Have you been wracking your brain about why your marketing ROI is in the toilet? Wonder no more…Hubspot surveyed 1200 marketers recently and almost half (42%) only knew their target audience’s basics like demographics, name and location. Less than half knew about their interests, purchasing history, buying decision tree or where and how they consumed marketing content.

B2B Marketers

This situation is no less scary in the B2B world I play in. There, a quarter of companies say that they have a lack of depth in their customer interactions. In fact, this was their top challenge in 2022. When B2B marketers don’t know much about their target, it affects everything from email outreach to sales interactions. Hence the lack of ROI from those activities. Why exactly is this happening?

Remote Selling

46% of of sales reps say that remote selling is not as effective. Therefore, they don’t have the opportunity to get to know their target. Yet a great majority of buyers are still interested in purchasing and doing the buying journey online. While in person interactions are coming back, it’s a whole new world where self-serve is the name of the game for corporate buyers who only bring in the sales rep at the last leg of the transaction.

Cost Of Selling is Up

Almost half of all sales reps surveyed say that the cost of acquisition of a new customer is higher than it used to be in previous years. That’s because it takes longer and involves more people, more information and more steps in general, In business, the cost of doing business goes up as the length of that transaction increases. All of this adds up to less access to the decision maker, which leads to less information about them.

No Strategic Way To Find Info

Most small businesses don’t have a strategic way to find out information about their target except through their existing clients. In my work with clients, we interview decision makers who don’t know, like or trust us already to get a cleaner read on our buyer info. If you don’t have millions of Dollars to throw at a research firm to give you this data, you’d better figure out a way to train your sales reps to do the data mining.

Solutions

The first step of curing any problem is to admit that it’s a problem (and that you have it). Similarly, when a company faces up to the fact that they need primary data about who their target is and how they buy, it’s the start of a solution. Then, comes the segmentation of the market into industries and guessing at their top most expensive issues they can solve. Next, they need to talk to their warm networks in target industries to validate the winning topmost pain for buyers. Lastly, give this first person research findings to the sales and marketing teams to create content and outreach strategies.

Remember, the market never lies if you ask them the right questions. Never be left guessing about your target’s needs again.

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