Your understanding of your target customer will influence your marketing and the direct sales communication you have with them and the way you interact and serve them.
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From the category archives:
Customer Behavior
Access challenges run both ways: smaller companies face challenges selling to bigger ones, but oftentimes, bigger players can’t get small enough to sell to smaller companies or individual buyers.
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Whether you developed your product with a specific customer need in mind, or happened upon a product and want to sell it to someone, you have to start by knowing your customer. Before the Internet boom, I assembled a group of friends and raised angel capital to start a company to develop a commodity chemical trading system, based on the notion that a hundred pounds of a specific chemical powder was the same as any other hundred pounds of the same chemical powder. It would be a trading system for chemicals – a brilliant idea – or so it seemed.
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Sometimes, the development of a new product doesn’t start with a specific problem.
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Know Thy Customers’ Internal Motivations – Part 1
January 25, 2010
Jane was the director of Knowledge Management at one of the major international consulting firms. She owned the budget for all of the firm’s market research activities, including contracts with Gartner, Forrester, Yankee Group and the like. What set our research company apart was our openness – we made our analysts easily accessible to our clients, in contrast to many of our competitors. We didn’t hide them behind an 800 number and a call screener and this differentiated us in the marketplace.
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Don’t forget that at the heart of every business – every organization – you will find… people and relationships. My favorite client also became one of my best friends. Tony was a Brooklyn-raised child of the Depression. He was an early IT professional – the kind that could talk about having programmed in IBM 1401 Autocoder[i] language in the early sixties.
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You might want to look at the point in your launch cycle in which your company actually asks customers their opinion. For example, a few years ago, BusinessWeek cited Xerox as typically developing products fully and then asking customers what they thought. Xerox has since refocused on customers from the onset in their product development timeline. Stephen Hoover, vice-president of Xerox’s research and development hub commented, “The team had had a certain idea of what customers wanted. Going out and actually talking to them really changed that.”
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Carefully crafted messages alone won’t sell your product or service. You must target your message for your best audience and via the most effective venues. While doing this you must continuously refine your position against relevant competitors in the marketplace.
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