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In today’s hyper-growth, rapidly changing markets, companies diversify for many reasons. Maybe you are trying to expand into a new market, or have launched a new product. No matter what, you need to strike a balance between gaining net-new customers and expanding your footprint within current customers—and one of the most important things you need to have access to is in-depth, reliable customer intelligence.

Although you may have a lot of data points on your current customer, chances are you are probably not an expert on the different business lines of the company, go-to-market strategies, or specifically what their executive focus is. If it’s a new client in a new market or industry, then they will likely have vastly different challenges and care-abouts than what you’re used to.

To improve your sales and marketing efforts—and successfully enter a new market—you need customer intelligence “but transaction data doesn’t improve the customer experience unless you combine it with some other data to learn something new and useful,” according to CIO.com author Allen Bernard (@CIOUpdate). What large enterprise B2B companies have found is that by using a particular practice of Big Data, personal business analytics, you can have even more strategic conversations with customers by gaining true insight into their business—not based on click data, but reflective of the customers own voice and needs. You learn valuable things, including:

• Who are they selling to? By understanding who their customers are and why their customers buy from them, you get insight into the big issues they face. The problem their product solves is likely a common one in their market.
• What are the events that could critically affect their business? It could be any number of things, from weather phenomena to the release of an emerging technology. You need to anticipate opportunity and risk for your own sales, but knowing how your product can help them no matter what makes you a trusted partner.
• What are the trends in their market? Knowing in what direction their market is headed is essential to provide value and win the sale. Your positioning for this new market may be very different that your previous one, and you need to be able to speak to how your product will help the customer not just now, but down the road as well.

Going into a new market blind rarely, if ever, ends well… so take advantage of the customer intelligence technology that’s now available to you and your teams. Make sure you’re always learning something new and useful that will lead you on a successful path.

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