Summit talk: Know your customers

Engineers may not believe this, but there are huge lessons to learn from the folks in the marketing and sales departments. The first and most important lesson is to know who your customer is. Not just who is buying the product, but why are they buying the product and what are their needs.
At the end of the day, you have to know your customer – whether it is the end user buyer or someone within your own company. That was one of the lessons from today’s packed ISA Marketing and Sales Summit held in Austin, Texas.
“Not only do you have to know who your customers are, you have to find out what resonates with them,” said Dan Miklovic, managing vice president at the Gartner Group.
Since quite a few of today’s industry marketers come from the engineering side, they sometimes feel the customers are more knowledgeable about products than they really are.
“We expect our customers to know as much about the products as we do,” said Jane Lansing, vice president of marketing at Emerson Process during her morning keynote address. That, she said, was not the way to go. “When we base the messaging around ourselves, we are not helping our customers.”
Marketers have to gain critical insight from their customer. “You can have all the facts and figures, but (you have to learn) the main thought about the product with the customer,” she said. Figuring that out is the first step. The second step is executing on what the customer needs. She then added, once you figure out the message, you have to do “relentless execution. It’s all about the message and the critical insight,” she said.
“It’s not brain surgery,” Lansing said. “It’s marketing. Go for it.”
Throughout the day, the word “listening” kept cropping up. You have to continuously listen to what your customer needs. You can’t tell them what they need, you have to listen to what they say their pressure points are. You have to find out what keeps them up at night, said Mark Taft, senior vice president of global systems marketing at ABB.
“It’s not a one size fits all thing,” he said. You have to know the customer and know what they want and need in their particular region. What works in the United States may not work in a different region.