Psychographics and the One Trick Pony

Carriers, Zombies and the Economy

June 4, 2010

Bedtimes and Blogging

June 23, 2010

By definition psychographics is not an insane graphic artist as depicted in the accompanying photo but is “The use of demographics to study and measure attitudes, values, lifestyles, and opinions for marketing purposes.” To further explain, “even though you may have determined your demographic group, people within that group still have very different perceptions about the benefits or value of your product and will be motivated for different reasons. These differences are known as psychographics. To further target your efforts, you’ve got to determine not only who buys (or will buy) your product, but what makes them want to buy it.”(pulled from howstuffworks.com)

Psychographics is a term used widely in the consumer research community but I admit it has only just recently come to my attention. My surface understanding of the approach did get me thinking about the B2B sales process and how we can fine tune it based on this further customer insight.

I had a chap call on me for over a year and based on his tenacity, his professional appearance and confidence in his service I finally gave him an audience. After 20 minutes into his pitch and not asking me a single question he says” so Lee, what do you think so far?”, I responded, “it sounds a bit canned”, without missing a beat he returned back to the safety of his well rehearsed presentation and at the end was very surprised that he didn’t win the business.

The best sales people I’ve met do a great job of finding out “what’s on our sheet” first and then adapt their pitch to assess and deliver what’s important to us. I believe everyone is guilty of falling into a canned pitch at times, one that has got us business in the past so we just keep on using it. The problem is that a decision maker’s time today is more precious than ever and getting appointments are increasingly difficult…we can’t afford to misfire!

Approaches I agree on:

Understand what’s important to your potential customer first. I wasted a lot of valuable time a few months ago because I didn’t get this right. For 45 minutes we pitched our award winning creative, our search engine marketing skills, and our qualified tight knit team. What was the customer really interested in? They were concerned about automated processes, quality control, work back schedules and ability to implement low cost web templates. Creative wasn’t a big priority … lesson learned.
Have an engaging elevator speech. If you go to each of your sales reps individually and pose the question “You’ve got 5 seconds to give me a concise snapshot of why a customer should use our services. What would you say?” I find that most companies I’ve worked with can encapsulate their unique benefits to the client in such a manner but it usually takes a couple of hours to discover what their true differentiators are. Some good examples of concise marketing statements/elevator speeches.
Have answers in advance for any possible push backs. I have printers call me all the time and though I’m happy with the suppliers we have established relationships with, I am open to such calls. After their brief introduction I ask questions like this, “Are you a trade printer or commercial printer? What is your maximum press sheet size? Do you have in-house bindery services? I get frequent calls like this and typically no one can answer these fairly basic questions.
Be prepared to handle price objections. How does a convenience store get away with charging a buck more on a 2-3 dollar item without a single complaint? We accept that convenience has a price tag. What tangible value are we adding? If we are in a position where we’re in a price war on a daily basis either we aren’t conveying our added value properly or we don’t have one. Both scenarios need addressing.

If our current sales approach is akin to the one trick pony, it needs to be a damn good trick to be a sustainable way to earn us future business. The basics of psychographics are that every purchaser of your services has different needs that require identifying and satisfying. Some are willing to take higher risks while others want to stay with the safety of known brands. The purchaser of our services may value relationships and want a lot of personal contact or may value “less is better”. We have a new account that prefers to communicate through text messaging, some respond to phone calls only, others only return e-mails and some still like when you drop by occasionally and just shoot the breeze.

The bottom line is we all need to find ways to become more customer-centric. Get inside their head by asking the right questions and making proper assessments of what’s important to them. If we find ourselves singing the same tune regardless of the audience, we should take the lead from the great jazz soloists. The best ones have part of their solo memorized and the balance is improvised. The more customized and exciting the improvisation is the more likely the performance will be appreciated and remembered..