Tag Archives: Buyer foresight

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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Beyond Predictive Marketing: Planning With Persona-Based Strategic Narratives

In a recent interview, one of the world’s most compelling management consultant, Tom Peters, responded to a question related to what is missing from today’s discussion about management. In classic as well as vintage Tom Peter fashion, he responded: “My real bottom-line hypothesis is that nobody has a sweet clue what they’re doing.” He went on to say we, in business, should be trying things out at an insanely rapid pace as a result. It is fair to say in the world of marketing, what has been taking place is trying things out at a rapid clip. One of those things…

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The Power Of Human-Centered Marketing Begins With Empathy

An emerging truth about the world of digital transformation is the greater the increase in technology, the greater the need to understand humans. Knowing how technologies and digital transformation are affecting how we work, conduct business, and go about our daily lives will be an imperative businesses cannot ignore. In essence, it will take human understanding to succeed at modern marketing. A cornerstone principle behind a human-centered approach to modern marketing is being empathetic to the goals of humans – in our case your users, customers, and buyers. Empathy will serve as the driving force behind the power of Human-Centered…

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The New Face Of Buyers In The Digital Economy

In the mid-to-late ‘90’s, as the first roots of the Internet began to take hold, Don Tapscott coined the phrase The Digital Economy. Tapscott’s landmark book is entitled The Digital Economy: Promise And Peril In The Age Of Networked Intelligence. At the time, it was filled with tremendous foresight. Much of the perspectives Tapscott offered have come to fruition. Global Phenomenon The digital economy has become a global phenomenon. Intertwined now on many fronts be they economics, political, finance, consumerism, technologies, globalization, and societal. The digitization and the Internet of everything no longer a far fetch idea but a reality…

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Story-Driven Insights Drive Growth

We have a problem. We are being inundated with facts, data, reports, and charts. In the digital age, instead of reams of paper piled high on a desk, we have megabytes being stored on a hard drive or in the cloud. The hope is these deeply stored megabytes will give us the analyses and insights needed to make the next leap over competitors. The dilemma faced by decision-makers and strategists today is the more data is collected and aggregated, the harder it is becoming to make sense of data. The more arduous the task becomes of connecting the proverbial dots…

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D.I.V.E. Deeper: Getting The Most Out Of Your Buyer Personas

To get the most out of anything worthwhile takes persistence, perseverance, hard work, intuitiveness, and grit. It is advice we offer to our friends, family, and children. Often in helpful conversations with marketing and sales leaders, I usually am posed the question of how to get the most out of buyer personas. A common theme is many have invested in buyer personas but are not reaping perceived benefits. It is a perplexing dilemma for executives who have sponsored such efforts. Much of the disappointment comes from not attaining new revelations about buyers or as one executive put it to me…

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Understanding Who Your Buyers Are Is Not Enough

“We need to know who our buyers are.” I hear this often today. From Chief Executive Officers, Chief Marketing Officers, Chief Operating Officers, and Chief Sales Officers, the confounding question of – Who are our buyers? – is asked repeatedly. Even in mature established B2B businesses, this question is often asked. In fact, more mature B2B organizations run the risk of realizing too late they have moved distantly away from their buyers. Like the frog that realizes much too late the water has reached boiling temperature. Guess Who As I have helped many B2B organizations in the past 15 years…

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How The C-Suite Can Discover Rich Buyer Insights Through Buyer Stories

CEO’s and their C-Suite teams are mired in quantitative data analysis. Trying to make sense out of dollars and cents. Uncertainty reigns on how to shape future company strategic direction. Frustration exists with research consisting of surveys and data analytics only providing a snapshot of customer and market realities. Recent customer profiling efforts only telling senior executives what they already know. Sound familiar? Given the amount of technological changes impacting buyer behaviors in the past decade, this is the likely state of affairs in many B2B corporate environments. Frustration Many executives today in marketing, sales, strategy, and operations are frustrated…

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Walk A Mile In Your Buyer’s Shoes With B2B Buyer Ethnography

It began, as history can best record, as a proverb of the Native American Cherokee tribe. Which said, “do not judge a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes.” This proverb had been rephrased, reshaped, and reworded many times as a way to communicate. What matters though, is the truth of this proverb. To truly know someone, you must walk a mile in his or her shoes. Increasingly today, B2B buying decisions are heavily weighted towards perceptions about a brand’s promise and experience. Oftentimes, gaining clues about buyer perceptions and experiences with a brand is not an…

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CMO 2014: Achieve CMO and CEO Alignment With Powerful Insights

2013 may turn out to be a watershed year. According to PWC’s (Price, Waterhouse Cooper) annual survey of CEO’s, nearly 65% view building a customer-focused organization as one of their top priorities. Along with this top priority comes a willingness to invest time and money into developing customer intimacy and expanding their customer bases. What this means for CMO’s is the gaze of the CEO’s on the customer health of the business will be stronger than ever. Moving Beyond Lip Service For years, we have heard CEO’s in roundtables, presentations, interviews, and conferences espouse the need to get closer to…

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