Most B2B journeys fail through tiny frictions, not big flaws. A friction inventory turns vague optimisation into practical fixes.
We all know the problem. We can spend hours creating campaigns, then lose conversions because a form is annoying on mobile, or the confirmation email never arrives, or the pricing page answers the wrong question.
It’s the non-glamorous stuff where a lot of the money goes to die quietly.
One way to tackle this? A quarterly ‘friction inventory’.
The idea is boring on purpose. Once a quarter, we list every small annoyance a customer might hit on the way to doing something useful with us. Not just on the website, but across the whole journey. Then we fix the top three.
The friction often hides in the gaps between teams. The marketing pages are fine, but the booking flow belongs to another platform. The enquiry form works, but the processing by sales is slow. Together, they feel like a company that is trying to – but not quite joining – the dots.
We can collect friction from customer-facing people: sales, support, account managers. They hear the same confusion repeatedly. We should ask one question: “Where do people get stuck or hesitate?”
We can also look at our own behaviour. Try doing the obvious tasks ourselves on a phone. Book the demo. Download the thing. Find the address. Change a preference. If we cannot do it quickly, we have found friction that prospects will not tolerate.
Then there are the simple signals in analytics. High exits on a key page. Form completion drop-offs. Slow pages. Low click-through on obvious next steps.
Then we write it all down. One list. No judgement yet.
The next move is to pick only three. The three that, if we fixed them, would reduce hesitation for the largest number of people. Not the big project because it feels meaningful, but the small things that happen often. A clunky form field that rejects phone numbers. A missing “what happens next” message after submitting an enquiry. A pricing page that hides the range so thoroughly it creates suspicion.
The most useful outcome is to change our marketing conversations towards why people are hesitating. We do not always need more demand, we often need less friction.