Created by:
Customer Marketing Alliance
What is an empathy map template?
An empathy map template is a one-page framework for capturing what a buyer sees, hears, does, thinks, fears, and stands to gain, so your messaging describes the customer your evidence shows rather than the one you assume exists.
Most versions of this exercise share two flaws. They map a single persona, when the average B2B buying group runs to five or more people who don't share the same fears. And they leave out the thing that actually decides deals: roughly half of lost B2B deals aren't lost to a competitor at all; they end in no decision. This version fixes both.
What's inside the template?
Six sections, built from insights shared by speakers across our product marketing, revenue, and win/loss summits:
- Map the buying group first
- Where each box's evidence comes from
- The empathy map
- Getting to the emotional layer
- Worked example
- Turn the map into something that ships
How to use the template
Start with the buying group, not the map. Listing who's involved and what each of them personally risks tells you how many maps you actually need, and stops you writing one composite buyer who exists nowhere.
Then work through the evidence table before filling in a single box, and use the laddering questions to reach the fears and personal exposure that buyers won't volunteer unprompted. If your finished map could be pasted into a competitor's file and still read as accurate, you've mapped the buyer rather than your own pitch, which is the whole point.
Download your empathy map template
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