- Becoming customer-centric not only will make your company successful but ultimately is gonna change how you market. Traditionally, marketers use the four P's. A process or methodology that was created back in the 1960's to focus on how to sell products to consumers. So it's very product-centric. And when you look at products through the lens of the four P's, there are really four elements that you worry about.
- Product, what you are actually selling to a consumer,
- Place, where they can go and buy the product,
- Price, what they'll actually pay for the product to enjoy it
- Promotion, how do you make the consumer aware of the product.
- Do things like advertisements in newsprint or on television.The four P's, because it's product-centric, actually create some challenges for the B2B marketer. It forces the marketer to think about products and in turn they tend to describe features not solutions to their buyer.
- It leads the buyer to actually connect the dots on how the product will actually benefit them and how it will fit into their world. It also distracts from the ability of you as a marketer to build a trusted adviser relationship with the buyer because again you're not in his world you're thinking purely about how your product can be best bought by that buyer.
- Becoming customer-centric changes the lens that marketers look at in terms of practicing their trade. We become much more customer focused and focused on what the customer needs in terms of solving their problems and challenges. And that has a transformation to the four P's. Product then becomes solution.
- It may be your product along with some other services or some other products to create a whole solution. Place also changes. Place changes because the internet is now here you now have multiple channels that you can sell your product through. Price also changes because now we're looking at price from the customer perspective not only do they want a fair price but they also want to look at a return on their investment in your product.
- So it all equates to value.And then finally, promotion becomes something much richer.You're educating the customer on how they can use your solution to solve a problem but you're also showing how maybe other companies within their market have approached similar problems with your product and solution.
- So solution is a very important aspect here and a key fault here is that if you don't know the problem that you're solving for the customer, how can you possibly market a solution to them. So remember get into their world, understand what's affecting their bottom line as a business but also what keeps the the actual workers up at night.
- Now the four P's transforms into something we call SAVE. And SAVE is a framework that again is positioned around a solution. It can be vertically focused such that we have basically a way to talk about how in a particular market we can solve a customer's problem.
- We give them access by using the internet. They have web-based channels that they can actually utilize to acquire the product when they need it. And again value is something that they can look at in terms of, if they invest in our solution what will it mean to their business?And finally from an education standpoint, it's a way for us to show them our point of view and ultimately that gives them insight in terms of how we will solve their problems.
