Think Like Your Customer

The Key To Solution Marketing: Understand the Customer

By: Steve Robins

I came across a great blog post, How to Use the Secret Desires of Your Customers on Michael Martine’s Remarkablogger.  While the post is about blogging, it also applies to solution marketing.  

Martine says that writers should get inside their reader/customer’s heads, using reader/customer’s secret desires as their headlines.  So what’s the connection to solution marketing?

Solution marketing in general, and solutions specifically, all start with getting inside the customer’s mind.  What are your customer’s biggest business challenges?  What are their “secret desires?”  Once you understand that, you’ll have some of the critical knowledge required to develop and market a compelling solution that solves business problems and helps customers achieve their secret desires.  This is a stretch, but you might market your solution like this:

Our solution improves productivity so you can spend more time with your family instead of tracking down information.

Solution Marketing Tip
Understand your customer’s business AND personal goals

So what are those secret desires?  They’re not as spicy as you might think.  Secret desires are your customer’s personal goals such as:

• Spend more time with my family (as Martine says)
• Get promoted, make more money
• Be recognized for making a good business decision (like investing in a solution!)
• Kick my competitor’s *$%#
• Become a hero to my boss
• Make decisions faster and more easily
• Demonstrate leadership
• Gain thought leadership for cutting-edge innovations

Of course, these complement the traditional business challenges such as:

• Increase profits
• Increase efficiency and improve productivity
• Increase effectiveness
• Lower expenses
• Increase sales/revenue
• Ensure regulatory compliance

Bottom line: Understand all of the dimensions of your customer so that you can develop and market solutions that meet their needs – both business and personal.