Ep 193: The Journey Map

things as I go. But I am excited. So I hope you are too I hope you're feeling good about the year ahead and about the various projects and ideas that you are ready to work on. So one of the lessons that I have learned over my many years of running a business now is is that I serve myself better by slowing myself down. This is part of the reason that I want to take it a little bit easier at the beginning of the year

this year. But But part of it is just that I tend to get bright shiny object syndrome when I am in this frame of mind where I feel like the world is full of possibility. And I am ready to jump in sometimes I have at least historically done so in a somewhat haphazard way. It's like whatever happens to be right in front of me or whatever happens to pop into my mind first. So that's what I go for. And I talked about this a little bit last week. But that, you know, that hasn't always been a

bad thing necessarily. The problem is that there's only so much time and only so much bandwidth at this time of year where you know, before life starts to get busy again, and business picks up and everything else. So I sometimes have worked on a project that was fun or exciting, but wasn't necessarily the number one thing that I should have been working on in

my business. And by the time that I got done with that, and I was ready to move on to the thing that I was supposed to be working on, then I was inundated with other things and never really got around to it. So so that is why I feel like last week's tool that I taught you about the work wheel. And what I'm going to be talking about this week with the journey map.

These are two really great exercises that can help you identify and pinpoint exactly what it is that's going to serve you and your business the best. So that you can put this like fresh, excited brain to work on it. I, as I mentioned last week have a free download for you that encompasses both weeks. And if you haven't listened to last week's episode, which was episode 192, you'll want to do that as well. These don't have to be listened to in any

particular order. The work wheel is a tool that helps you see where your business needs focus where there's sort of like a balance or imbalance in your business. And this week's tool, the journey map is something that is going to help you identify what parts of the product that we sell, which is a service since we are photographers, what parts of

that service need attention. I think that whereas everyone's business is different, and everyone might have weak spots or strong spots that are different that can be identified by the work wheel, the journey map is going to be applicable for all of us because one of the most important parts of any business is the thing that you sell, it needs to be a good product right. And And so today, I want to introduce you to this tool called the journey map.

This is another tool that you can use to identify and set your business goals and your priorities. And if you happen to be listening to this episode at a time, that is not the beginning of the year, not to worry, these tools are a fantastic you know complement of, of resources for you at any time anytime something feels off

in your business. Anytime that you've got a bit of open space in your focus and you're wondering, like where should I focus your energy, my energy Next, you're going to want to come back to these. They're going to be really helpful for you and I am excited to dive in. Welcome to this can't be that hard. My name is Annemie Tonken and I help photographers run profitable, sustainable

businesses that they love. Each week on the podcast, I cover simple, actionable strategies and systems that photographers at every level of experience can use to earn more money in a more sustainable way. Running a photography business doesn't have to be that hard. You can do it and I can show you how.

So the point of a journey map is to audit the service that you're providing to your clients and see what's working and what could be improved and I I want you to be sure to listen all the way to the end of this one, because I actually, in putting this together thought about a second way that you can use a journey map. That is going to make more sense once I've explained how to set it up. So be sure that you listen all the

way to the end. But when it comes to creating your journey map, the first step is going to be just drawing a graph, right, so you've got your x axis and your y access axis. And I want you to make sure that that x axis is nice and wide, because in some way, shape or form, this graph is going to accommodate all the different steps in your

clients journey. So every single little interaction, you know, item on the to do list box on your check box for your workflow, like all of it is going to exist from left to right on the x axis. And then the y axis is going to go from disappointment at the bottom through a middle point of

indifference. And then at the top, we're going to label that delight and, and so it's a relatively simple graph, right, we've got kind of a timeline on the bottom, and we have this like disappointed, neutral, and delighted along the x axis on the left hand side. So once you draw this graph, where if you're using the graph that I'm providing in the download, you are going to add two points first, and the point on the left is the point where someone first discovers you or first reaches

out to you. And then the second point is going to be way down on the other end far to the right where that person has received their images or any products that they're getting from you. And your work together is officially complete. So then comes kind of the meat of the exercise the part that's going to take the most time. And I do want you to give this time, because the more detail, the more specific you can get, the more useful this tool is going

to be. So from that point, you are going to add as many points in between the beginning and the end of your client journey as you can possibly think of, you know, how do they contact you? How do you respond? What other emails are in the process? Or is that an email process? Is it a you know, is? Are you having phone calls? Are you having meetings with them, every single point from the time that they first contact you all the way through that like Goodbye, thank you so much email that you might

send at the very end. So in addition to all of the sort of standard points on that journey, I want you to think about all the different permutations of the process. So if someone reaches out to you, and you reach back out to them, but then they don't contact you again, do you email them again, do you follow up, that can actually be another point in the process. And I want you to be as thorough as you can. This is the sort of thing where sometimes it can actually be hard to think about

this all at once. But you could probably get a pretty comprehensive list together, and then go back and add things as you're thinking about them. But again, I don't want you to shortchange the time that it might take to do this in a thorough way. Because the more thorough the more granular you can get, the more insightful

this is going to be for you. So once you have all of those points written down, and kind of arranged in more or less chronological order from the left to the right on your graph, the next step is going to be to take each one of those points and move it up or down along the y axis to indicate your clients

experience of that step. So in a perfect world, this would actually maybe not even happen on a piece of paper, but rather on like a big bulletin board, right, and you've got like a piece of yarn for each of your axes. And you're using note cards or post it notes for each of these steps. Because ultimately, you want to move

them up or down. And you're going to end up with a wiggly line where you know, maybe when someone reaches out to you and you have an auto responder that sends them like a thanks so much for reaching out. They're delighted, because they hear from you immediately. Right? And that they weren't necessarily expecting to hear back immediately. There are going to probably be a fair number of neutral points along the process, right? Not every step is going to be exciting and and

wonderful. But you want to be as honest with yourself as possible, right? Does this step delight them? Does it disappoint them? Does it frustrate them? Or is it just something that they feel kind of neutral about and you move your post it's or your points on the graph up or down to accommodate that, but I want to do a quick timeout and talk about these concepts of like delight versus disappointment at

my son's Middle School. They have this saying that several of the teachers use which is early is on time on time is late and late is unacceptable. And And I remember when he first told me about that I was laughing. And he was like, it's that's crazy. If I'm on time, that shouldn't be considered late. But you know, I would say that the same is really true for experiences as well, when someone signs up to work with us, the bare minimum that they expect is what

we promised, right? So if we are just delivering what we said we were going to deliver, they may say, yeah, that was a good experience, but they're not going to say it was a great experience. It's sort of that like, early is on time phenomenon. You may feel like, no, look, I did everything I said I was going to do, but they're not necessarily going to feel like that's anything particularly good unless you are

delighting them in some way. And delight really doesn't happen unless you go above and beyond

what's expected. Now, that's not to say it needs to be expensive, it doesn't need to be extravagant, I think that immediately, our minds jump to, oh, I have to send them some sort of like amazing welcome, thank you gift kind of a thing, that's not at all the case, it can be as simple as making a process easier, or more visually appealing or more enjoyable, you know, if you can, instead of sending somebody like another boring survey or questionnaire to fill out, maybe you send them

a quiz that's, you know, feels more like taking a magazine quiz, rather than something where they have to sit down and write essays. One of the examples that I think of kind of off the top of my head, when it comes to this is that getting a reminder email or an email to like, tell them, you know, make sure you have this, this and this, that's sort of a neutral experience, right, we all get emails all the time, they may be excited about their session. So it's a little more exciting to

hear from you. But especially when we're talking about kind of the logistical emails that we all have to send, that's not going to be something that you are likely to rate as

delightful. However, maybe your reminder, email goes a little above and beyond, you know, maybe you're a funny person, and maybe you write a funny email, or you fill even the most boring of your emails with good gifts, and funny references or something like that, or, you know, your, your emails all have really beautiful design elements or beautiful photos that help your clients get extra excited.

That is an example of taking something that is generally pretty neutral, pretty mundane, to the next level, and giving your clients a more polished experience that feels a little bit more exciting and delighting right, or maybe you don't send a regular email at all, maybe you create little videos of you talking about how excited you are to work with them. And they're personalized, because you have that time and space in

your business. Fantastic. That is definitely going to be something that is going to be outside of what's expected outside the ordinary, that will delight your clients. And again, these can be little things, they should be different things along the course of all of those different spots on that graph. But I want you to be creative about what you can do to surprise and delight your

clients. But again, in order to categorize a step in the processes delightful, it can't just be sort of normal or run of the mill. And I want to just go a little bit deeper on that, too. The funny thing about delighting someone is that something can be delightful today, but not remained so forever, there will be certain things that will always be I think delightful. You know, everybody, I can't think of a single person, even though handwritten notes have been

around forever and ever. I can't think of a single person who wouldn't be delighted to receive a personal handwritten note, even if they've worked with you five times and they've gotten five handwritten notes, that kind of personal touch, that clearly takes time. And attention is always going to be something that people are like, wow, that is really amazing that

she does. However, there are things that you know, you might do it when it's new, maybe a technology is new, and you use that and when it's brand new, that's exciting and delighting but whenever something becomes expected, it loses some of its delight, right and moves back into neutral territory. If you think about like driving past an old school motel where I just this just happened to me the

other day. I was kind of out in the country and I passed this motel that still on their sign outside said had a thing that said free HBO and I was kind of laughing to myself thinking like Who in the world doesn't have I mean, maybe you don't have cable TV or one of those kinds of things but like free HBO like I can't even imagine being charged for that at a hotel. So that's one of those things where once upon a time that was like a marketing tactic that was a

point of delight. And now it has moved moved into very much expected territory. If, for instance, it was 100 years ago, and you went into a hotel and they had a private bathroom for you, you would be delighted if you went into a hotel room that you were expecting how to private bathroom, because we all expect that. And they didn't, it would not only be not delightful, it'd be pretty disappointing.

Anyway, the other thing to remember about this delightful, neutral and disappointing scale is that you might think like, Okay, well, as long as I am not disappointing anyone, as long as I've got everything in that neutral territory, I'm okay. And technically, yes, you are, okay, if you fulfill what you tell someone you are going to fill, it would be hard for them to, you know, ding you and say like, Well, she didn't live up to her

end of the bargain. However, it is very unlikely that if you are neutral across the board, or if your clients response to your process is neutral across the board, it's unlikely that you're going to get a lot of repeat traffic, it is unlikely that you're going to get referrals, because even if someone doesn't necessarily expect a particular point on their client journey to be delightful, or, you know, surprising, I think most of us, especially when we are spending a fair amount of money or

indulging in an experience like a photoshoot, we expect that some part of the process is going to be kind of extra, right, delightful. So I want you to think about that, in total, if you've got all neutrals across the board, I think that your your total process is going to actually slip below the neutral into kind of the, I'm kind of disappointed, I can't really say I'm frustrated or angry, but I'm not, you know, I'm not going to probably come

back for more. Okay. So once you have gone through and categorized every single point along the process on that journey map, as somewhere on that, like delightful to frustrating scale, you are going to be ready to prioritize your

efforts. So the first thing obviously, is that you want to fix any part of the process that you identify as disappointing to your clients or potentially disappointing to your clients, you should really try and be able to eliminate almost all of those in terms of your systems. Now, sometimes somebody's going to be a little disappointed with some of their photos, or sometimes someone's going to be disappointed that it rained on the day of their wedding and you don't have anything, you don't

have any control over that. But you can put as many sort of pieces into place that will help protect your clients from disappointment as possible. And that really should be your first priority. Then, of course, your next priority is to move on to the fun stuff and see where you can turn those points of neutrality into opportunities

for delighting your clients. And I would love to see you once you've actually gone to the trouble of creating this journey map, I would love to see you take every single neutral point and create some sort of idea brainstorm some kind of, you know, way to make that neutral, uninteresting point of the process more interesting, more delightful. I don't expect that you are going to accomplish all

of those things. I mean, especially if you've gotten super granular, I don't necessarily think that anyone expects or needs to have every point in the process be super delightful. However, it would be great for you to be thinking about those kinds of things. So that you know, if you ever have a one off opportunity, you can put that point of delight into

play. Or if you've got somebody who did end up with rain on their wedding day, you might have like a back pocket point of delight that you could toss in there to kind of counterbalance that for your client, right. But once you've brainstormed all of those, then I want you to pick a few places where you think that you might be able to add the most delight or where you can kind of lean into what makes your brand or your personality

special. You know, one of the reasons that people hire you in the first place, take that and turn it up, right? So put your focus in the places that have maybe the most leverage that you think might be something that people can share or talk about, you know, you're thinking about this from the client that's in front of you, but you're also thinking about it in terms of like, how are they going to tell their friends about their

experience with you. And then finally, once you have done all this work to create your client journey map, I want you to duplicate the map. And I want you to go back through all of those steps that you have identified on that in that process. And I want you to recategorize them according to now Not your clients experience, but your own experience, right. So, you know, maybe your client is delighted that you have reduced your editing turnaround to two weeks. So you deliver

their gallery in two weeks. But on your end, that has actually become a bottleneck in your business, it's become a point of stress for you. And so when you think about that point in the process, from your perspective,

it's not the same. Or, you know, maybe your client is neutral about your online gallery software, but you love it, you're delighted about it, or you get massive headaches by it about that, like maybe that's a point in the process that's frustrating to you, anywhere that you identify that you and your client both love a step that those opportunities or those points in the process have the opportunity to become kind

of your signature. So those are things that you really want to amplify in your marketing, you want to talk about them when you're when you are talking to potential clients or when you are, you know, on Instagram you want to share about them, because those are the things that are going to be they stand to differentiate you from your competition. Anywhere that you and your client both dislike a step that needs to be changed

immediately, right. If it's not serving you or your client, you need to figure out a way to either get rid of it or change it so that it's something that you are at least both neutral about. And then anything that your client loves about the process, but that you don't love should be top of your list for outsourcing or automating. So okay, let's take the that two week turnaround example. It's stressing you out. But your

clients love it. Great. You still need to deliver your photos and rather than disappointing your clients by stretching that out what if you hire an editor? What if you take that off of your plate and make it so that you enjoy that process and your clients enjoy the speed with which the process happens. So again, anything that you both love needs to become something that you really lean into and develop as a signature.

Anything that you and your clients dislike or are disappointed or frustrated by needs to be addressed and changed immediately. And anything that works really well for your clients but is bringing you down needs to be outsourced or automated or changed in a way that you can work with without taking away that delight from your clients. I hope that you are feeling energized by these two tools. Again, if you go to this can't be that hard.com/ 2023 You can get the sort of pre made versions of

these tools for you to use. And if you come up with anything interesting you have any aha moments I would love for you to DM me on Instagram I'm at this can't be that hard. If we're not already friends, we need to be friends. And I would love to see how this works for you. So let me know. And again, happy new year. Well, that's it for this week's episode of This can't be that hard. I'll be back Same

time, same place next week. In the meantime, you can find more information about this episode, along with all the relevant links, notes and downloads at this can't be that hard.com/learn If you liked the podcast, be sure to hit the subscribe button. Even better, share the love by leaving a review on iTunes. And as always, thanks so much for joining me. I hope you have a fantastic week.