In baseball, some of the greatest hitters in the game had the God-given talent to see pitches coming at them 90 plus mph as if they were in slow motion. And so I presumed that that was the key to it all. So I thought. I recently listened to an interview with Joe Morgan, the great former Cincinnati Reds slugger talk about his days as a baseball player. Most revealing was how Joe Morgan talked about studying films of pitchers and how he studied pitches in general. He was looking for insight into how a pitcher prepares to deliver a pitch. Based on what he learned, he would make slight adjustments to his stance and swing based on who he was facing.
Buyer Insights
What amazed me about Joe Morgan’s story was how he could see, in the pitcher’s wind up, where the fingers were on the baseball. And that he could tell by how the seams were positioned and how the baseball rotated out of the pitcher’s hands, what kind of pitch it was. Based on that insight, he would know if he was going to try for a home run or aim for a hit.
Similarly, CEO’s today need to have keen buyer insight into today’s markets and buyers. Without it, it will be a struggle that results in wasted, and precious, dollars disappearing into the catcher’s mitt of campaigns and initiatives gone awry.
Not Always A Home Run
Buyer insight and insights as a term suffers from potential symbolism issues. Talk to a group of people in a business setting, and most likely 6-8 out of 10 will have the idea that insights mean the grand “ah-ha” moment. This can certainly be true. However, buyer insights don’t always have to be characterized as the home-run that forever changes the game. It can be something of a genuine nature that is equivalent to a base hit or even a double and yet advances the momentum of the company as the winner in its market space.
Here’s an example. One organization we conducted buyer insight gathering and buyer persona development for embarked on a well-intentioned effort to make it easy for their customers to reach them and to place orders. They created four toll free 800 numbers depending on the type of product and service you wished to order. Since the four products and services were distinctive enough and potentially reach different types of market segments, this approach seemed to make sense. When you think about it, who can really argue with the idea that you want to open up more lines of communications for your customers? Right? Well, so we thought. Our buyer insights revealed that when it came down to the moment of making a decision on who to place an order with, there was buyer confusion on which toll free number to call. This invariably caused, for expediency sake, them to call the closest competitor instead. Leaving the CEO and the organization scratching their heads on how could revenues decline when they were doing even more to make it easier for their customer base. The insights also revealed “why” this was happening. Most of the orders were placed at the end of the day and thus buyers saw this as potentially causing delays that might not allow them to leave their offices when they needed. The organization quickly reverted back to a single number but based on this insight, expedited the ordering process as well as improved their web capabilities – knowing that their buyers just plain and simply didn’t want to be delayed leaving on time to get to their kid’s little league baseball game.
Revealing Insights Can Prevent 3 Strikes
For CEO’s, buyer insights can be important for three areas that keep them up at night:
Finding out what is not working:
When revenues are supposed to be growing and they are not, it is bound to keep you up at night. Executives pour over reams and reams of customer and buyer intelligence, crunch numbers endlessly, and query the sales team like the old KGB looking for that secret dossier. With a thorough investigative process and usually through the use of third party expertise, the how and the why of what is not working can be revealed. You might not always like the answer but it is better to know than not to know.
Validating an idea:
We all have some great ideas. Let’s face it, what initially sounded great, turned out to have some holes in it once we received more input from trusted colleagues and friends. Senior executives must be conscious of the fact that not everyone is comfortable offering reasons on why their idea or suggested strategy might have holes in it. Courageous senior leaders and CEO’s have the will to use buyer insights to validate ideas – knowing that it just might not validate their idea as a good one.
Making a discovery:
Some senior executives, wisely so, are kept up at night thinking about what they do not know. What changes have taken place in their market space that they do not know about? What new processes have been implemented that has an impact on our solutions? What better ways can we meet the needs of buyers? What is the competition doing that we are not? The questions can be endless. Good insight leads to good strategies. Done consistently enough, then one day there just may be that grand slam home run “ah ha” moment that is a game changer.
As in the game of baseball for a masterful hitter seeking insight into the nuances of a pitcher, insights can lead to sound approaches that can help CEO’s to win in his or her market. And just as in baseball, insights need not always be of the home-run variety. Like the urging on of a good baseball manager to practice your swing and base running consistently, so must a CEO urge his or her organization to practice the art and science of buyer insights consistently to stay ahead of the game of who can best serve its customers and buyers.
