. The truth is: You cannot build a reliable, repeatable, and sustainable client journey without connecting the puzzle pieces together into one, unified whole experience.
The Fix:
In order to fix a client journey that is out of sync, you’ll need to step back and look at the big picture.
In every client journey the puzzle is 2-dimensional. The journey moves horizontally along a timeline, from start to finish, AND it moves vertically down through every resource required to accomplish each step along the way.
You’ll need to look at both the x and y axis of the journey to fix inconsistency:
Conduct a comprehensive audit of the client journey timeline. Map each step from start to finish. What is the brand promise you’re working to deliver? How do you or could you deliver your promise at every step of the process? Where can you be different and better than the rest by fully exuding the uniqueness of your brand?
Next, look at the vertical axis. Pull out all the materials. Organize client feedback. Compare the process against your Vision and Values. Contrast the materials with your brand identity guide. Where do the materials fall short? Where is there conflicting information or confusing contrast?
Finally, identify the inconsistencies and prioritize them. Then, start to make improvements one step at a time using a comprehensive project planning process.
BREAKDOWN #2: Many Solutions in the Client Journey are “One of a Kind”
100% custom proposals and service solutions are often a labor-intensive substitute for a missing brand framework.
Here’s why:
The brand story isn’t entirely clear—people tell their own story.
The target client isn’t entirely understood—proposals are tailored to the individual.
The company growth priorities are out of sync between teams—teams create different client solutions or pursue different clients entirely.
The services or product mix are unfocused—solutions are designed uniquely or are disjointed from eachother.
When the brand strategy is missing from the client journey the effort required to build solutions for clients is intense. There’s no guiding framework to shape them. The sales team needs to create custom proposals and solutions for clients, and it’s a burden that’s often unsustainable.
It’s like baking from scratch without a recipe. You know what you’re trying to bake, but you’re not sure exactly which ingredients go in the mixer. As a result the quality, ingredients and flavor can varying wildly depending on which team member is in the kitchen.
“There is one common thread among your patchwork of services, solutions, and clients: Your brand. It’s the framework that reduces customization.”
—AMELIA ELLENSTEIN
But, there is a common ingredient in every client journey: Your brand.
When a clear brand strategy is applied to the sales process, the percentage of customization reduces.
Here’s how:
The description of what you do, how you do it, and why you’re better is a common template in all solutions.
With clarity about the target client, proposal templates for services and products can be tailored to each client cohort instead of writing custom proposals for each individual client.
Personalized elements can be added: A custom introduction, call outs to pain-points that are unique to the client, and client testimonials that support a client’s unique needs, for example.
Think of it less as creating a brand new solution every time, and more about applying proven, high-quality solutions in a way that feels unique and relevant to the individual client.
If we go back to the bakeshop as a reference point, the baker follows a recipe to bake a cookie, but then adds chocolate chips or walnuts to personalize the result.
The Fix:
More personalization, less customization using the brand framework as building blocks.
Stop baking from scratch every time. Instead, define your brand's fundamental ingredients. This means getting crystal clear on who you are, what problems you solve, how you do it uniquely, and for who. (I use the 10 Tools of Brand Clarity).
Organize your services or products into “toolkits” that represent related issues or common combinations. Name them, train people on them.
Leverage your newly defined brand framework to create a set of standardized, on-brand proposal templates that serve different client cohorts.
Now, with your standardized templates, empower your sales team to personalize them effectively, rather than create entirely new documents. Train them to identify specific client needs and weave in unique elements like tailored introductions, specific call-outs to the client's unique pain points, relevant case studies, or testimonials that resonate directly with that client's industry or challenge.
BREAKDOWN #3: Difficult or Confusing Onboarding Process
At it’s core, a brand promise is the explicit or implicit guarantee you make about the experience people can expect consistently from their interactions with you.
It’s who you are. Always.
But, when training about your brand is inconsistent, your promise is inconsistent, too. An extended ramp-up time for new hires leads to unreliable service delivery during their learning phase, slower response times for client inquiries, and a higher chance of errors.
Clients interacting with less experienced team members may feel they're not receiving the same level of expertise or efficiency as they would from a seasoned veteran, creating friction and dissatisfaction in their journey (and sometimes, on the team).
The Fix:
Create a Training System: Move beyond ad-hoc training. Design a systematic onboarding curriculum that progresses from basic product/service knowledge and internal systems to more complex client scenarios.
Use the Buddy Systems: Pair new hires with experienced mentors or "buddies" who can provide direct support, answer questions, and offer real-time feedback.
Celebrate and Certify Progress: Gradually increase team member exposure to different client issues, starting with simpler cases and progressing to more complex or custom scenarios as their confidence and expertise grow. Celebrate the milestones and recognize them with certification.
