It can be a challenge for SMEs when trying to find their customers. This month’s question explores the best way to find potential customers, starting below with a response from Chloe Bevan, Head of Customer Success EMEA at Conga.
Firstly, it is important to establish what the business is actually looking for in a customer. What or who does the organisation consider to be their ‘ideal’ customer? Who is most likely to use the organisation’s products or services? By conducting detailed market analysis, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can identify a core target demographic, as well as any particular preferences, which will help the team to build a customer profile.
Ideally, this would be based on the SME’s current services and product line or the challenges that the organisation is trying to solve. This will help to identify any reoccurring trends with this particular audience. More importantly, by establishing what customers are looking for, SMEs will then be able to identify a more effective means of engagement.
A SME should analyse its existing customer base and current demographic data to identify patterns and trends among satisfied customers. It is important that the organisation focuses on behavioural data, that is, how a customer responded to a particular channel of engagement. This will help when targeting future prospects, as teams will be able to identify the preferred communication channels, which will inform future marketing strategies.
That way, the SME can focus on attracting similar profiles using even more tailored marketing efforts. By understanding the business’ core audience, the team can refine their approach, whether it is targeting a broader or similar group, or expanding to new regions and doubling down on successful channels. This approach not only helps in reaching the right customer but, ultimately, drives more sustainable business growth.
Understanding the customer journey is essential to not only identifying who its customers are but also determining how best to reach them at each stage of their interaction with the business. Ideally, SMEs should map the customer journey and use it to craft effective marketing and outreach strategies.
From first becoming aware of a business to making a purchase and beyond, SMEs need to identify and consider key touchpoints throughout the customer lifecycle. This process of ‘journey mapping’ can help SMEs understand what interactions the customer has with the business, which channels and methods are the most effective at each stage and how they can simplify the customer journey. In turn, businesses will know how to communicate effectively with their target audience.
Personalisation is key as each market segment, region or industry will respond differently and requires different levels of engagement. This is particularly important for those SMEs trying to expand or grow their business. By setting up and tracking metrics such as conversion rates, customer acquisition costs or customer lifetime value, SMEs will be able to refine their approach as they target new customers or expand to new markets or regions.
The business should constantly review and improve the way it identifies and reaches its customers and prospects. It is important to identify a value proposition once the SME has identified the audience they want to go after; one that clearly outlines measurable and demonstrable benefits for customers and why they should buy a particular product or service.
Steve Harlow, Chief Sales Officer, Sopro:
Lead generation is the process of finding and attracting potential customers. It involves using various methods, such as social media, email campaigns and online ads, to get people interested in the company’s products or services.
The aim is to collect contact information from these interested people, called leads, so that the business can follow up with them through targeted marketing. Successful lead generation helps to create a steady stream of potential customers that can be turned into actual customers over time.
Prospecting:
Prospecting in sales is identifying and reaching out to potential customers interested in a company’s products or services. It involves researching and finding individuals (for B2C sales teams) or businesses (for B2B sales teams) who could be interested in your product or service and initiating contact through various methods, such as cold calling, emailing or networking.
Similar to lead generation, prospecting creates a pipeline of potential clients who can be nurtured and converted into paying customers. Effective prospecting helps salespeople focus on high-potential leads, increasing their chances of closing deals and driving revenue.
Total Addressable Market (TAM):
Understanding your TAM is crucial in sales strategy. TAM represents the total revenue opportunity available if your product or service achieves 100% market share. Knowing your TAM helps you understand the scope of your market potential.
Typically, only about 3-5% of this market is ready to buy immediately. However, focusing solely on this small percentage can limit growth. We encourage sales teams to also focus on the 20-30% of people who have shown some level of intent toward your brand or product, showing signals that they may be interested soon. This approach can significantly expand your opportunities and help build a robust sales pipeline.
Buyer research/ persona:
A buyer persona represents a business’s ideal customer based on market research and data around existing customers. It includes demographic information like age, gender, income, education level and other details such as interests, behaviours, goals, challenges and purchasing habits.
Creating buyer personas helps businesses better understand their customers, allowing them to tailor their marketing, sales and product development efforts to meet their target audience’s specific needs and preferences.
Monitoring and making improvements to the customer journey:
The customer journey refers to the customer’s entire experience with a company, from the first point of contact to the purchase and beyond. It includes all interactions and touchpoints, including research, evaluation, purchase decisions and post-purchase engagement. A problem in the customer journey can lead to a failed sale, so your team must note where the most potential customers are dropping off and look into action points to rectify this.
Di-Ann Eisnor, Chief Strategy Officer, WakeCap, and CEO, Crews by Core:
When I founded Crews By Core, a platform that streamlines projects and activities, I knew that alongside developing exceptional technology, the success of the platform hinged on understanding our customer. As business leaders, it is our responsibility to ensure that this happens before you try to make a single sale.
WakeCap, which recently acquired my company, is changing the face of construction in Saudi Arabia and beyond, working with KSA’s government ministries to make the construction industry better and safer for everyone.
But as with any successful company, WakeCap and Crews by Core both started out by delving deep into understanding the needs, behaviours and desires of their potential customers.
But how do you do it? The answer lies in leveraging technology to solve your customers’ biggest pain.
Understanding the problem your customer faces is the most important first step. The first problem we hear is probably too broad and the real issue – the product epiphany – is three or four levels deep. In industries such as construction, with inherent workflow complexity, it’s critical to spend time face-to-face and in the work and also in a relaxed environment.
“Data is the new oil,” says WakeCap’s Founder, Dr. Hassan Albalawi, and I couldn’t agree more. Many SMEs fall into the trap of assuming they know how their customer uses their product and what they need based on intuition. Even if we’re right, it’s a small glimpse into reality. Tools like Google Analytics, social media insights and customer relationship management (CRM) systems can provide data about who is engaging with your brand, what they’re interested in and how they found you. We use data analytics to identify patterns and trends in exactly how people use our product; every click, which features are really used. Are your customers coming from a particular area? Do they share certain behaviours, such as frequenting specific websites or engaging with certain types of content?
If you collect a solid base of data, you can discover even more insights with AI and Machine Learning. Some of it is invisible in the platforms you already use but being proactive about trying new systems can help you predict future customer behaviour based on past interactions and segment your customer base into highly targeted groups, enabling custom strategies that are more effective than generic campaigns. And in some cases, it can reveal how to improve your product or what features it’s missing.
Understanding your customer is important and ongoing so you need to see where they are and where they want to talk about your product. Today, we interact with brands across multiple touchpoints, from social media and email to stores and customer service lines. An omnichannel approach ensures your brand is present wherever your customers are. Technology plays a crucial role here. Marketing automation platforms can help you deliver the right message at the right time.
Finally, our customers are always changing, the environment is changing, our product is changing, the economy is changing so getting to know your customer is an ongoing process. The market evolves, and so do preferences. Test your assumptions using A/B testing and other experimentation tools.
Sam Richardson, Customer Engagement Consultant, Twilio:
Leveraging first-party customer data – i.e. data consensually given to brands by their customers or generated by their interactions with them – can be a great way to both identify relevant customers and better understand them. However, collecting and analysing such data from often disparate and siloed sources represents one of the biggest challenges for brands, often leaving customer insights untapped.
To address this, brands should consider adopting software designed to unify data from multiple sources in one place, like an AI-supported Customer Data Platform (CDP). Automatically pulling data from different customer engagement touchpoints – such as chatbot exchanges, live chats, WhatsApp messages, emails and voice interactions – the CDP can then clean, sort and interpret the data. Everything from purchase history, conversation styles, browsing behaviour, engagement levels, feedback, communication preferences and previous context can be consensually unearthed from such channels, building detailed customer profiles.
Every engagement channel should therefore be viewed as a source of insight to not only better understand your existing customers, but also to build a profile of patterns and trends of your prospective audience base, helping brands better identify new customer segments, too.
This real-time data can then be turned into valuable intel to inform how brands reach their customers. Brands can better segment their customer base in an incredibly granular way and hyper-personalise their outreach with great precision and relevance. Critically, it can all be on an individual basis, rather than by broad demographic categories.
From a marketing and advertising perspective, customer data insights can help create timely, personalised campaigns with tailored offers and personalised product suggestions. For example, it can run potentially millions of individual marketing campaigns at once that are hyper-targeted to the intended recipient. As a result, marketers can say goodbye to generic marketing emails sent to every customer on their mailing list that go unread and encourage unsubscribing.
Real-time insights can also be displayed to customer service teams whilst on a call or chat with customers, empowering agents to deliver relevant and accurate personalisation and have a deeper customer understanding than ever before.
So, rather than providing a repetitive, universal brand experience, AI tools and CDPs provide infinite possibilities for marketing, customer service and sales teams, enabling them to ‘design’ their engagement strategies for every customer. This creates a customer engagement experience that is more context-driven and informed and ultimately more impactful and memorable for the end customer.