How Business Clients Think: 6 Tips For Staying Ahead

No matter what type of business you’re running, there’s nothing more important than getting to understand your customers or clients. There’s one demographic that tends to be unique compared to individual customers, however - clients of B2B businesses, the businesses and business owners themselves. With different goals, priorities, and factors to consider from an average or individual consumer, getting to know their needs and perspective is important but somewhat more difficult.

Now, let’s look at a few ways of getting inside the heads of your business clients so you can better understand and meet their needs.

1. Provide business clients with relevant information for decision-making

When you’re selling to individual consumers, you’re often trying to capitalise on a whim, an emotional response that can lead to a buy, whether on impulse or by generating enough desire that they cannot ignore the product. B2B customers are different, however. They’re not driven by a need that your product triggers, but rather, real objectives in their businesses that they measure and try to meet.

To that end, B2B clients tend to base their decisions on more research than individual consumers. As such, you should make sure you provide sufficient content or information to them. Content marketing through blog posts, informative videos and infographics can speak to your potential clients much more than simple banners. Make it clear to them that your business offers unique solutions to their needs by providing as much evidence of that as you can.

2. Know what your business clients want

There is no approach more important than simply discussing your services with clients or potential clients. When you’re organising a meeting with a client, make sure you’re listening more than talking. You should know the benefits of your services but don’t go in-depth into specific service offerings unless you’re asked to. You don’t want to end up speaking to a selling point they’re not interested in. You want to listen to what they want before telling them how you will deliver it.

There are clients who are more than willing to tell you what they want, but many of them may not feel like they have the opportunity. Implementing feedback platforms like Leapsome can help you understand what your clients are after.

3. Don’t neglect analytics 

Even if your target market isn’t always directly talking to you, they are certainly always telling you what their wants and needs are. Typically, they do this at the point of discovering your business. Through analysis of your website search data, review of your Google analytics metrics, and social media, you can glean a lot of data on what, precisely, your customers want.

Search terms might show you the questions, services, or keywords that bring them to you. Conversion statistics on the website can show you which of those align more with what your business offers. Social media posts and advertisements will also show you what gets their attention through engagement ratings. You can compile all of this with the help of tools like SproutSocial to see what messaging does and does not work. You can then take those insights into consideration when dealing with your clients.

4. Be where they are

Aside from asking them directly, you should make sure you’re integrated with any community you’re trying to target so that you can understand their worldview and priorities. This might be difficult if you tend to work with businesses across a wide range of industries. 

If you find that your services speak to a certain industry or you want to target businesses within that industry, then you should take the time to find the LinkedIn groups they discuss in, as well as the networking events people within that industry attend. 

5. Know what a day in your client’s life looks like

When you’re talking to individual clients, one of the best ways to ensure you’re using the same frame of reference as they are is to know how they operate and the way they interface with their work and the services you provide them. Take a page from the book of Call That Hard Work?, the TV documentary that has people in three different occupations all trying out each other’s work. Of course, you don’t have to actually try and do their work. 

Just try to get an idea of what their job is like, what they do, and how you can sell the benefits of the services you provide. This way, it’s easier to talk to the individual decision-makers, no matter what level they might be within the business itself.

6. Continue engaging customers even after the sale is made

Every customer or client is going to deal with post-purchase anxiety. To some degree, people are wired to wonder if they could have done things better, which includes wondering whether they have gotten the best deal that they can. B2B buyers, however, tend to keep this on their mind a lot longer than the average consumer, often because the kind of services you sell to them has an ongoing effect on their businesses. They will wonder if they can maximise their gains further, and they might even think about switching to do just that.

For this reason, it’s important that you’re able to show your customers metrics and clear key performance indicators that show the effects and the return on investment you’re able to offer them. Otherwise, you could be risking the long-term survivability of your contractual engagements.

7. Talk to your sales/support team

If you’re not personally in charge of every client-facing interaction your business engages in, you could be missing vital parts of the story when it’s time to talk to your clients. For this reason, it’s a great idea to make sure that you’re working closely with those who do face them, such as your sales, customer service or customer support team if you have them.

Having multiple points of contact within a company can create a sense of inconsistency if your team isn’t organised, connected, and working with the same insights on the client’s perspective. To that end, aside from simply meeting with your sales and support team, you may use customer relationship management solutions that ensure all the data and insights gathered from multiple contact points is put into one central database that anyone can review when it’s their turn to speak with clients. 

In the world of B2B, every client is different, so special attention must be paid to the specific needs of each business, owner, or leader you’re talking to.