Remember - if your competitors are doing the same, your USP isn't unique any more. The more you know about your customers, the more effective your sales and marketing efforts will be.
It's well worth making the effort to find out:. If you're selling to other businesses, you'll need to know which individuals are responsible for the decision to buy your product or service.
For information on targeting decision-makers, see our guide on how to target the right people in an organisation. You can learn a great deal about your customers by talking to them. Asking them why they're buying or not buying, what they may want to buy in the future and asking what other needs they have can give a valuable picture of what's important to them.
Strong sales are driven by emphasising the benefits that your product or service brings to your customers. If you know the challenges that face them, it's much easier to offer them solutions. It's also well worth keeping an eye on future developments in your customers' markets and lives.
Knowing the trends that are going to influence your customers helps you to anticipate what they are going to need - and offer it to them as soon as they need it. You can conduct your own market research and there are many existing reports that can help you build a picture of where your customers' markets - and your business - may be going. Chances are your potential customer is already buying something similar to your product or service from someone else.
Before you can sell to a potential customer, you need to know:. The easiest way to identify a potential customer's current supplier is often simply to ask them. Generally people are very happy to offer this information, as well as an indication of whether they're happy with their present arrangements. If you can find out what benefits they're looking for, you stand a better chance of being able to sell to them. The benefits may be related to price or levels of service, for example.
Are there any benefits your business can offer that are better than those the potential customer already receives? If there are, these should form the basis of any sales approach you make. Our information is provided free of charge and is intended to be helpful to a large range of UK-based gov.
Because of its general nature the information cannot be taken as comprehensive and should never be used as a substitute for legal or professional advice. We cannot guarantee that the information applies to the individual circumstances of your business. Despite our best efforts it is possible that some information may be out of date. Ask your current customers for feedback. Defining your target market is the hard part. Once you know who you are targeting, it is much easier to figure out which media you can use to reach them and what marketing messages will resonate with them.
Instead of sending direct mail to everyone in your ZIP code, you can send it only to those who fit your criteria.
Save money and get a better return on investment by defining your target audience. Dig deeper: How to find new customers and increase sales. Pew Internet publishes reports regarding internet use among various demographics. Scarborough issues press releases with useful data and sometimes publishes free studies. Also look for free studies by Arbitron. You may be surprised what you can find just by doing a search in Google. Editorial Disclosure: Inc.
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Top Stories. Top Videos. Getty Images. Psychographics are the more personal characteristics of a person, including:. Once you've decided on a target market, be sure to consider these questions:.
Are there enough people who fit my criteria? Will they see a need for it? Do I understand what drives my target to make decisions? How big is the gap between where you are and where you want to be? What should you work on first? Where are you in relation to your competitors? Administer this exercise to a number of people at different levels and in different areas of your company.
Note: If it seems impossible to identify even your most valuable end-user customers, then your best option may be to concentrate on developing relationships with the intermediaries in your demand chain whose identities you can readily acquire. But keep in mind that sooner or later you will almost certainly want to deal with end users themselves, even if your relationships with them will always include channel members. This exercise, to be administered to employees at various levels and in various functions, is designed to capture a robust analysis of how your company sees itself both culturally and organizationally.
It should also be given to a representative group of customers, with the language tailored appropriately, in order to expose the gap between internal and external perceptions.
For each question listed below, select the statement that most closely reflects your opinion of the company as you view it today—not as you think it should be or it might be in the future. We have a full understanding of all the possible interactions between customers and our business processes. We ensure that all technology selections are customer-centric.
For instance, we research how to improve customer convenience. Does the company provide its employees with technology that enables them to help customers? We provide the most effective technology available to all employees who interact with customers. Does the company maintain a strategy for collecting and using information about customers? How effectively does the company combine information on customers with its experiences to generate knowledge about its customers?
We have poorly developed and inadequate processes for combining our data on customers with our own experience and views. We encourage using processes and systems that support the collection of both customer information and experiences about some customers. We have implemented systems and processes that collect and combine information and experiences about selected customers. Does the company understand the relationships among its customers and partners?
We collect and use information gleaned from interactions with customers to differentiate each customer and to evaluate the importance of each relationship. We have a continuously updated customer-knowledge database that provides all the critical business information about our relationships with individual customers. What steps has the company taken to improve the total experience of its customers? We know all the points where customers are in contact with the business, and we manage these areas effectively.
We conduct frequent surveys with selected customers and make improvements based on their feedback. We have a continual dialogue with each customer and use well-developed methods to improve our relationships. We understand the trends and buying patterns of our customers and consider them when making critical decisions. To what degree are employees empowered to make decisions in favor of the customer?
We require every employee to take whatever action is appropriate to ensure the ultimate satisfaction of the customer.
To what extent does the company understand how customers affect the organization? We pay little or no attention to the needs of our customers when we design our products and services. Responses will probably vary widely among those groups, and that is exactly the way the exercises should be evaluated—by comparing how different groups rate your company. Beyond that, however, there is enormous value in comparing the answers given by different constituencies, in different locations and functions, facing different agendas and issues.
Instead of designing a Web site, should you try to customize your product offering, perhaps by lining up strategic alliances with businesses that provide complementary services? To set priorities, you need to consider how differentiated your customer base is in terms of customer needs and value. Consider the contrast between a bookstore and a gas station. If a customer who enters a bookstore is reminded that his favorite author has a new book out that has been reserved in case he wants it, he is likely to become very loyal to the store.
We call this a steep skew. Relationship marketing is more cost-efficient for businesses with a steep skew than with a shallow one. The greater the skew, the more feasible it is to cultivate relationships with the most valuable customers. There are specific strategies—we call them migration strategies —appropriate for dealing with a customer base that is not well differentiated in terms of needs or value. These strategies involve either expanding the definition of customer needs or value, or improving the interaction or customization capabilities of the enterprise.
Basically, the less costly it is to interact, the less important it is to reserve interactions for top customers only. Consider the example of the bookstore again.
Although it might have a customer base with widely different needs, it also has a fairly flat value skew. Very few bookstore proprietors actually remember the preferences of their individual customers because it is simply not cost-efficient to do so. As a result, Amazon. It will always be at least a little easier for the customer to return to Amazon. Of course, Amazon. People in different functions and from different business units will be working together more frequently on an ad hoc basis.
Managers on one project will be trying to relate their metrics to the outcomes of other projects. As you begin to take a more integrated view of the enterprise, certain organizational issues will arise.
Considering the following questions may give you some advance warning:. To be ready to tackle issues like these, you might want to create a few programs now. Set up a multi-department committee to agree on a standard way to report customer information, for instance. Agree on a cross-divisional standard format for customer service calls. Come up with a weighted measure to rank customers by their overall value—not just their worth to one division.
Large, well-established enterprises like Pitney Bowes, Wells Fargo, 3M, Owens Corning, British Airways, and Hewlett-Packard have begun creating stronger, more interactive relationships with their customers. They implement these strategies piece by piece, in one business unit at a time, wrestling with one obstacle at a time.
But they are making progress and gaining a significant competitive advantage as a result. You have 1 free article s left this month.
You are reading your last free article for this month. Subscribe for unlimited access. Create an account to read 2 more. Customer experience. Implementing a relationship-marketing program is a complex endeavor.
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