If you’ve spent time in the sales or customer service departments, you’ve probably thought a lot about how customers come to interact with your company. If you haven’t, it’s important that you think about it not only from your perspective but from the customer’s perspective. There are a couple of different business terms that can help you delineate and describe as well as understand what that means.

Let’s start with the marketing funnel. This is a way of describing how customers come to know about and finally to turn from leads into sales. Of course, a lot of people are familiar with this and older iterations of the marketing funnel were just that — a funnel-like process where there were a lot of leads of various sorts at the top of the funnel, then a narrowing of the funnel as some people stayed and some people left. But what does the funnel look like today and how does it differ from the customer journey? This graphic below explains it.