Do You Know Who Your Customers Are and What Problems They Need Solved?
This month's BrandingWire posts look in the mirror at those of us who are B2B consultants. For the sake
of continuity, here is the background information that we use to solve the challenge facing the made up consultancy. It is: A small marketing firm is losing contracts to lower pricing and to bigger firms. The consultancy after three years has stopped growing and most of its clients buy one project and don’t return for more assistance for several years, if at all.
Here is the background driving the consultancy:
Consulting Firm’s Client Base Profile:
- Revenues: $1 million to $25 million
- Employees: 150 or fewer
- Verticals: High-tech and health care
- Location: North America
- Challenges: Consumers and other businesses have so many choices that high-tech businesses as well as their other target audience made up of clinics and hospitals are either showing stagnant growth or they are losing market share.
- Client’s Problem: They don’t know how to differentiate themselves from their competition.
The key to differentiating this consultancy stares them in the face. Unlike most businesses, small or large, this consultancy completed the most important task any business faces, and that is to identify their ideal clients and customers. Without that knowledge, businesses cannot differentiate themselves or compete against those businesses who have targeted a specific customer base and use all their marketing and sales budget and time to go after those businesses.
To differentiate ourselves, we have to know our customers and clients problems and then offer a solution. Our consultancy knows the problem, as the backgrounder above demonstrates. To repeat, the consultancy's clients, "clinics and hospitals, are either showing stagnant growth or they are losing market share." To differentiate itself, the consultancy needs to study their customers and clients challenges and then they need to discover what their competitors are offering to solve the challenge. Once they have that information in hand, they can create solutions that drive growth and increase market share that will differentiate them from the solutions offered by their competitors.
In conclusion, the answer to differentiating ourselves lies in first understanding who our ideal customers and clients are and what they look like, then discovering what their problems are, and finally coming up with innovative and targeted solutions to those problems.
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