The B2B marketing sphere or B2B client profiling demands a completely unique approach to marketing. The B2B Industry works in a very different way from B2C. Needless to say, the marketing communication strategies are different too. There is a constant influx of marketing gimmicks and trends that promise to offer growth to your business. However, more often than not, these are just illusions. Furthermore, hardly a few of these tactics actually deliver the results they claim. The main reason for this is that while these gimmicks talk about every other essential component, they never stress the importance of having a solid client information base.
What is Client Profiling?
Client Profile, in simple terms, refers to the profiling or analysis of your B2B organization’s typical customer. Businesses can use this process as a marketing tool. What’s interesting is that it helps to understand your customer’s needs, wants, expectations, and preferences too. In this manner, you get a description of customers from a particular attribute or set of common attributes. Customers with profiles that share demographic, behavioral, geographic, monetary, or psychographic similarities can be clubbed together.
What does B2B Client Profiling Translate To?
Customer profiling is a marketing tool that businesses use regularly. Besides, it helps in understanding their customers. Such insights help in making better business decisions. Profiling results in customer profiles that describe your customers based on set attributes. You can group similar profiles by shared characteristics. Such shared characteristics involve demographics, geographic, psychographic and behavioral characteristics. Most importantly, client profiling helps you gain a better understanding of your market. By highlighting who your consumers are, it can help you guess their interests. You could find out what is possibly attractive to them. All in all, client profiling hep understand what your B2B business can offer a particular client. It shows where you can add value.
360-degree Client Profiling is a holistic and practical approach to client data collection. In this case, the data related to your customers comes from all the possible channels. The collected information is then condensed. This condensation helps us find crucial information about the client’s preferences. By all means, such information helps you deliver engaging customer experiences. It goes hand in hand alongside attaining company goals.
Creating 360 degree Client Profiles
Your B2B business is going to see tremendous benefits by adopting client profiling. Needless to say, there is no reason for passivity. Businesses that ‘know’ their customers in and out are employing ‘smart work’. This efficiency in their strategy gains them bigger and better profits.
Gartner says, “Not more than 10% of the companies have 360-degree Client Profiling, and out of this only 5% use it to grow their business!”
We’ve established how beneficial and nurturing client profiling is for your B2B business. Now, let’s understand how you can achieve it. For the sake of easier understanding, we’ve broken down the process into three steps –
Driving Client Intelligence
In today’s highly connected world of modernization, every person who chooses to have an online presence inadvertently leaves web footprints. This is applicable even in the case of your clients. The average person accesses a multitude of social media networking sites. They are also highly likely to make purchases from online stores. They might have responded to certain online promotions, advertisements, offers, and deals at some point. As social media users, they have shared, liked, commented on, watched, and interacted in many ways with other businesses, organizations, and even people. Similarly, they must have referred to online resources like business blogs and forums to make informed decisions about purchases, trends, etc. All these activities leave web footprints which are a highly valuable asset to you as a business owner. These footprints can be tracked to gain insights into the user and his/her behavior patterns as a customer.
What does Client Intelligence Offer You?
Analyzing client behavior through these internet-based interactions has a host of benefits. Additionally, this grants you the ability to understand your client in a more holistic manner. In turn, this helps you isolate his needs, problems, and desires in a more efficient manner. Understanding clients’ needs are the key to making improved B2B decisions. With such insights, you can’t achieve organizational sales and marketing goals in an efficient or effective manner.
Client Intelligence is all over the internet. In the first place, this intelligence needs to be collected in the right way for optimum functionality. The best way to gather client intelligence is by keeping a check on clients’ online behavior. This means that you ought to keep a track of past business dealings with them. Make a note of transactions they may have conducted. Make sure to check for ongoing interest in competitor products.
You must be adept at looking out for the issues or problems that they are likely to face. Specifically, you should concentrate on offering solutions to these via the products and services offered by your B2B organization. When you make pitches, they might not seem interested in your product or service offering at first. But these actions help in building a solid reputation for your brand. Lastly, it also helps in fostering a healthy client relationship that will benefit you in the long run.
Enabling predictive analysis
A 360-degree view of your clients has the potential to display every client’s individual interaction history. As a result, it can even go so far as to predict the outcome for similar interactions in the future. These predictions typically involve a customer’s satisfaction or dissatisfaction with a particular product or service or their acceptance or refusal of a sales proposition or marketing approach. Based on the sum of these calculations for a particular client, or the specified customer segment, the 360-degree B2B Client Profiling System can recommend the course of action with the highest probability of bringing in a desirable end result, be it related to marketing, sales or client-support efforts.
How Predictive Analysis Can Help
Every single client interaction ideally should help your business get closer to achieving performance milestones. These ‘milestones’ are different for different organizations. Milestones can include things like increasing the total number of clients, client loyalty, or client retention rates. It is necessary to understand that your clients are not a homogeneous group. This is why your B2B business’s strategy needs to be designed, optimized, calculated, and reported on the basis of the individual client-type or client segment. This ensures that your business can act accordingly to attain the predicted results.
Calculating response rates for your business advertisements, marketing offers and business proposals for every single client or client segment can bring tangible benefits. It does so by streamlining your B2B business’ approach towards the clients. Similarly, when your CRM displays a particular trend among your clients, such as responding positively to a standard offer or their inclination towards a specific type of marketing approach, you can precisely curate, design, and promote your future offers to attract this particular client segment’s attention.
Urging for Client Alignment
It is a known and widely-accepted fact that sales and marketing must align and integrate for sustainable business growth. Through 360-degree customer profiling, you have the ability to design your service offerings. You offer client support based on the contribution of the client towards your products and services. Let’s take an example of a client who is highly interested and contributes heavily to growing your business revenue. With profiles, you can design and scale a high-end support strategy keeping them in mind. Imagine the case of another client who isn’t as interested in your operations. In this scenario, you can tweak the marketing communication or engage them with marketing schemes or offers. You have to find something that aligns better with their current needs.
Evidently, 360-degree B2B client profiling helps you personalize communication. It enables you to scale and build all your efforts and approaches in a desirable manner. This helps attract seemingly different client segments to availing of your products and services. In the long run, customer satisfaction and retention depend on many factors. They depend on the quality of products, services, and delivery of your B2B business’s promises. It takes a lot of concentrated effort and continuous updating to retain and maintain existing client relations. As opposed to forging them for the first time, this process is more time-consuming.
Through client profiling, you’re in a position to make these processes easier and more precise… Instead of having a ‘one size fits all approach to these ongoing client-related tasks, you can segment.
Benefits of Client Profiling
Now that you understand the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of creating 360-degree client profiles, let’s look at a few benefits of the same –
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A comprehensive client profile helps improve your client engagement ratio. Most importantly, it also helps nurture your B2B business’s relations with the most valuable clients.
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360-degree client profiling nurtures otherwise less-profitable clients. Specifically, it enables them to become profoundly profitable for your B2B business.
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It suggests and urges you to alter promotional strategies for better impact. With client profiling, you can improve customer service approaches. You can decrease the ratio of marginally profitable clients.
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360-degree client view helps predict a client’s inherent value for your B2B business.
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It additionally assists you in calculating the costs of customer acquisition. Moreover, it tells you the cost of serving and retaining clients from a particular segment.
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You can analyze bulk client data to design, enhance and manipulate marketing approaches. Initiatives and promotions can convey the best of your offerings and services.
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Likewise, client profiling helps you understand the client’s persona and behavior. You understand their requirements, expectations, and problems. These insights assist you in designing solutions that are custom-fit for your clients.
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It gives you a fair idea about the clients’ inclination towards a particular marketing channel and their preferences.
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Strategically lower your promotional costs by locating the least productive client segments.
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It gives you the opportunity to access client-centric data. Such data easily predicts and controls the churn-rate.
What Do These Stats Mean?
Sure, your CRM is an integral part of your marketing effort management. However, it can only offer limited insight into client behaviour. Once you adopt 360-degree client profiling, you are essentially gaining an in-depth view of your client base. Undoubtedly, this helps a B2B firm devise effective plans. You understand the most efficient course of action for all your actions. You can streamline promotions, marketing, acquisitions, customer service, lead generation, and the retention of valuable clients.
Pre-requisites for 360-degree B2B client profiling
To deploy this uniquely productive strategy, one has to have access to core client data. Now, all marketers know that their data is one of the most essential raw materials. Consequently, achieving prosperous returns on marketing efforts depends on data. By the way, gathering core client data is no piece of cake. It requires a professional approach, combined with the right skills. The right knowledge and skill-set are so essential to the process.
There are multitudes of data vending companies that promise to deliver data that they claim is relevant. However, the bitter truth is that such vendors are completely under-prepared for your needs. Moreover, to offer exhaustively researched data that build solid client profiles isn’t enough. Such vendors fail miserably if you’re on the lookout for data that is completely up-to-date.
Why You Need To Combat Data Decay
Thanks to how dynamic human nature is, things change in people’s lives. The fact of the matter is that people don’t work at the same place all their lives anymore. Increasingly enough, families move more often. Promotions occur and companies merge or shut down frequently. Consequently, the average database decays at a rate as high as 5%-6% every month. Basically, a typical database becomes useless within a short span of just six months.
Data vending firms usually sell client-centric data gathered from different sources. Furthermore, they often sell the same data to competing B2B companies. If you’re from a similar industry, your competition might be targeting the same people as you! Imagine what such prospects will feel. A customer who is a part of your lead-generation database might get solicited from all sides. They may receive offers for the same or similar type of product or service by a multitude of firms. Not just your company, but a few others are vying for their attention. Everything from email campaigns to marketing communications has tough competition. In such a scenario, having the best content or product is not enough. Additionally, your effort loses value only because the database itself lacks quality. Such tech append email lists are a nightmare!
The Best Solution for Your B2B Business
It goes without saying that your database is very important. You need to have a well-rounded, relevant, up-to-date, accurate, and complete database at your disposal. Obviously, if you want your marketing efforts to bring returns this investment is crucial. While it would be great if you could get this done in-house, such a premise is preposterous at best.
Your Sales and Marketing teams are already occupied with their primary responsibilities. While they are the ones who need data predominantly, they cannot deal with the task of data mining. They aren’t even trained or skilled in research or mining client information effectively and in a quick manner. It is best to leave this task to the professionals.
BizProspex is a leader in manual data mining, data cleaning, and lead generation. We’re the only US data solutions company that excels at data-specific jobs with manual research techniques. Yes, that’s right! Without a doubt, we make sure to research and verify information meticulously. Likewise, our team scours for intel across various professional networks, platforms, and software. This means that data is cross-checked and cross-referenced using specialized tools and software. Extra verification steps cross-reference phone numbers, emails, and other contact details.
The data obtained in this manner is up to 99% accurate. Furthermore, this data is extremely relevant, freshly mined, and accurately appended. Here, we can customize results for need-specific requests. Simultaneously, all these factors together make for a successful end-product. These processes guarantee a higher percentage of client engagement with your B2B firm. The effort that BizProspex takes to provide clean data is exceptional. Needless to say, it helps your B2B business build a lasting impression on clients. This extra effort, ultimately, drives higher sales and enhanced returns.
Leads On Demand
When it comes to running a business, having quality leads is extremely important. You may think that, as a business, you’ve covered all bases when it comes to lead generation. However, having the luxury of accessing high-quality leads is a bonus. Through Bizprospex, you can observe a huge difference in the overall business and marketing efforts.
BizProspex, the pioneer, and veteran in Manual Data Services has launched a new service called CRM cleaning. Here, the aim is to deliver high-quality leads and prospects. These records have completely relevant, complete, and up-to-date information. With just a few clicks, you can access thousands of leads. The leads we mine are highly suitable for the products and services your B2B organization offers. Moreover, we collect leads through manual research. Hence, you can rest assured of their quality and value. Try our services today and revolutionize lead generation for your B2B business!
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