Smart marketers focus on what the customer sees as a successful outcome. People don’t care about features, they care about the benefits for them. What problems do they have that you can help solve?
If you work in business-to-business tech you’re customer’s measure of success is often the success of their customers. That means your focus must be helping your customers, help their customers succeed. Not only do you need to understand how your product or service helps your customer, but also how it helps their customer.
Your success hinges on helping your customers succeed. When you start thinking like this, you realise your customers are partners not just buyers.
At SilverStripe, we create an open source content management system (CMS) that digital agencies use to build websites. Our software is developer-centric. Many of the features our direct customers (developers) love are never seen or experienced by the final customer, website owners and content administrators. But if we create a product that only developers love, the chances are they won’t get to use it very often.
The number 1 measure of success for developers in our community is how happy their clients are (2015 SilverStripe Community Survey).
This makes building software our customer’s customers love key. So to understand how our software helps our customer’s customers, and how we can improve, I talk with them directly whenever I can. Some opportunities that allow this include:
- Case studies: whenever we write about a new website built with SilverStripe we talk to the end users as well as the digital agency to understand how it helped the business goals and return on investment.
- Partner reference checks: when we bring a new digital agency on as a professional partner as well as reviewing their technical competency we interview their customers directly.
- Meetups: By attending web and marketing meetups, I connect with people who use our CMS in their roles, these impromptu discussions add to my understanding of how our software is used
- User testing: our product development teams have a pool of SilverStripe users who are consulted regularly
These conversations not only provide valuable marketing insights, but a hugely rewarding process that makes my role a pleasure. I work with talented developers who are passionate about building great software. It’s great to share stories about how their efforts help web teams around the world succeed. Through this process we also form a greater empathy with the teams using our software, and the challenges that they face.
When was the last time you spoke to your customer’s customer? What did you learn?
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