About
We built this because most journey mapping starts too late.
CX firms map what happens after someone becomes a customer. Marketing agencies focus on capturing the buyers who are already looking. Neither one maps the 70% of the journey that happens before a prospect ever hears of you: the awareness, the research, the consideration, the trust-building that determines whether you're even in the conversation when someone's ready to buy.
That's the gap Experience Labs was built to close.
Ryan Baker
Pre-Contact Journey Mapping
Ryan spent years running paid media strategy for B2B companies and watching the same pattern repeat: smart teams, solid campaigns, and leads that never quite converted the way they should. The problem almost never lived in the ads. It lived upstream, in a fundamentally incomplete picture of who the customer was and where they were in their journey when the marketing found them.
That observation became the Market Journey Path, a framework for mapping how customers move from unawareness through purchase decision, and building the ICPs and messaging that meet them at every stage. Ryan now applies it through Experience Labs, working with marketing teams who are ready to fix the foundation.
Michael Bartlett
CCXP · Post-Contact Experience Design
Michael has spent his career on the other half of the journey: what happens after the sale. As a Certified Customer Experience Professional, co-founder of SYFRR, and former Director of Experience Innovation at JMARK, he's designed customer experience systems for companies across industries.
He's also the author of The Dark Side of CX and CCXP Exam Preparation, and writes about customer experience practice on his Substack, including a deep-dive series on Estuarine Mapping. His work at Experience Labs focuses on post-contact journey mapping: the onboarding experience, the retention triggers, the moments of friction and delight that determine whether a customer stays, grows, or leaves.
FAQ
Common questions
What is Experience Labs? ▾
Experience Labs is a B2B consulting practice founded by Ryan Baker and Michael Bartlett (CCXP) that maps the full customer journey from pre-contact awareness through post-sale retention. We help in-house marketing teams understand who their best customers are, how those customers move through the market before making first contact, and where post-sale friction is quietly driving churn.
What types of companies do you work with? ▾
We work primarily with B2B companies in SaaS, professional services, healthcare technology, financial services, and manufacturing, typically with 50 to 2,000 employees and marketing teams already in place. The common thread is a growth-stage company that has marketing running but lacks a validated, research-backed picture of who their best customers are and how they buy.
What makes you different from a strategy agency or fractional CMO? ▾
We do one thing: map the customer journey using primary research. We do not manage campaigns, write content, or run ads. That focus is intentional. Most strategy engagements fail because they produce frameworks instead of facts. Our output is a specific, research-backed picture of real buyer behavior your team can act on immediately.
How do we know if we are ready for journey mapping? ▾
If you have at least 10 to 15 customers you would describe as a good fit, a marketing or sales team working to improve targeting or retention, and a catalyst such as a lost deal, a churn spike, or a leadership question you cannot confidently answer, you are ready. The best way to find out is a 30-minute discovery call.
Together
Most companies approach pre-contact and post-contact as separate problems owned by separate teams. Experience Labs treats them as two sides of the same coin, because to your customer, they are.
See How We Work →"Promise what you practice. Practice what you preach."