The customer journey is the “journey” a customer takes from the start to end of their dealings with a supplier and include seach major step (or “milestone”) within that journey. A typical customer journey will start with awareness of the supplier and education about its products and services, move to engagement with the sales function to understand product or service “fit” and development of a proposal, then move to contract negotiation, then to implementation and finally to adoption and then value realization. Understanding the customer journey helps suppliers to view the customer/supplier relationship from the perspective of their customers.