A customer journey mapping worksheet for businesses entering export markets

The Export thinking aid

You have a customer journey map for your home market. It works. Then you cross a border, and the variables you took for granted, payment culture, communication register, trust signals, distribution norms, all shift at once. This worksheet helps you see them coming before they cost you a launch.

What is in it

A five-page worksheet, A4, designed to sit alongside the bigger thinking you are already doing. Inside you will find five stages adapted from the Good CX customer journey mapping framework: awareness, consideration, decision, retention, advocacy.

Across each stage, the same seven cultural variables that founders most often miss:

1. Payment culture, how people expect to pay and be paid.
2. Communication register, how formal, how direct, how fast.
3. Distribution and trust signals, which channels confer legitimacy.
4. Time and patience expectations, what counts as responsive.
5. Customer service expectations, what good help looks like.
6. Return and warranty norms, what is taken for granted as fair.
7. After-sales etiquette, what builds advocacy versus what reads as overstepping.

You get B2B and B2C prompts side by side so you can pressure-test both lenses without rebuilding the document, and a short executive summary section so you can hand it to a board, an investor or a co-founder without rewriting it first.

Who it is for

Founders and senior leaders at a tipping point. Scaling, repositioning, exporting for the first time, or formalising a market they have already tested. If you have done a journey map for home and you are about to do another for somewhere else, this saves you starting from scratch.

Sitting alongside this worksheet: our cornerstone piece on global brand adaptation, which walks the wider discipline behind the seven variables here.

Download the worksheet

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This is preliminary thinking, not a finished answer. It is built to provoke better questions in a planning session, not to replace one. If you want a thinking partner alongside it, get in touch.