By now in every industry marketers fully acknowledge that we are living in the age of empowered customers who will use every tool at their disposal to come and find you when they have a need. But try to push your message onto them when they are not interested and you will quickly find yourself and your precious marketing investment completely ignored or worst yet, in the spammer abyss.
The key is to use marketing tools to build relationship and only pass a lead to sales when they have expressed a need and are able to make a decision. If they are not the decision maker, marketers needs to keep nurturing that relationship. When the prospect expressed a need and they want to learn more about your product or service, then the sales teams need to know a whole lot more than name-rank-serial number to be able to close the sale. One of the methodologies used in demand generation programs to help guide the interaction around customer needs is clearly defining the path customers walk in their decision making process.
In his popular blog Brian Carroll has been repeatedly highlighting the benefits of walking in the customer’s shoes as you are setting up lead nurturing program. Brian states: “Walk IN your potential customers’ shoes means thinking like your customer and considering the questions they will have for you and your company.”
Another good tool to gain intimate understanding of your customer is to create customer profiles, we sometime refer to these as buyer personas. Groundswell blog has several of these profiles that consumer marketers use. In recent weeks Forrester also came up with B2B profiles.
The tool is called Social Technographics Profiles of business buyers. B2B marketer now can use this tool to integrate buyer behavior and social media into their marketing tool set.
Demand generation programs have come a long way from just using email and list building to create demand. With these types of tools we can now more precisely define our audience and have a better chance to influence their decision making process.
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