What makes for a good use case in understanding your customer at a deep level
What makes for a good use case in understanding your customer at a deep level?
There could be many cases where understanding segmentation based on customer psychology has no use. Anything that’s an emergency, where you have no choice does not fit well.
Below are six criterias that could gauge if you need to understand your customers and future customers better:
Criteria number one: averaging.
In my experience if a company is averaging according to a false KPI such as click-through rate of search terms or sales volume (loyalty) or some type of action-based system, where the customer is clicking on a bunch of things, you are the prime reason why reorganizing according to the deep understanding of the customer yields the best results.
These signals are easy to acquire but don’t offer enough predictive value for seeing the future. Averaging produces averages.
Criteria number two: asymmetric data about the customer is poor.
if you don’t know anything about the customer or that customer data is hard to acquire it might be time for change.
Big media knows more about your customer then the customer knows about themselves in many cases. They have quantified and mapped many aspects of where we shop. Not to say that this is predictive data but there is such rich historic data one could argue anomalies are more limited. But do they share this data? No.
if they did, it’s likely that your media buys would be a lot smaller, maybe 10% of what you are currently spending. So this is an asymmetric data problem. Give you enough data to buy media.
If you can level up your data about customers and ‘why they buy’ and ‘who they are’, you can turn media buying into a dumb pipe. Your media buys would be rewritten according to a much more refined total addressable audience.
Criteria number three: acquisition of some data about customers is not hard.
If you have CRM data as well as rich history, you have enough to map clusters of traits, discovering your best customers according to why they buy.
A bonus is if you have written marketing and sales material. The personality of this material, largely based on the writer, is a strong indication of who will buy. It’s also a strong indication of who will not buy.
Combine this with CRM and you’re now refining your total addressable audience according to why people buy and why they will buy if you change things.
The personality of the company has to align with the personality of the buyer. While that attracts a clear set of customers, it dissuades a large group of others.
Criteria number four: complexity of the product
If the product is hard to understand, and there are many reasons to use it, it has a complicated jobs to be done answer or multiple answers, then this is a fit. Understanding traits will collapse and simplify many of the problems running into. Many products have multiple uses for very different reasons for different people.
The classic jobs to be done theory about the milkshake is no exception. Milkshake is food, reward, time occupier to name only three. The single product is purchased by different people who are going to have different traits. Once you understand the different use cases, your understanding the traits and the drivers to grow sales.
Complex software, products that are closely tied to who we are, are also good fits.
Criteria number five: high value products
Any high value product explained the wrong way to the wrong people is a media consumption hog. Remember Trade shows? sometimes they’re very successful and sometimes they are complete time and money wasters. Why? Often high value products at the wrong trade show have no fit. That’s what I’m talking about. In the digital world you have a massive trade show but a week way to form intent with prospects.
That company is wasting time and resources by explaining the wrong thing to far too many people.
High value should not be connected with high acquisition cost. By understanding why people buy, you can refine a select audience to sell to that fit well.
Each cluster of customers offers a completely different total addressable audience. At some point there’s no more clusters and that defines the future size of the company.
High value products also need to be given careful product development attention. The wrong features and functionality…. No sales. Just because you have the resources to develop a lot of things doesn’t mean you should. Many people used to describe Microsoft Word as this particular case. Overtime the product became so complex that a large majority of the customers we’re happy to opt to Google docs for many reasons.
Criteria number six: ethics.
Just because you understand a lot about people doesn’t mean you can take advantage of them. Products and companies that are ethical should be focused on forming intent not manufacturing intent. The right people will utilize these products but selling to the wrong people is unethical.
Selling things or services is changing and those who master the reasons why we sell and understand the deep reasons why people buy will come out on top.