Customer Focused | Tony Zambito Founder of Buyer Personas and Buyer Insights Research

customer focused

How To Lead With Customer-Focused Content

The explosion of content in the digital world is an unprecedented phenomenon just a few could have predicted twenty-five years ago. Content is ubiquitous in all phases of life and in business. In fact, it is getting harder and harder to find a slice of time where content is not invading precious personal or business space. The voluminous nature of marketing and sales content is making it harder for organizations to get through to customers and potential customers today. In several hundred qualitative buyer persona research interviews conducted last year, I heard firsthand about new behaviors related to filtering, managing,…

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7 Elements Of Customer Understanding The C-Suite Must Master

Changes in customer and buying behaviors continue to rock the very foundations of many industries. According to recent surveys by PWC, Forrester, IBM, and McKinsey, disruptive trends in customer and buying behaviors are expected to continue over the next five years. Many organizations are undergoing digital transformations in order to improve customer interactions, engagement, and understanding. For CEOs and their C-Suite teams, developing deep customer understanding is becoming strategically important to staying competitive and relevant to customers. While customer understanding is becoming of vital importance to the C-Suite, the struggle continues on just how to attain customer understanding. New digital…

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The Emerging Importance Of B2B Ethnography To Buyer Personas

Better, deeper, insightful, and well-rounded understanding of customers and buyers is on the top of the list for many CEOs and CMOs today. In recent studies by IBM and other research studies on CEO sentiments, customer insight and understanding are identified as a top focus for CEOs. A majority of surveys also find a growing concern for both establishing and retaining customer loyalty in today’s digital marketplaces. There are two additional concerns CEOs are finding of increasing importance to the growth, as well as, survival in competitive environs. These two are: CEOs and CMOs have a growing concern about the relevancy…

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Beyond Buyer Profiling To Buyer Personification

Segmentation has been a staple of business marketing and sales for several decades. The concept of breaking down a potential market or industry into smaller target segments is a standard technique taught in business schools and used by many organizations. Beginning in the 1980’s and 1990’s, we began to see a shift to individualism. The understanding of not only the segments and organizations that buys but also the individual that buys. We saw the influence of the Meyers-Briggs Testing philosophy extended into the business world. Whereby sales organizations, in particular, went through training on how to adapt to the personalities of…

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The Influence Of Buyer Goals On Content And The Search For Good Ideas

One of the most under-realized areas of understanding in marketing today has to do with the powerful influences of buyer goals and their goal-directed behaviors. This is especially true in B2B marketing. Most notably, in terms of understanding the impact of buyer goals on how buyers conduct informational searches, as well as, gather content and make choices based on the information acquired. The ongoing concern for many senior marketing executives is the lack of effectiveness in content marketing today. Surveys in the past two to three years indicating marketers are struggling to break through even being thirty to forty percent “somewhat”…

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Why CMOs Should Not Focus Only On Content Marketing

Soon, two thousand plus marketing directors, managers, coordinators, and marketing specialists will descend on the content marketing Mecca event called Content Marketing World. The largest content marketing oriented conference of its kind. These teams flushed with CMO approval in hand to attend eighty plus available sessions in the hope it will result in improved effectiveness. Effectiveness. This is the dilemma and conundrum facing many senior marketing executives on the role of content marketing. While we have seen a rise in spending on content marketing, we have seen a correlating rise in conferences and services designed to improve effectiveness. Despite this correlation,…

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Looking At The World Through The Eyes Of Your Buyers

One of my favorite visits as a young person was to the House Of Mirrors at the amusement park. It fascinated me how the mirrors distorted the way we looked and how they reshaped our faces. Having fun with facial and body gestures to make myself look even more different. Companies today, if not intent on understanding their buyers, can fall victim to their own House Of Mirrors. Having a very distorted view of buyers than that of reality. The buyer becoming a reshaped reflection of the way people internally view and think about customers. Corporate-Referential View Of Buyers Corporations…

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The Secret To A Successful Career In Marketing

For many marketing professionals today, the world of marketing they entered just a few short years ago, or many years ago, most likely does not fit what they expected. On-the-job learning has become the norm. Different industries and markets can take marketers down different career paths. Depending on their experiences in consumer marketing or business marketing, marketers find themselves living in cultures with their own set of norms and lingo. Jumping to a completely different industry or market then can become a scary thing to do. Role Definition Is Limitless If you never heard of marketing and you find yourself…

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Intervention: Buyer Personas Are Not A Product Requirements Document

Product centricity is still kicking dust up in the perfect storm of changing buyer behaviors and transforming digital technologies. The dust up so thick, most organizations believe they may be responding to this perfect storm, yet, everything they do does scream products. A good case in point is what organizations believe they need to do or are told what to do with developing buyer personas. Unfortunately, companies are being misguided on the intent and methodology behind buyer persona development. Where the end game is still about pushing the product onto a target buyer. Let me illustrate with a couple of…

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Stop Business Speak And Simplify Insights To Achieve Customer Centricity

Many executives today are struggling in two areas. One is in formulating strategies designed to help their organization stand out in a crowded field. The second is in creating an enterprise adept with deep customer insights and understanding, which translates into obsessed customer focus. When struggling in these two areas, executives and their organizations can find themselves in a turbulent whirlpool dragging them and their customers into further states of confusion. Wrapped In A State Of Business Speak Depending on the circumstances and the people involved, you sometimes wonder if people are wired with a switch in their brains to…

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