Don't Be Yourself, Be Your Customer!

As B2B buyers rarely interact directly with sales representatives, it has become a challenge in ‘getting to know them better’. In today’s buyer landscape, traditional ‘funnel thinking’ no longer addresses questions that need answers to get a clear picture of B2B buyer personas. 

To understand B2B buyers, some of the basic questions to begin with are:

• Who are the existing buyers?
• Why have they chosen you?
• How can their expectations be exceeded?
• Who are the potential buyers?
• What are their preferences and business requirements?
• How can their needs be identified and addressed?

There are three ways you gain in-depth understanding of ‘new buyer psychology’.

1. Brand and Buyer Experience 

Businesses need to go beyond conventional ‘funnel thinking’ and instill a perception of overall brand and buyer experience. To create a brand impression it is important to understand how different buyers interact with different marketing channels. Identifying channels where your buyers are active is a great way to map buyer experience by knowing what they feel, think and experience about your brand. 

2. Buyer Modeling

To connect with B2B buyers on a relational level, you need to know your buyers’ perceptions, attitudes, beliefs, values, motivations, goals and needs. Buyer modeling is a good technique to understand scenarios, experience and the decision journey of your buyer. With modeling, B2B companies will be able to map marketing and sales strategies that revolve around buyers’ world.

3. Buyer Segmentation

Companies are taking segmentation to the next level by combining predictive analytics with modeling. ‘Buyergraphics’ is now become a popular way to represent insights visually about buyer scenarios, behavior, perceptions, attitudes, preferences and experience. Through segmentation marketing and sales can create goals that resonate with specific B2B buyer segments and improve not just ROI but customer relationship as well.

By adopting these three tactics, B2B companies can gain insights into the world of buyers and instead of perceiving them as leads will be able to recognize them as potential personas with different objectives, preferences, attitudes and experience.

We believe that if you have a segmented database, one that is customer centric, you are already half way there. Get to know how that can be made possible.