The importance of understanding your customers

‘The customer is the king’ - a saying we’re all familiar with, especially in the sales and marketing world.

There’s a reason it’s so famous though, and we all need to know the importance of making sure our customers feel valued, feel listened to, and feel that their needs are taken care of.

But, how do you know all your customers’ needs and desires? How can we truly understand where they are coming from, and why exactly is this so crucial for us to be aware of?

To fulfil expectations and deliver to your customers needs and wants, you first have to know what they are, and understand why they are what they are. Without this fundamental understanding, there’s little hope of a successful sales funnel. Customers need to feel valued, and need to clearly understand the value of what you have to offer them. Too often, sales and marketing teams simply assume to know their customer and what they want - the result is likely a failed marketing and outreach campaign and ultimately wasting your time. So, how exactly can we understand our customer?

To be able to really understand your customers it is helpful to create a customer persona (also referred to as buyer persona).

‘A persona can tell you where your demographic spends time online, what resources they trust and what pain points they’re facing. This makes the persona development process crucial to your success’. (Forbes)

Knowing your customer takes a careful balance of data driven decisions, and remembering personality. Data driven decisions are imperative to pretty much every facet of marketing and we will always advocate this approach. Through looking at data around a customer, and effectively tracking it in a comprehensive and well organized CRM, you can have a clear picture of your customer. You can know more about the timing of their business strategies, you can know more about their budgets, you can know more about their target audience, and ultimately you can understand their business objective and therefore what your value proposition is. Ultimately if your customer is a B2B, their customers and their objectives are important to be aware of.

Once you have identified the personas, you should use this data for every strategic decision you make - whether it is for a New Product Introduction (NPI), redesigning your website or sending email marketing campaigns. This information will help you to target your audience more effectively by sending them more relevant information to solve their problems. Having this data allows you to also see purchase patterns and better understand your customers behaviour, so even after you make that crucial sale you can move on to other more sensitive sales such as upsells or cross-sales.

What brings this to the next level, is a delicate balance of this data driven decision making process with remembering personality. When thinking about personality in this regard, it’s to remember that each person is different and how you communicate with one company, is not necessarily how you will communicate with another. Customers are only interested in something if it seems genuine to them, and you can put across in a friendly and personable way how you can help them achieve better results. So, let’s leave the robot approach behind and start personalisation. This can be achieved by thinking about segmentation and also using more social platforms for outreach, such as social media. Using social media and segmentation, you can begin to consider what truly matters to each customer and make sure that you are addressing those in your outreach. Combined with data to back up your decision, and you have the winning approach.

Understanding our customers is essential. If we don’t understand their needs or expectations, how can we ever possibly help achieve them? And if we can’t do that, sales and marketing campaigns are going to fail. So, take a look at the data, remember we’re all people here, and remember the importance of knowing your customer.

SciLeads gives you screenshot overviews of your customers, you can easily segment with our lists and you can easily categorise with our search and filter functions. Get in touch today to learn more about how to better understand your customers with SciLeads.