The notion that an effective approach to marketing and sales must incorporate a deep knowledge of your customers might seem obvious. After all, how can a vendor cater to their requirements unless they understand them?
Yet B2B marketers appear to be failing to make a connection with their customers and prospects: a recent Gallup survey reported that 71% of B2B customers are either indifferent to their vendors or actively disengaged.
Why is this the case? On one level, it might come down to a presumed impersonality in the nature of B2B marketing, with a feeling there isn’t a need to connect on an individual level in the same way as a B2C marketer might. This only encourages impersonality and complacency, hindering the ability to build a meaningful degree of loyalty and trust.
While B2B marketers try to build relationships with an organisation whose needs are not as varied or capricious as those of an individual, this ignores the fact that their products and services will be considered with the specific challenges of their organisation and individual need (or a select group of individuals with the responsible for buying) in mind.
Forbes says improving the customer experience is the number one trend marketers needs to develop in 2017, therefore building an understanding of these unique objectives is essential. The alternative is a relative indifference of the client towards the vendor.
The collection of effective data is essential to evolve your approach to marketing and connecting with clients. In particular, the structure of the client business and the channels by which purchasing decisions are made. How does this customer buy? When do they buy? Who, ultimately, makes the final decision?
Just as B2B marketers must be able to show clients that their solutions can serve their organisational and operational needs, they can also invigorate their connection with customers using a communication and sales approach that suits a prospect’s organisational framework.
This assures customers that, not only does their vendor have an invested understanding of their business’ objectives and how they must be met, but also that the vendor has taken the time to accommodate the purchasing procedures of that specific business. It demonstrates attentiveness and compatibility, and suggests that the vendor has thought into the mechanisms of their client’s organisation. Namely, a commitment to developing a meaningful and malleable vendor-customer relationship.
Furthermore, it’s important for a vendor to understand that, as markets change, the needs of the client will change as well. A vendor’s initial understanding of their client will not be set in stone. To avoid impersonality and complacency, the vendor’s relationship with their client must evolve along with that client’s market and industry needs.
Core to this is a critical eye towards their own model: a willingness to understand how and where they failed with previous clients, when they succeeded, and why. Without that awareness of their own successes and failures, a vendor will most likely find themselves slipping back into the behaviours that create the unstable relationships.
In order to build a meaningful, long-lasting, and mutual rapport with a client, a vendor must treat them with as much attentiveness and care as they would an individual customer. The alternative model will prove to be ultimately ineffective, and – in that case – it’s the vendor who will end up taking the fall.
