Locating the Best Customer Data (Hint: It’s Closer than You Think)

You want the best data possible on your buyers, but the research doesn’t have to be a headache. Learn exactly where to get the inside scoop on your customers.

 

Locating customer data doesn’t have to be an arduous journey. Sometimes, all you need to do is take a hard look at your company and start take advantage of existing customer knowledge. Below, we’ve pinpointed the internal sources you should visit first.

1) Prior Research

This may seem obvious, but all too often research ignores previous similar studies in the interest of objectivity. Since you will be testing the hypotheses you begin with anyway, there’s no harm in acknowledging and assembling prior research. Market research projects that could contain useful information include buyer persona, segmentation, competitive messaging, win-loss analysis, and lost customer analysis.

2) Customer Interaction Databases

A large percentage of customer interactions with your company are now stored in databases, which can be mined effectively to draw insights on your prospect buyers’ behaviors and interests — from their first interaction with your company’s website through the marketing funnel and sales cycles. There is already a lot of available information on the ways data from these systems can be analyzed to support a company’s sales and marketing strategy. Below are the areas that are most pertinent to buyer insights, organized by source:

Web Analytics

There are two main types of Web analytics to consider:

Traffic Sources Information: Referring sites, inbound keywords, and inbound link anchor keywords are important data points that reveal the topical interests of organic (non-paid search) visitors to your website, of which a substantial percentage would be prospect buyers.

Navigational History: If you can, filter Web analytics data to a subset that is representative of a segment of your buyers. Tracing those buyers’ navigational paths through your website will reveal important insights on their interests regarding the content on your website and their priorities when considering your product.

Marketing Automation Software

Marketing automation software, such as Marketo or Pardot, can also provide useful information, including:

Lead Information: Marketing automation systems typically have rich information at the individual lead level. This includes information that prospects submit on lead capture forms, as well as their interactions with your company’s marketing campaigns. Corporate information can also typically be inferred through a reverse IP lookup.

Prospects’ Interaction History: The value of marketing automation software is in the rich, unified interaction data it maintains for each prospect. As with Web analytics, it is important to aggregate data such as the conversion rates of different marketing campaigns or content. The interaction flows of prospects on various landing pages and microsites provide valuable information. In turn, you will be able to build hypotheses on the needs and behaviors of particular segments of buyers.

CRM: Depending on the level of detail in your customer databases, information from customer relationship management (CRM) systems can be mildly to extremely useful in building your hypotheses. Most CRM systems are organized as relational databases that have records for customer organizations and individual contacts there, information regarding individual deals (sales opportunity), and records of activities and interactions with each contact and/or others who are related to sales opportunities.

You can easily extract information about customer companies based on their market segmentation or assemble customer contacts at one or multiple companies, or records of activities with one or multiple contacts. All of these could be useful in your analysis and hypothesis development.

3) Internal Interviews

While a CRM ideally documents every communication between your colleagues and prospective customers, in reality much of the knowledge gained through these interactions is never formally recorded. That’s why conducting one-on-one interviews with your sales, marketing, and customer service personnel is a great way to uncover additional knowledge. During the interviews, you will want to develop ad-hoc personas (or personas based on personal anecdotal evidence) to flesh out answers to each of your questions.

Ready to Take the Next Step? Download our Free eBook

Buyer Insights Research: How to Understand Your Buyers So You can Eliminate the Guesswork outlines a step-by-step approach to conducting the kind of research your company needs to:

• Introduce a more customer-centric way of thinking across the organization
• Improve customer acquisition effectiveness
• Focus on the decision-makers within a target company and their key influencers
• Understand the subtle distinctions between different roles in the buying process
• Build a pipeline with more targeted and effective messaging
• Create compelling product packaging and pricing schemes
• Enhance customer success and retention with improved product and service delivery

 

Photo by: Rafael Anderson Gonzales Mendoza