How Well Do You Know Your Customers? PART I

Last month I attended a marketing presentation about segmenting your customers. The presentation described how a company successfully identified their different customer segments and what specifically appealed to each group’s personalities. The company sold directly to consumers. They put a plan together to target the ‘hot points’ for each of the different consumer groups. The company planned their advertising to attract these groups and were quite successful in the process. They measured their success and the costs of each campaign so they would know if something worked, or didn’t work. This happened to be a large company that could afford to spend lots of dollars hiring telemarketers to better define their customers. I’m confident that most good marketers could successfully devise a marketing campaign that will attract their customers if they are first armed with the background data on their customers’ personalities. So, the difficult part is how do you find out all about your customers if you can’t hire telemarketers?


It will definitely take a lot longer to accomplish, but there are other ways. First make up a list of what you want to know. No matter what an individual is purchasing, even if it is machinery for their company, if all else is equal in the purchase (i.e. the items are apples to apples comparative in features, abilities and price), the individual will decide to purchase the brand that makes them ‘feel comfortable’. So your list of items must include what interests a person. People feel good when surrounded by their interests and likes. Great salespersons know this and know how to mirror this in their personalities. You can call it ‘bonding’, but people feel more comfortable in buying from someone they think shares their same interests. So add to the list questions that will assist you in finding out what they like. For example ask if they had an afternoon off which would they prefer to do, watch NASCAR racing, go to the beach, read a book, go shopping, play sports. If you’re not sure what questions to ask, purchase a personality test and see if you can use some of the questions on the test.

Visit this blog later in the week for Part II of this discussion.

The author, Marge Bonura, is the Director of Sales & Marketing for New England Machinery, Inc. (NEM). NEM is a leading manufacturer of bottle unscramblers, cappers, orienters, retorquers, lidders, pluggers, pump sorter/placers, scoop feeders, hopper elevators and much more. The company has been in business since 1974 selling to the food, beverage, pharmaceutical, personal care, chemical, household products, automotive and other industries. For more information on NEM, visit their website at http://www.neminc.com/.