What's Better than Understanding a Customer?

The three most important questions in marketing are:

What do we know about our customers?
What do they know about us?
…and with the answers to these two questions…
What kind of experience do we want to create for each customer?

These questions might seem like they are pretty hard to answer, short of market research or feedback from a few vocal customers willing to tell you what they think. By inviting people to a data-driven, intelligent nurturing campaign and carefully watching what they do and what messages they respond to you can build a dossier on the people who respond. When they respond and interact with the content, it's pretty exciting. You begin to understand who that person is and what their interest are. It gives you the ability to create a narrative around each person. If you keep track of them and their interactions you know more about them, you have a much better idea of what they know about you and if you pass this customer intelligence on to the sales force, it gives them context for creating an engaging, relevant experience.

But there's something that beats understanding a customer…understanding two customers from the same organization…or three…or more. We call this a "cluster of activity" and it's very meaningful, powerful information. Much of our work is in healthcare devices and services where the sell cycle is long a new relationship can be worth millions of dollars…it's really cool when more than one person from the same large organization, hospital, or healthcare provider responds to the same messages. It's even cooler when patterns emerge or when you can follow a sequence of events!

Think about what it would look like if you had a window into the conversations your customers were having about your organization, when you weren't around to hear them? What if your sales people could see the spheres of influence in a customer's company? Armed with this information, they would have a better understanding of who is involved  in the decision making. Who influences the decisions and who the advocates are...what they should review before seeing the customer. This is what our clients need to develop an action plan and that's the power of clusters.