The more often I travel to different companies as part of my normal 9 to 5 responsibilities, the more amazed that I am that most businesses do not understand who their customers are.  When I ask the questions “who is your customer”, most people give answers that reflect their own biases or anecdotal knowledge about their customers, but very rarely any real insight.  The truth is, most companies have a vast array of data about their customers that could be used to make decisions on, but that data is often disorganized and usually goes untapped. It is extremely valuable for a management team to be able to segment their data and determine exactly what types of people (or businesses) are buying their products or services.  Factors such as industry, income range, personal demographics, geographic location, company size, average spend, churn rate, and other data points that every company has can be critical in making marketing and business development decisions.  Building a business intelligence system around this area of customer demographics is a critical first step to knowing your customer.

Beyond the data points that a company already has (but may not be utilizing), capturing more data about customers is key for moving ahead of the pack.  Profiling your customer’s interests and needs and coupling that with behaviors is a key component of marketing, sales, and understanding your own business.  The  key to successful business growth is gaining new customers and selling more to existing customers.  The key to doing that effectively is knowing who your customers are and which customers are the most lucrative, and targeting like people with similar messages.

How much do you know your customers?  Does your company have the means to analyze your customer data for purposes of profiling and decision making?  Is the knowledge of your customers based on hard data or intuition?  What would you do to improve the knowledge of your customers?

Discuss.

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