What Is Your BQ and How Can It Boost Sales?
All kinds of intelligence are needed to succeed in business. IQ and EQ come to mind, but sales and marketing staffs in particular need another form of intelligence: BQ, your buyer intelligence quotient.
Why It’s Important
BQ is either a competitive advantage or a competitive vulnerability. It means either you or your competitors will be the one who wins your buyer’s attention, interest and purchase decision. So it’s really important to assess and maximize your BQ.
Calculating Your BQ
There are six dimensions of BQ, and each one can be measured. As a result, BQ is a handy way to get your management and your team to think about these six dimensions of your marketing as a customer experience (CX).
You can use this framework to evaluate how well you understand and serve your buyers and whether you are equipped to deliver a competitive advantage or disadvantage.
1. Individual Buyer Personas
Do you understand what makes each of your personas tick? Can you identify the key prospect insight (KPI) that drives their interest in your offering? When is the last time you met or spoke with real people in each of your persona roles? How do they express their issue or potential need for your product or service? What are their goals? How might your offering help them accomplish that (in their words)? What sources of information do they trust? What is their view of your company vis-à-vis alternatives (aka your competition)?
2. Prospect Account Personas
Beyond the individual personas, do you know who is in your client buying centers and how that consortium operates as a team? If you don’t have this perspective, you won’t be able to run a successful ABM campaign. In a world where 60% of B-to-B engagements fail to end with a decision (no purchase is made), do you know how to drive consensus through all these stakeholders?
Companies generally do not buy B-to-B products — they decide which company partners they want to work with. Can you describe the company culture of your clients and how that fits with your company?
3. Touch Point Behaviors
We are all in the CX business. What do your metrics and analytics tell you? What insights have they brought that the competition doesn’t know? Data analytics can reveal hidden insights about what your buyers are actually doing.
4. Buyer Journeys
What triggers the need for offerings like yours? How does the company decide to pursue your solution or others? We have seen many companies map the journey as though it begins with contacting them and ends with the process of becoming a customer. The buyer’s real journey is very different.
5. Winning Strategies
Do you know what the differences are between winning a potential account and losing one? Lots of sales groups conduct a win-loss post mortem, but this “research” is typically done as a side project at a lower-level position who is looking to close the book on opportunities that did not turn out. Unfortunately, this predictably points to price, features and internal relationships as reasons your firm could not have won the account. Not very useful or actionable! Useful research points to behaviors your company can implement to win more, as well as how to avoid the biggest killer of them all: stalled deals.
6. Customer Advocacy
Finally, the holy grail of superior buyer intelligence is knowing how to attract, retain, delight and engage your customers to refer you — to attract buyers for you far better than you can yourself. This is where BQ really becomes a competitive advantage that puts distance between you and the others. And it’s where marketing becomes a friend of the CFO by delivering lower cost of acquisition and higher customer lifetime value at the same time!
What’s Next
Fortunately, there are clear steps that can be taken to get to know your buyers better and turn that BQ into a competitive advantage.
You can map your team’s BQ on a spider chart to see where you are strong and weak. Focus on the dimensions that are most important to your company and where you perform worst.
Most marketers say their teams could benefit from a little quality time getting to know their buyers better. In the words of David Sable, Global CEO of Y&R, “You must get out of the echo chamber and get under the hood.”
About the Author | Wayne Cerullo
Wayne founded B2P Partners a dozen years ago to help B2B companies see past their products to their prospects with the vision of making B2B marketing more powerful by making it more personal. B2P has worked with mid-tier B2B growth firms as well as global leaders like Baxter, Citibank, IBM, Microsoft, Siemens, and Visa.
