7 Big Benefits of Buyer Insights Research
December 16, 2013
Ready to open the door to a wealth of information about your customers that can vastly improve your go-to-market activities? Here are seven reasons why your company needs to start conducting buyer insights research now.
Many B2B companies lump customer segmentation research and buyer insights research into the same category of research tactics. However, buyer insights research actually takes understanding target customers a step further. Whereas customer segmentation research gives you a glimpse into the organizations that make up your target market, buyer insights research allows you to actually understand the buyers within those organization — the living, breathing people with individual pain points, interests, and goals.
As Adele Revella, President of Buyer Persona Institute, says, “There is a vacuum of insight into how buyers make decisions to buy the company’s products, a competitor’s, or no one’s at all.”
Buyer insights research is the key to that vacuum of knowledge. Depending on your needs, a typical project will help you gain clarity into:
- Distinct buyer roles within an organization
- Different stages of the buyer process.
- The features that matter most to your buyers’ business goals.
- How buyers evaluate products like yours and how they view your competitors’ products.
Not convinced you should launch a buyer insights research project? Here are seven more reasons it’s crucial to B2B success.
7 Benefits of Buyer Insights Research
Introducing a more customer-centric way of thinking across your company: Conducting buyer insights research is a way to put yourself in the customer’s shoes and understand why they would purchase your product. Framing and evaluating the elements of your go-to-market strategy — messaging, positioning, pricing, sales and marketing channels — from the customer’s perspective allows you to discover what the customer wants.
Improving your customer acquisition effectiveness through a greater understanding of buyers’ pain points: Conducting a buyer insights project allows you to be far more targeted in your outreach to prospects, build messages that will resonate with the right set of buyers, and be more efficient in the channels and media you use to reach them. Having this focus is essential for expansion-stage companies that are constantly strapped for resources. A strong focus also makes your go-to-market strategy more agile and responsive to market movement, a key competitive advantage.
Allowing sales and marketing teams to focus on the decision-makers within a target company and their key influencers: High-growth companies are often focused on rapidly expanding into new markets, new channels, and new customers, meaning that their sales and marketing team members typically have more work to do than they can handle. Understanding who in the buying process plays the most important roles and what their needs are, the team can allocate its limited resources most efficiently, creating more impact and ultimately leading to better sales and marketing results.
Helping your sales and marketing team understand the subtle distinctions between different roles in the buying process: In some ways, the most difficult thing about customer acquisition in complex software sales is information asymmetry, i.e., a lack of clarity and transparency between buyers and vendors. One typical manifestation of information asymmetry is a lack of knowledge on the specific role each buyer plays in the process and his or her relative importance at each stage. Those roles could include technical and economic buyers, users, and executive sponsors. Having a nuanced understanding of these roles will help you tailor your messaging and outreach to best resonate with them.
Building your pipeline through more targeted and more effective messaging: Having targeted messaging is essential for successful marketing campaigns and demand generation efforts. Possessing validated insights on the right offers to make and the right hot-button issues to address in marketing materials will go a long way toward ensuring the success and effectiveness of the market- ing dollars you are spending.
Allowing you to create compelling product package and pricing schemes for prospects in your target market segments: Product-centric organizations typically are feature- and performance-focused. They often miss out on another crucial aspect of product marketing: developing product packaging and pricing levels most attractive to their target customers. This can only be achieved through direct input and feedback from participants in the market. Gaining these insights and incorporating them into your product package will give you an enormous advantage in the market by reducing friction in the buying process and making your product’s value proposition more compelling to prospective buyers.
Enhancing product and services delivery to improve customer success and retention: Having a better understanding of your buyers’ needs will help your product team build products that meet their needs in a timely fashion, and help your services team to offer activities that truly align with their interests. When done well, these feedback loops ensure that your customers are always happy with the product, and that they ultimately become its advocates, further enhancing your relationship with them.
Photo by Joel Bedford