Personal Motivations: 3 Steps to Understanding your B2B Customers

The relationship with B2B customers requires placing great importance on the perceived value a customer will find in your offering. Before proposing a product or service, a salesperson first sells “value” to solve a particular “problem”. In many sales situations, this problem takes on dimensions beyond just the rational notions of supply or optimization. Beyond the stakes of your product or service, a decision-maker will often be influenced by their own professional concerns.

Can We Still Afford to Ignore Our Customers’ Personal Motivations? With the digital transformation of the sales function, mastering and leveraging the most relevant customer information – especially via a well-informed CRM tool – becomes a key competitive asset. Furthermore, this dimension is also significant in the sense that an important purchasing decision often amounts to sending a message to one’s organization, such as:

• The role they seek to play within the company: embodying performance, being “the innovator,” ensuring stability, etc.
• The level of expertise they seek (or not) to achieve in relation to your specialty.
• The social status and level of credibility attributed to them – and the one they seek to achieve.
• Their degree of sensitivity to incentives – especially for the buyer position.
• Whether they wish to act in continuity or disruption with past decisions.

Achieving this level of customer knowledge will then allow you to build an offer that can help your customers to find a consensus between their choices and their aspirations.

We have summarized the 3 key steps to consider the relational and personal dimensions that influence your B2B customers’ purchasing decisions.

Successful Qualification as a Starting Point

The idea is first to list all the grey areas surrounding the purchasing decision. This first step is important because it requires a certain exhaustiveness as well as analytical finesse. Give little room to intuition: prioritize observation.

A first, very common but insufficient method will lead you to define your customers’ S.P.N.C.M.S: Their relationship to the decision in terms of Security, Pride, Novelty, Comfort, Money, and Sympathy towards your offer in general. This first approach is more of a primary basis for your reflection. It can be quickly implemented during a well-conducted qualification.

However, it is necessary to delve deeper into each of these dimensions. For this, don’t hesitate to resort to “Small talk”. Engage in an informal discussion, outside the negotiation framework, to obtain this initial information directly from your customer.

Leverage the Ambition of Decision-Makers

Then, at the limits of the SPNCMS approach, the notion of ambition emerges. This is the most important dimension of your research, but also the most complicated to clarify.

• What are your customer’s aspirations within the company? In their industry?
• Does the way they are perceived match their expectations?
• What level of expertise do they seek to achieve?
• How do they envision their future, and what success factors will they need?

The entire structure of your offering may depend on these answers. The idea, to obtain them, is to adopt a more consultative role to foster an informal relationship. Also analyze how your customer describes themselves on professional social networks.

For example, if your customer, “head of purchasing,” describes themselves as a “Sourcing & Open innovation purchaser”, you will understand the importance of emphasizing the potentially disruptive and innovative nature of your offer.

Establishing the “Psychological Profile” of your B2B Customers

Finally, the third dimension of your study will focus on your client’s psychological preferences and key decision-making criteria.

• What psychological mechanisms are they likely to trigger?
• How do they prioritize their choices?
• Should you allow them a significant degree of creativity (for example, to adapt your solution to their needs)?
• Or, on the contrary, do they tend to favor a single “turnkey” solution?
• Are they more rational in their thinking?

The more detailed and specific your analysis, the better you will be able to understand what triggers the famous “click” in your customer. In practice, this information is very difficult to obtain. The best way to find out more about this aspect is still to find a prescriber: someone from your target customer’s company or network who can provide you with reliable information.

This approach, centered on your customers’ personal motivations, is a formidable asset in terms of engagement and loyalty: provided it is part of a logic of trust and goodwill. The entire objective of this approach is to better address your customers’ problem(s). The goal is then to personalize your offer. Select your communication channels, adapt your content and your discourse to meet a broader spectrum of customer expectations.

Discover how Incenteev can help you to better understand and organize information from your B2B customers. Develop your customer knowledge strategy by more easily surfacing key information gathered in the field.

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