In a short time, the holidays will end and we’ll all be back at work looking to crank up revenues to make 2010 a great year. If you’re like most other businesses that sell to businesses, you’ll be looking for more sales-ready leads.
So what can you do to ensure the new year gets off to a great start?
My recommendation is that you talk to customers and prospective customers and learn absolutely everything you can about them:
- What are their pains?
- How do they make decisions?
- Who’s involved in decisions?
- Where do they turn for information?
- Whom do they trust?
- What language and terminology do they use?
Kadient, a software firm in the Boston area, took this to new heights, using cardboard cutouts and developing complete personalities of target customers. Let’s call this “customer intimacy.”
Why talk and collect this information? Jon Miller, VP, Marketing and Co-Founder at Marketo says that one of the principles of lead nurturing is that it must be valuable to them, and not just you. But how can you know if your content is really valuable? You simply cannot know unless you have a deep understanding of prospective buyers — true customer intimacy.
If you think about it, customer intimacy will help you in all aspects of the business. As you create content to engage buyers, you can make it very compelling with customer intimacy:
- Website content
- Blog posts
- Lead nurturing
- Sales conversations
Avitage, a partner of Find New Customers, recently hosted a webinar with Steve Rankel from Product180, who advocated companies go talk to customers. He also said that in all his years of working with CEOs, precisely ZERO companies correctly predicted what customers would say. So first thing in the new year, go survey your customers and target accounts.
For a good company to help you with this research, please visit Communication Strategy Group.
Happy Holidays from the Fearless Competitor
What do you think? We love comments and people who share.
Jeff Ogden is President of Find New Customers “Lead Generation Made Simple” Check out the online show every Friday at 11am ET, “Laugh and Learn with the Fearless Competitor.” Find New Customers is one of few lead generation companies in New York.
Find New Customers helps companies like yours (with 50 to 5,000 employees and complex products) implement lead generation programs to improve the way you find and acquire high quality sales leads using best practices in online lead generation. Quality leads matter. In fact, a recent study found that sales teams with fewer, high quality sales leads closed more than sales teams with more leads of dubious quality.
If you wish to do sales lead generation online, contact the B2B lead generation experts at Find New Customers using the form below.
