Do you know enough about your client?
It's time to consider what you know about your clients and prospects. Do you know enough?
If you believe you know how your clients think and act, then it's time to think again. The world has changed... and you clients are changing too.
If you have not updated your expectations of how much you know about your clients in the last 18 months, push the panic button now. You competition is racing ahead of you.
Today's younger B2B decision makers are comprised of polychronic people who can be online, reading a magazine, watching television and texting on their mobile at the same time.
They are the same while you are paying them at work.
Communication is no longer linear. Gone are the days of the marketer being in control of the message. Gone are the days where the marketer talks and the audience listens. You are not in control of the message or the medium any longer... and it could be why your messages are not as effective as they once were.
So what do you do? Shout louder? Send more brochures? All that's doing is creating more noise.
That age is past and it's time to get over it and move on.
Technology was the change agent. Your clients have a whole bunch of technologies with which they can filter your messages. Your clients have access to more information. An answer - not necessarily the correct one - is only a click away.
It's time to stop thinking "How many messages can I get out there?" and start thinking "How many messages will my potential client receive?"
To answer that question, you must understand your audience. Most businesses don't know much about their potential clients. They know a lot about what their own organisation does for - or to - clients, but not a lot about how their clients make decisions. In a non-linear world, it's about networks of friends and contacts, websites and aggregated data pulled from many sources.
Certainly there's the regular segmentation of your clients and prospects, but data is not the same as understanding, and information is not the same as insight. To understand your audience, you will need to add to your knowledge base the 'softer' side of market intelligence.
Spend time interviewing your clients and prospects with no immediate sales objective in mind. Learn what makes them tick. Here's a few questions to consider:
• Which of their peers (inside and outside the company) opinions do they value?
• Which industry events do they attend?
• Are there competitors they consider leaders or losers? Why?
• Which magazines, newspapers, websites, blogs and podcasts do they trust?
• Would they refer you and why?
When you know the answers to these questions for both clients and prospects, then begins the much more targeted task of determining how you and your company can become part of their conversations and their reference base.