Customer Journey Mapping for High-Involvement Purchase Decisions
This skill teaches you how to build a detailed customer journey map for deliberate, research-intensive purchases where buyers spend weeks or months comparing options before committing.
Start by defining three stages: latent (pre-need awareness), evaluation (active research), and buying (final decision). For each stage, document the customer's goals, information sources, emotional state, touchpoints, and brand consideration set. Then connect insights across stages to reveal where brands gain or lose consideration during extended purchase timelines.
Outcome: You produce a stage-by-stage journey map that shows exactly where customers enter the purchase process, how their brand consideration set shifts, and which touchpoints matter most at each phase, giving your team a shared reference to prioritize marketing investments across a long decision cycle.
Prerequisites
- Basic understanding of customer personas and segmentation
- Familiarity with the three-stage structure (latent, evaluation, buying) from the Planned Journey Framework
- Access to customer research data such as surveys, interviews, analytics, or CRM records
- Working knowledge of touchpoint analysis
Overview
Customer journey mapping for high-involvement purchases is fundamentally different from mapping impulse or habitual buys. When someone is purchasing a car, selecting a financial advisor, or choosing a new laptop, the decision stretches across weeks or months. The buyer moves through distinct psychological phases, consults multiple information sources, and actively narrows a consideration set of competing brands. A standard e-commerce funnel diagram cannot capture this complexity. You need a map that reflects the extended timeline, the research behaviors, and the emotional shifts that characterize deliberate purchases.
This skill sits at the core of the Planned Journey Framework. Where sibling skills focus on individual stages or specific analytical moves (such as tracking brand consideration shifts or optimizing touchpoints), this skill is the act of assembling the full picture. You are building the canvas that every other analytical activity references. Without a well-constructed map, efforts to optimize individual touchpoints lack the context of what happens before and after the moment of contact.
The concrete artifact you produce is a multi-layer journey map document. This document contains, for each stage (latent, evaluation, buying): the customer's goals and questions, the information sources they consult, the emotional state driving their behavior, the touchpoints where your brand appears, the consideration set of brands the customer is actively weighing, and the triggers that move the customer from one stage to the next. The map can take the form of a large spreadsheet, a visual wall chart, or a collaborative whiteboard. What matters is not the format but the completeness. A finished map lets your team see the entire purchase arc at once, identify the moments of greatest influence, and coordinate marketing, sales, and product efforts across the timeline.
Success looks like a map that your cross-functional team actually uses in planning meetings. It should prompt specific, testable hypotheses: "We think customers in the evaluation stage rely more on third-party review sites than on our website, so redirecting budget from homepage redesign to review site presence will increase consideration-to-purchase conversion by 10%." If the map sits in a slide deck and never drives a decision, it failed regardless of how visually polished it is.
How It Works
The mental model behind high-involvement journey mapping is that extended purchase decisions are not a smooth funnel but a series of discrete psychological states, each with its own rules. In the latent stage, the buyer may not even recognize a need yet. They are exposed to category stimuli (a friend's new car, an ad during a sporting event, a life change like a new job) that plant the seed of future action. In the evaluation stage, the buyer has acknowledged a need and is actively seeking information, comparing options, and building a shortlist. In the buying stage, the buyer has a small set of finalists and is looking for reasons to commit or reasons to eliminate.
The mapping technique works because it forces you to treat each stage as its own research problem rather than blending them into a generic "awareness to purchase" pipeline. A customer in the latent stage is not a less-engaged version of a customer in the evaluation stage. They have different questions, different emotional needs, and different touchpoint preferences. By mapping each stage independently first and then connecting insights across stages, you reveal transition triggers (what causes a latent-stage person to become an active evaluator?) and consideration dynamics (which brands enter or exit the set at each transition?).
The Planned Journey Framework structures this work by giving you a common vocabulary and a consistent set of dimensions to map at each stage. The dimensions are: customer goals, information sources, emotional drivers, touchpoints, consideration set composition, and stage transition triggers. By using the same dimensions at every stage, you can compare across stages and spot patterns. For example, you might discover that customers who enter the evaluation stage through a recommendation from a friend maintain a smaller consideration set and convert faster than customers who enter through a search engine query. That insight would be invisible in a generic funnel view.
The key assumption to watch is that your stage definitions actually match how your customers behave. The three-stage model is a useful default, but some categories have sub-stages. A customer buying a house might have a "financing" sub-stage between evaluation and buying that has its own distinct touchpoints and emotional profile. If you rigidly force every journey into exactly three stages when the data shows four or five, you will lose the detail that makes the map useful. Let the research guide the structure. Start with three stages as a hypothesis, and split or merge as the data demands.
Step-by-Step
Step 1: Define Your Target Segment and Purchase Context
Before drawing any map, get specific about whose journey you are mapping. A first-time car buyer and a repeat buyer replacing a lease have fundamentally different journeys. Write down the segment (demographic, psychographic, behavioral), the specific purchase they are making, and the typical timeline from first thought to final purchase. If you lack data, use rough estimates from industry benchmarks or your sales team's experience.
" Circulate this brief to stakeholders so everyone agrees on scope before the detailed work begins.
Tip: If you try to map 'all customers' at once, the map becomes so generic it tells you nothing. Pick your highest-value or most common segment first. You can always build additional maps for other segments later.
Step 2: Gather Raw Research Data for Each Stage
Collect data that covers each stage of the journey. For the latent stage, look at brand tracking surveys, social listening data, and ad exposure records that show how people first encounter the category. For the evaluation stage, pull website analytics (search queries, page flows, time on comparison pages), review site data, and interview transcripts from customers who recently completed a purchase. For the buying stage, examine CRM records, sales call notes, and post-purchase surveys.
Aim for a mix of quantitative data (what happened) and qualitative data (why it happened). Organize the data into three folders or document sections, one per stage, so you can work through each stage methodically in the next steps.
Tip: The latent stage is the hardest to research because customers often cannot recall what first planted the seed of a purchase. Aided recall questions in surveys ('Which of these events, if any, first made you think about buying a new car?') produce more useful data than open-ended recall.
Step 3: Map the Latent Stage
Using your research data, fill in the six dimensions for the latent stage. ' Information sources are typically ambient: conversations with friends, social media exposure, advertisements, or life-event triggers. Emotional drivers are often a mix of mild dissatisfaction with the status quo and aspiration. Touchpoints may include brand advertising, word-of-mouth, and editorial content the customer was not actively seeking.
The consideration set is broad and loosely formed, sometimes just a category awareness ('I know Toyota and Honda make sedans') without active comparison. Document the transition trigger: the specific event or accumulation of signals that moves the customer from passive awareness to active evaluation.
Tip: The transition trigger from latent to evaluation is one of the most valuable things you can identify. If you discover that a common trigger is 'my current car needed a repair costing more than $1,000,' you can design marketing that targets customers at exactly that moment.
Step 4: Map the Evaluation Stage
The evaluation stage is typically the richest in data and the most complex to map. Customers here are actively researching, comparing, and narrowing their options. Fill in the six dimensions. ' Information sources shift to search engines, review sites, comparison tools, dealership websites, YouTube reviews, and peer recommendations.
Emotional drivers include anxiety about making the wrong choice, excitement about the possibilities, and decision fatigue as the research extends. Touchpoints multiply and include both brand-controlled (your website, email campaigns, sales consultations) and third-party (review sites, forums, influencer content). The consideration set is actively shifting: brands are entering and exiting. Document which touchpoints correlate with brands entering or leaving the set.
Tip: Pay close attention to the order of information sources, not just which ones are used. If customers typically read third-party reviews before visiting your website, your website needs to address the specific concerns those reviews raise rather than presenting a generic value proposition.
Step 5: Map the Buying Stage
In the buying stage, the customer has a shortlist of one to three options and is looking for final confirmation or elimination criteria. Goals narrow to price negotiation, availability, terms, and reassurance that the choice is correct. Information sources shift again: customers may revisit review sites for final validation, consult family or friends for emotional approval, and engage directly with sales representatives. '), urgency ('I need this resolved'), and post-rationalization ('I need to justify this spend').
Touchpoints are primarily direct: in-store or on-site visits, sales calls, pricing tools, financing applications. The consideration set is at its smallest. Document what causes the final brand to win and, equally important, what causes runner-up brands to lose.
Tip: The reasons customers eliminate the runner-up brand are often more actionable than the reasons they chose the winner. If runner-up brands consistently lose on financing terms rather than product features, that tells you where to invest.
Step 6: Identify Cross-Stage Connections and Patterns
Now lay the three stage maps side by side and look for connections. Track how the consideration set evolves: which brands appear in the latent stage but disappear by evaluation? Which brands enter only during evaluation? , the brand website serves ambient awareness in the latent stage but detailed comparison in the evaluation stage)?
Look for emotional continuity or shifts: does the anxiety that builds during evaluation get resolved in the buying stage, or does it persist? Document three to five cross-stage insights, each phrased as an actionable observation. For a deeper treatment of this analytical step, see connecting insights across journey stages.
Tip: A common cross-stage pattern is 'consideration set lock-in.' If customers who enter evaluation with a strong brand preference (formed in the latent stage) rarely change their preference during evaluation, then the latent stage is where the real battle is fought, and evaluation-stage marketing is just confirmation.
Step 7: Annotate with Quantitative Data Where Available
Return to each stage and add quantitative annotations. What percentage of your target segment can you estimate is in each stage at any given time? What is the average duration of each stage? What is the conversion rate from one stage to the next?
What is the average consideration set size at each stage? If you have survey or analytics data, attach specific numbers. If you do not, use clearly labeled estimates. These numbers transform the map from a qualitative narrative into a resource that supports budgeting and forecasting.
A map showing that 60% of your target segment is in the latent stage with a 12-month average duration, while only 15% is in the active evaluation stage with a 6-week duration, immediately suggests that latent-stage investments have a much larger addressable audience.
Tip: Label estimates clearly as estimates. Stakeholders will treat any number on a polished document as a fact. Use language like 'estimated from Q3 survey data' or 'sales team consensus estimate' so the numbers invite validation rather than blind trust.
Step 8: Validate with Cross-Functional Stakeholders
Present the draft map to stakeholders from marketing, sales, customer support, and product. Walk through each stage and ask: does this match what you see in your interactions with customers? Sales teams often have strong intuitions about the buying stage that research data misses. Support teams may notice post-purchase signals that indicate latent-stage dynamics for the next purchase.
Product teams may know about feature requests that reflect evaluation-stage comparison criteria. Capture disagreements explicitly. If the sales team says the buying stage is driven by price and marketing says it is driven by brand trust, that disagreement is a research question to resolve, not a political problem to smooth over. Revise the map based on validated input.
Tip: Run the validation as a structured working session, not a presentation followed by open comments. Walk through each stage and each dimension, asking 'What would you change, add, or remove?' stage by stage. Open-ended feedback sessions tend to devolve into pet topics.
Step 9: Finalize the Map and Define Next Actions
Incorporate stakeholder feedback, clean up the formatting, and add a summary section at the top that lists the three to five most important insights the map reveals. Below the summary, add a next-actions section: specific projects, experiments, or research questions that the map suggests. For example, 'Conduct A/B test on evaluation-stage landing page to address top three concerns identified from review site analysis' or 'Launch latent-stage brand awareness campaign targeting the life-event trigger identified in Step 3.' Assign owners and timelines to each action. Publish the map in a location accessible to all stakeholders and schedule a quarterly review to update it as new data arrives.
Tip: A journey map without next actions is a poster. Force yourself to write at least three specific actions with owners before declaring the map complete. The actions are the return on the hours you invested.
Examples
Example: Mid-Range Automobile Purchase
A regional auto group wants to understand the journey of first-time SUV buyers in the $35,000-$50,000 range. The typical purchase timeline is 4-6 months. The team has access to a post-purchase survey of 400 recent buyers, dealership CRM data, and website analytics.
The team defines the segment as households with children under 12, household income $80,000-$120,000, purchasing their first SUV. In the latent stage, survey data reveals that the most common trigger is a second child or a move to a suburban home. Information sources at this stage are dominated by friends and family who already own SUVs, along with social media ads that plant category awareness. The evaluation stage lasts an average of 10 weeks.
com reviews, visit three to four dealership websites, and watch YouTube comparison videos. 8 by the time a test drive is scheduled. The buying stage is 2-3 weeks and centers on test drives, financing terms, and trade-in valuation. 4x higher chance of being the final purchase than brands discovered during evaluation through search.
This insight leads the auto group to invest in a referral program targeting current SUV owners rather than increasing their search advertising budget. The map is formatted as a large spreadsheet with six dimension rows and three stage columns, plus a summary row highlighting the top two touchpoints per stage.
Example: Wealth Management Service Selection
A wealth management firm serving high-net-worth individuals ($1M-$10M investable assets) wants to map how prospective clients find and select an advisor. The sales cycle averages 8-12 months. The firm has interview transcripts from 20 recent new clients and CRM notes from the advisory team.
The segment is defined as professionals aged 45-60 approaching retirement or experiencing a liquidity event (business sale, inheritance). The latent stage is triggered by a specific financial event rather than gradual awareness. Interview transcripts show that 14 of 20 clients had a triggering event within 6 months before their first outreach. Information sources in the latent stage are overwhelmingly personal networks: accountants, attorneys, and peers at the same wealth level.
The evaluation stage involves requesting proposals from two to four firms, reviewing credentials and fee structures, and conducting introductory meetings. Emotional drivers at this stage are trust and vulnerability: clients feel exposed sharing detailed financial information. The buying stage collapses to a final meeting and paperwork, but the real decision point is the second meeting during evaluation, where clients form their trust judgment. The cross-stage connection shows that referral source quality (a trusted CPA versus a generic online directory) predicts both consideration set size and conversion rate.
3 firms and convert at 18%. The firm uses this map to build a CPA partnership program with co-branded educational content rather than investing in digital lead generation.
Example: Enterprise Software (B2B Adaptation)
A SaaS company selling a $50,000-$200,000 annual contract project management platform wants to understand the buying journey of mid-market companies (500-2,000 employees). The sales cycle is 6-9 months with an average of 5.3 stakeholders involved. The team has access to closed-won and closed-lost deal notes, marketing attribution data, and five recent buyer interviews.
The team maps the journey for the primary decision-maker (typically a VP of Operations) while noting where other stakeholders enter. The latent stage is often triggered by a failed project or a new executive mandate for operational visibility. Information sources include analyst reports (Gartner, Forrester), peer conversations at industry events, and LinkedIn content. The evaluation stage begins when the VP assigns a team member to research options.
This delegation is a critical transition detail: the person who felt the pain is not the person doing the research. The evaluation stage touchpoints split between the researcher (who reads G2 reviews, requests demos, and compares feature matrices) and the VP (who reviews the shortlist and attends finalist demos). The buying stage involves procurement, legal review, and a business case presentation to the CFO. Cross-stage analysis reveals that the VP's latent-stage brand awareness strongly predicts which vendors make the shortlist, but the researcher's evaluation-stage experience determines the final ranking.
This leads the company to run separate campaigns: thought leadership content targeting VPs for latent-stage awareness, and detailed technical comparison content targeting operations managers for evaluation-stage influence. The map is built as a collaborative Miro board with swim lanes for each stakeholder and stage columns. For a more complete treatment of multi-stakeholder mapping, the team references adapting the Planned Journey Framework for B2B purchases.
Example: Consumer Electronics (Premium Laptop)
A laptop manufacturer targeting creative professionals wants to map the purchase journey for its $2,000-$3,500 product line. The typical timeline is 4-8 weeks. The team has access to an online survey panel of 600 recent premium laptop buyers and web analytics from the brand site.
The segment is freelance designers and video editors aged 25-40 who rely on their laptop as a primary work tool. The latent stage trigger is performance dissatisfaction: rendering times increasing, battery life degrading, or a software update requiring more RAM. Survey data shows 72% of buyers experienced a specific performance frustration within 3 months before starting research. The evaluation stage is heavily digital: YouTube benchmark videos (cited by 68% of buyers), Reddit threads in r/SuggestALaptop and r/editors (cited by 41%), and brand comparison pages (cited by 55%).
0 within two weeks. The buying stage is short, averaging 5 days once the customer has narrowed to two options. The final decision factor splits between price-to-spec ratio (48%) and availability (27%). Cross-stage analysis reveals that YouTube benchmark videos are the single highest-impact touchpoint, appearing in both evaluation and buying stages.
1x the rate of those who did not. The manufacturer redirects $150,000 of annual display advertising budget to a YouTube creator partnership program that produces benchmark and workflow comparison content.
Best Practices
Map one segment at a time. Combining multiple customer segments into a single journey map averages out the details that make each segment's journey distinct. A first-time buyer and a repeat buyer have different latent-stage triggers, different evaluation criteria, and different buying-stage anxieties. Mixing them produces a map that accurately describes nobody.
Always include the emotional dimension. It is tempting to focus on observable behaviors (what they searched, which pages they visited) because those are easier to document. But purchase decisions in high-involvement categories are heavily emotional. A customer choosing a financial advisor is dealing with trust and vulnerability, not just feature comparison.
Omitting emotions produces a map that looks logical but fails to predict actual behavior.
Use real customer language in the map, not marketing jargon. If customers say 'I was scared of getting ripped off,' write that on the map instead of 'price sensitivity concern.' Real language keeps the map grounded and makes it more persuasive to stakeholders who have never read a customer interview transcript.
Distinguish between brand-controlled and third-party touchpoints. You can optimize your website and sales process directly. You can only influence review sites, forums, and word-of-mouth indirectly. If your map does not distinguish between these, you will overestimate your ability to shape the journey at certain stages.
Update the map at least quarterly. Customer journeys shift as competitors launch new products, new information sources emerge (a new review platform, a popular YouTube channel), and customer expectations evolve. A map from 18 months ago may describe a journey that no longer exists. Schedule a standing review.
Keep the map to a size that fits in one working session. If the map is so detailed that it takes two hours to walk through, it will not be used. Capture the essential dimensions at each stage and link to deeper research documents for stakeholders who need more detail. The map is a decision-making tool, not an archive.
Validate the map against actual conversion data. If your map says the transition from evaluation to buying is triggered by a test drive, but your analytics show that customers who schedule test drives convert at only 15%, there is a gap between the narrative and reality. Use quantitative checks to keep the qualitative story honest.
Common Mistakes
Mapping the journey from the company's perspective instead of the customer's
Correction
This happens when the map is organized around internal processes (lead generation, MQL, SQL, close) rather than customer states. The symptom is a map that reads like a sales pipeline diagram with customer labels attached. To fix this, start every stage description with what the customer is trying to accomplish, not what your team is trying to do to the customer. Replace 'nurture with email sequence' with 'customer is comparing three shortlisted options and seeking validation from peers.' If a stage on your map has no description of customer goals or emotions, it is an internal process map wearing a customer disguise.
Treating the latent stage as unimportant because there is no measurable intent
Correction
Teams skip the latent stage because it is hard to research and difficult to attribute revenue to. The result is a map that starts at evaluation, which misses the most important question: how did the customer get to evaluation in the first place? To catch this, check whether your map explains how customers first become aware of the category need. If the answer is 'they just show up in our analytics,' you have a latent-stage gap.
Use brand tracking surveys, social listening, and aided recall questions to fill it in.
Creating a single journey map for all customer segments
Correction
This feels efficient but produces a map so averaged that it drives no specific action. The signal is when stakeholders from different teams all say 'that is sort of true but not exactly what I see.' Different segments enter the journey through different triggers, consult different information sources, and weigh different evaluation criteria. Build separate maps for your top two or three segments. If resources are tight, map the highest-value segment first and expand later.
Listing touchpoints without indicating their relative importance
Correction
A flat list of all possible touchpoints at each stage implies they are equally influential. In practice, one or two touchpoints at each stage dominate customer behavior. The symptom is a map with 15 touchpoints per stage and no indication of which ones matter. To fix this, rank or weight touchpoints by frequency of use (from survey data) or by correlation with stage transition (from analytics).
Highlight the top two or three at each stage and group the rest as secondary.
Building the map in isolation without cross-functional input
Correction
When marketing builds the map alone, it reflects marketing's view of the journey, which overweights digital touchpoints and underweights in-person interactions. Sales, support, and product teams each see parts of the journey that marketing does not. The symptom is a map that surprises or contradicts the experiences of customer-facing teams. Run a structured validation session (Step 8) before finalizing.
If you cannot get time with other teams, at minimum send the draft map to two or three salespeople and ask them to mark anything that does not match their experience.
Producing a beautiful visualization but no actionable next steps
Correction
Journey maps have a reputation as expensive wall art because many teams invest in the visual artifact but never translate it into decisions. The map gets presented once, receives compliments, and is never opened again. To prevent this, force yourself to write a next-actions section (Step 9) before sharing the final map. Each action should name a specific project, an owner, and a timeline.
If you cannot generate at least three concrete actions from the map, the map is either too generic or the wrong audience is looking at it.
Other Skills in This Method
Defining the Latent, Evaluation, and Buying Stages
How to identify and structure the three distinct stages of a planned purchase journey—latent need recognition, active evaluation, and buying—to map high-involvement customer decisions.
Optimizing Touchpoints at Each Journey Stage
How to identify and improve specific customer touchpoints within each planned journey stage to reduce friction and increase conversion in long purchase cycles.
Adapting the Planned Journey Framework for B2B Purchases
How to apply the planned journey stages to complex B2B buying processes involving multiple stakeholders, extended timelines, and committee-based decisions.
Tracking Brand Consideration Shifts Across Stages
How to measure and visualize changes in brand consideration sets as customers move from latent awareness through evaluation to purchase decision.
Connecting Insights Across Journey Stages
How to synthesize research findings from the latent, evaluation, and buying stages to reveal hidden patterns and optimization opportunities across the full decision journey.
Building Planned Journey Funnel Visualizations
How to translate the latent-evaluation-buying stage model into funnel diagrams and journey maps that communicate drop-off rates and conversion opportunities to stakeholders.
Related Skills from Other Methods
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to build a complete high-involvement journey map?
Plan for 3-5 hours of focused work to produce a first draft if you already have customer research data organized. If you need to conduct new research (surveys, interviews), add 2-4 weeks for data collection before the mapping work begins. The validation session with cross-functional stakeholders typically takes 60-90 minutes. Most teams complete a usable first map within two weeks of starting, including research and revision.
Should I build the journey map before or after defining the stages?
Define the stages first. The stage definitions give you the structural framework that the map populates with detail. Without agreed-upon stage boundaries and transition triggers, you will struggle to organize your research data. If you have not yet defined stages for your category, start with the [defining the latent, evaluation, and buying stages](/skills/defining-latent-evaluation-buying-stages) skill before attempting the full map.
How do I handle journey maps when the purchase timeline varies wildly across customers?
Segment by timeline length. A customer who goes from latent to purchase in 3 weeks and one who takes 9 months are on fundamentally different journeys, even if they buy the same product. Map the most common timeline first (your modal customer), then create variant maps for significantly faster or slower journeys. Often you will find that fast journeys skip the evaluation stage almost entirely because of strong brand loyalty or referral trust, while slow journeys involve multiple re-entries into the evaluation stage as priorities shift.
What if I do not have enough data for the latent stage?
This is common because the latent stage precedes any measurable interaction with your brand. Three practical approaches: first, add retrospective questions to your post-purchase survey asking what first made the customer think about this purchase category. Second, use social listening tools to monitor how people in your target segment discuss category-level needs before mentioning specific brands. Third, interview recent buyers within 30 days of purchase while their memory of the early stages is still accessible. Even rough directional data about the latent stage is better than omitting it entirely.
How do I map the journey when multiple decision-makers are involved?
Add a stakeholder swim lane to your map. For each stage, document which stakeholders are active, what their specific role is (researcher, approver, influencer, budget holder), and which touchpoints each one engages with. In B2B contexts, the person who feels the pain is often not the person who evaluates solutions or signs the contract. If stakeholder dynamics are central to your category, the [adapting the Planned Journey Framework for B2B purchases](/skills/adapting-planned-journeys-for-b2b) skill covers this in depth.
Why does my journey map keep drifting from the original scope?
Scope drift in journey mapping happens for two reasons. First, the team tries to map every possible customer segment in one map, which forces constant compromises and exceptions. Fix this by committing to one segment per map. Second, the map expands to include post-purchase stages (onboarding, retention, advocacy) that were not in the original scope. Those stages are valuable but separate. Contain the scope by writing the segment and purchase boundaries explicitly in your one-page brief (Step 1) and referring back to it when the team proposes additions.
How do I measure whether my journey map is actually improving marketing performance?
The map itself is a diagnostic tool, not a performance metric. Measure the impact of the actions the map generates. If the map led you to launch a referral program targeting latent-stage triggers, measure referral program enrollments and the conversion rate of referred leads versus non-referred leads. If the map identified that YouTube reviews are the dominant evaluation-stage touchpoint, measure branded search lift and consideration set inclusion after your YouTube creator program launches. Tie each next action from Step 9 to a specific KPI and review quarterly.