What if you could know your customers world better than they know it themselves, and teach them what they don’t know, but should?
Today we’re showing you how to unpack market insights so that you can go beyond just presenting a new idea by first undermining an existing one, and shifting the view of what your customer needs - which is obviously, your solution. Here, we're showing just one topic covered in the Partner Elevate Channel Enablement Platform.
For any Partner organisation, winning new business can feel like a never-ending challenge.
Partners tell us daily that they’re wasting time on unqualified leads, that they’re relying on current customers for new opportunities, and as a result are getting distracted by the need to find new lead sources. What they’d rather is to spend time converting more qualified leads (not qualifying them from the first touch), and they want their sales generated from a mix of existing customers and new business.
Salespeople need the ability to spend time with their highest probability prospects, and this means there is an expectation that the marketing team hands over leads that are already qualified and ready to buy.
We know that this is much easier said than done. Creating a funnel that drives a competitive offer is no easy feat – and requires a specific approach to how you structure and deliver content through each stage of your funnel.
So, where do you start?
Market Insight
For most partners, building an offer that is aligned to the skills & capability in their business, while also satisfying their ‘why’ is not an issue. You know your niche, who, and how you will deliver it – that’s not the problem we see.
What we see is that partners are taking more of a ‘spray and pray’ approach when taking their offer to market. They may have defined the demographic of their customer, such as the role type to target, location or industry – but aren’t delving any deeper than that. The truth is, that we need to understand our target market in much more detail before we can expect our offer to really resonate with the people we’re delivering it to.
Understanding the unique requirements and challenges of their environment so that we can bring meaningful insights into our offer messaging will make the success of your offer night and day different. It will also mean you’re not spending valuable resources (time, effort, energy & money), serving your offer to people who will simply never buy it.
3 things causing you frustration right now
1. Not knowing your customer’s challenges
Challenges are the things your customer is focused on but can’t complete because they have a lack of time, resources or competing priorities that are distracting them.
When we don’t know the challenges faced by our core customer, how can we really have meaningful conversations with them, or know whether what we offer is what they actually need. If you can understand the unique challenges that a customer is facing, you can use a different type of language and structure in how you communicate your offer with them.
2. Not clear on their priorities
Your priorities are one thing, but if they don’t align with your customer priorities then you’re wasting your breath. Uncovering the future vision, and the priorities that align with the vision will allow you to define an offer or approach that ensures your customer is progressing towards that. This isn’t just about business goals or focus areas, but the priorities that sit within the role you’re targeting, too.
3. Requirements are vague
Requirements are the things your customer must do to operate their business. Whether it’s reaching a certain security standard, or satisfying legal obligations – requirements of their business are imperative to their operations.
Often going into a new customer environment, we make certain assumptions about their requirements. This leads us to putting offers in front of them, or talking to them about things that they don't really need to relate to or want to relate to right now. When this happens, they struggle to link their requirements with what you offer, and your offer falls flat.
What you can do differently
What if we could teach the customer something about their world or their environment that they don't know today - but they should. Then we use that as relatable insights to make us more competitive and make our offer more competitive?
Here’s how:
Market Lens
At Partner Elevate, we use a particular structure to determine and build relatable market insights of your customer’s environment.
The PESTLE analysis helps us examine the customer through 6 factors; Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal and Environmental. To do your PESTLE analysis, answer these 6 questions in as much detail as possible.
Political: What is the political situation in the country and how might that affect the industry?
Here, think about your customer’s industry and things that affect this industry. The things to consider here are internal and external factors from a government perspective that might be impacting either the customer, or the industry like taxation or fiscal policy.
Economic: What are the prevalent economic factors or conditions in the country?
What we want to do here is get insights from an economic environment perspective. Consider things like inflation. Is there inflation in the in the country or in the industry that the customer is operating in? Is inflation going to have an impact on supply and demand in that industry? What's happening with interest rates? What might be some of the economic growth patterns? Is the environment contracting or is it expanding from an economic sense?
Social: How much importance does culture have in the market, and what are its determinants. This includes lifestyle or social trends.
Here, think about cultural trends - things like population or immigration. Are there lifestyle trends that are impacting your customer – or their customer’s environment that they need to respond to?
Technology: What technological innovations are likely to pop up and affect the market structure?
What technology innovations are likely to pop up and affect the market structure? Think about things like use and adaption, or the innovation agenda? How innovative is the customer or the environment in which the customer works? Or innovation in the industry - how forward looking are they? What is the tech awareness of our customer or the industry that they're in?
Legal: Is there current legislation that regulates the industry, or could there be a change in the legislation that regulates the industry?
This factor is usually linked to political, but there is the business legal requirements of the customer, but the government legal requirements to consider as well. Is there any current legislation that regulates the industry, or could impact the industry at some point in time? Also think about this from the consumer side - are there any consumer laws - things like health and safety? Is there specific health and safety regulation that your customer or the industry that they’re in may be affected by? Is there any labor legislation or regulation?
Environmental: What are the environmental concerns in the industry, or for the industry?
If you're in industries like tourism, agriculture or farming, there might be environmental factors or concerns we need to understand. What is the impact of things like environmental credits, and how might that affect the industry?
Things to remember
Using this type of analysis gives us a bird's eye view of the customer's environment and determines what we understand the specific requirements and challenges to be. This means we can move away from making assumptions, and be informed about the things we consider competitive market insights – the key factors that are going to set our messages apart from your competition.
If you have a sales or marketing team, we recommend completing this together. This means everyone has a shared understanding of your customers and the environment they’re operating in.
Ready to get started creating your competitive offer today?
