Who’s your customer?

Customers are central to any business.  After all, without them, you have no business.

Understanding them is critical to any business plan. The more you know about your customers, their behaviors, their preferences and needs the more successful you will be in positioning your brand, reaching them efficiently and innovating value-added features.  Knowing your most valuable customers can help identify adjacent segments to sell, as well as set in motion loyalty programming to keep them.

But many B2B operations, it can be tricky business.  Take a B2B food & beverage business that markets salad dressing.  They make the dressing, the distributor buys the dressing.  The distributor resells it to a restaurant.  The restaurant puts it on a salad that sells as a side dish to a patron.

Who’s the customer here?  Is it the distributor that the food maker sells and invoices?  Is it the restaurant that demands the distributor carry that dressing brand and flavor?  Is the consumer who orders the salad and enjoys that dressing on it?

In today’s B2B2C world, you would argue all three and be right. Without delivering a meaningful value to everyone in the channel, you haven’t got much.

But this can be troubling to the data-driven marketer. Yes, you can track the distributor customers quite well, through their purchases and invoices.  But information on from there can get sketchy.  Who is buying that dressing sold to that distributor?  Who are the restaurant guests ordering that salad?

Hence, marketers need to dig deep to identify and profile their valued customers and prospects beyond the large national accounts. To varying degrees of sophistication and dedication, these B2B2C marketers tap and organize the findings from several key resources, including:

• CRM Databases
• Broker partners
• Distributor partners
• Buying group data
• Promotional redemptions
• Syndicated databases
• Proprietary research
• Secondary research, media reports

 

For key channel players, the buying types, considerations and processes are important to understand:

• Who are the big buyers in the category?  Who are the big buyers of our products?
• What role does our product play in their business?  What are the primary and secondary uses?
• Who makes the decision and who influences it?  Do certain titles make all the decisions, while others are a source of ideas or input?
• Can we segment them — the businesses or the people — in any way?  What defines buyer’s styles, attitudes, beliefs or needs?
• What are their buying habits?  Is it a considered purchase with a lengthy review or a routine purchase that’s more or less an auto-order?  Are they brand loyal or brand apathetic?  How do they learn about new products?  When do they buy?
• What rational needs does it fulfill and what emotional factors are at play?  Is price all that matters or is trust or some social status involved?

 

A target profile for each channel participant falls out of this effort to guide growth strategy and programming.  Now it’s possible to create a comprehensive and integrated plan for developing new customers, enhancing sales to existing segments and creating innovative new products to meet the customers needs.

On a more granular level, you’ll also put within arms reach your most valued customers.  Here, you can go even further with customer-specific strategies to fortify the relationship, build loyalty and cultivate advocates.  These customers may provide the testimonials and endorsements needed to grow elsewhere.  Also, because they purchase the most or deliver the highest margin or profit to you, these are evidently the customers that derive the greatest value from you. As a marketer, you need to understand the shape, source and delivery of this brand value so that you can showcase or replicate it elsewhere.

So who is your customer?  It’s not a trick question.  It’s just a tricky answer sometimes.