To Accelerate Growth in Uncertain Times, Leaders Need Insights on How Buyers’ Goals are Changing
We have entered a pronounced Era of Uncertainty. The past year has bedeviled both suppliers and buyers in the world of commerce. What was once dependable is no longer. Uncertainty has always been an element of business commerce. What the Covid-19 pandemic has brought on is a deep Era of Uncertainty that may very well last the rest of this decade.
With this backdrop, business organizations will need to recognize that customer and buyer goals are changing. Rapidly and frequently. Each new world or commercial event brings new implications for businesses and buyers alike. Resulting in buyers changing, modifying, eliminating, and adding to goals they aspire to reach. This puts enormous pressure on businesses to not only understand buyers’ goals but to be aligned in helping buyers to achieve goals.
For decades, business leaders have relied on data from sales and marketing to get a read on what buyers prefer and need. Tracking sales opportunities and struggling to identify marketing returns. The shortcomings of this approach are too long to list.
Understanding buyers in an Era of Uncertainty requires business leaders to invest in ongoing and real-time buyer insights. What they need insights into more than anything else are the goals of their buyers. Collectively, goals drive behavior. Without this understanding, it will be hard to truly understand rapidly changing buyer behaviors.
Foundational to buyer insights and buyer personas is this critical principle regarding goals. It is why we often refer to buyer personas as helping us identify goal-directed behaviors. Buyers will have goals that rest on bedrock while others may rest on shifting sand. Knowing the difference becomes critical.
What can business leaders do? Invest in and implement buyer insights to both uncover and monitor buyer goals, choices, and decisions. Doing so without losing sight of the importance of blending qualitative and quantitative forms of insight gathering. Just analyzing the hodgepodge of demographic data, psychographic data, analytical data, intent data, customer satisfaction survey data and other forms of data will no longer cut it in an Era of Uncertainty.
Desperately needed is understanding shifting buyer goals and how they are impacting choices and decisions. Correlating external pressures and their impact on how buyers can or cannot meet their goals. Gaining a deeper understanding of new emerging buyer behaviors to respond to and align with.
Buyer personas play a role in helping to interpret buyer insights and act as a communications tool for leaders to enable their teams to help buyers meet their goals. Buyer personas are an essential tool in talent development, which directly impacts employee retention. Employee satisfaction correlates with their feel-good beliefs they are helping people.
Business leaders today are pressed to accelerate growth. Growth in market share. Growth in revenues. Growth in customer bases. Growth and expansion in global markets. Many business leaders are wanting of critical buyer insights to act upon and to achieve growth.
One of the most important elements of insights business leaders can invest in today, to drive growth in an Era of Uncertainty, is how to meet buyers’ goals.
