5 Questions Every B2B Seller Should Ask About Their Target Audience

Olin Hyde
June 30, 2016


Within the B2B niche, the most attention grabbing Tweets always revolve around discovering your target audience and making sure that you are staying on-target as time goes on. 90% of the buying process happens before the salespeople even start to work their magic. Knowing your target audience will help you to grow your business.

To make sure that you are reaching your target audience, you must go out of your way to ask some key questions.

These five questions will help you to define your target market and understand what they want.

Who are Your Customers and Potential Customers?

To get leads not inquiries, you have to start by building up a persona of your perfect customer. The more detail you can have the better. Include information regarding their motivations, their likes, and their dislikes. This will help you to humanize and make them relevant to your business.

But what if you don’t have detailed marketing metrics, as the majority of small businesses don’t before they get a fanatical customer base?

The answer is to profile yourself. Most entrepreneurs are creating products and services that appeal to them, so you are in essence an example of a perfect customer. Answer those same deep questions by yourself and you will be shocked at how relevant they are.

What are the Motivations of Your Customer Base?

A motivation can also be defined as a trigger. To master the art of persuasion you have to hit that trigger. It’s like a switch that generates interest and encourages customers to pay attention to you. Finding out what that trigger is should be your priority.

It can tell you more than what your customer wants. A trigger can tell you how often they are likely to buy the product and how they want to access and consume that product. You are gaining an insight into the daily routine of the customer by focusing on this aspect.

For example, if a customer needs your product early, often, and always it will change your marketing strategy entirely. These are the things you have to uncover.

What Type of Customer are They?

The type of customer you are hitting will be defined by the product or service you happen to be selling. Figure out how often a customer is likely to buy from you. This often depends on your price point, as well.

For example, a seller of luxury cruises will only deal with a customer once or twice a year, at most. On the other hand, a bread company will deal with customers on nearly a daily basis.

Understanding how often a customer is likely to buy will influence things like how often you update your products and when you release a new version of it.

Where Will You Get Growth From?

Your growth will depend largely on protecting your online reputation as a high-quality business. But you still need to develop a strategy to drive this growth. You may be a business based in referrals or you could be engaged in a nationwide marketing campaign.

Answering this question accurately is crucial for determining your budget and where you invest your money. It will also define your marketing strategy and how you build relationships with customers. The best book we have found to help you figure this out is Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth.

How are You Going to Differentiate Yourself from the Competition?

Coming up with a strategy that multiplies your customer base is the key to success in any business. You are operating in a more crowded marketplace than ever before, though. There are at least a hundred businesses like yours operating in the same niche. Standing out is harder than ever before.

Finding a gap in the market is still a good tactic to follow for entrepreneurs, but it’s not enough. Even if you manage to become the sole provider in a new niche this isn’t going to last for long. Before you know it, you have ten competitors all offering similar products and services.

Differentiating from the competition is something that you are going to have to examine on a regular basis. You need to review this and continually consider how you are going to come up with something new. One effective strategy is to “verticalize” your product by becoming the best in a particular vertical or several verticals or adapting your product in each vertical.

Last Word

Understanding your target audience will help you to make the right moves when it comes to your business. You shouldn’t just ask these questions when launching your business. They should be questions that you return to a few times every year. It’s the only way that you are going to stay ahead of the competition.

Further Reading

Nick Arnaiz
November 22, 2019
Lainey Mebust
June 25, 2019
Olin Hyde
May 19, 2019