Big Data – B2B Marketing Style

The term “big data” has become synonymous with “smart” in I.T. circles. But is it?

If you ask the gods of the Internet (Wikipedia, Google etc.) to define big data, they will say something like: 

“Big data is a term for data sets that are so large or complex that traditional data processing applications are inadequate. Challenges include analysis, capture, data curation, search, sharing, storage, transfer, visualization, querying and information privacy.”

But when people think of big data most of us are really thinking of trying to find a pattern of value in what feels like a massive pile of mixed up data. It’s like going into your grandma’s attic in the hope of finding a Van Gogh. Amongst the thousands of boxes there may well be something of amazing historical or monetary value. But to find it your going to have to deal with every memento from every member of your family’s holidays for eighty years along with boxes of old photos and receipts. You will get covered in dirt and sweat and the chances are at the end you will not find any treasure.

This is how the big data analysis that most companies try, actually feels to them. But the promise of finding some incredible pattern that can help you predict future business behavior and gain a competitive advantage keeps people looking (just like in grandma’s attic). Hearing claims that others have found “it” fuels the quest further.

One of the biggest challenges with all searches is to apply what you already know against all new pieces of data. If you are looking for a masterpiece in the attic, it’s important that you have a good idea of what famous artists’ works look like, or you could easily mistake a Gustav Klimt for a secondary school kid’s paint project.

With any source of data, the value is in understanding the attributes of the data, (the meta data). Information such as:

• When did this thing happen
• Who made it happen

Then mapping this piece of data to other things that this person did, or other things that happened at the same time, gives this data value.

If this person did a similar thing at other times, then understanding how often this person did this thing or the frequency of the repetition of this thing can be important.

Now you can try and find other people who do a similar thing and see if they do this thing as often. If they do then you can maybe find other people who do other things that this person does, but haven’t yet done this one thing that they do, and then maybe you can see if this is something they would like to do. You have now gotten to a point where the data may be helping you identify something that may be really interesting. This may sound complex, and circular, but that is the science and art of trying to understand behavior from data. Trying to glean a formula from data means considering all the variables in a multi-dimensional model, and trying to spot the ones that are important and remove the variables that are superfluous.

Before big data, everyone used to call this smart thinking. Trying to deeply understand a situation and work out how to identify the criteria that make a relationship with your business valuable, and look for other similar situations.

The more intimate you can get with the process that people use to decide to buy your product or service, then the easier it will be to identify prospective new customers.

In my world (the world of Business-to-Business Marketing) the most important questions regarding prospective customers are always:

• What business problem are they trying to solve?
• Who exactly has this business problem?
• How to these people want to solve this problem?

The more detailed you can be at defining the what, the who and the how, then the more targeted you can be at identifying exactly who can be your future customers.  

Big data can help, but the most critical skill is to be open to listening very carefully to your market. Committing to spend the time to deeply understand exactly what your customers and prospective customers do with their workday and their personal time and to understand their motivations. The more you understand about your market, the more likely you are to spot value in the patterns of your data. So-called “small data” extracted in real conversations with customers and prospects can be extremely important in learning how they think, make decisions, and act.

It is amazing how often you will find multiple correlations between the people who have similar functions (or roles), but have them at very different companies. What school people attended, what types of cars they drive, do they buy new cars, lease cars or buy used cars, how long they keep their cars for, where they live, who they date and marry, how many kids they have, what music they listen to, what foods they enjoy, what books they read, what they think of their religion, what second languages they speak, where they vacation, what brand of soap they use, their political tendencies, their plans for retirement, how long they will stay in the same job, their hobbies, etc.; this list is huge (almost infinite).

People who succeed in understanding the pressures, motivations and desires of their customers and prospects are the ones who build the kinds of relationships that foster trust and friendship. And these are the people who succeed in business.

If you have millions of prospective customers, then perhaps big data can be the only way to find the formula that defines business success, but if you are a business that sells to a relatively small market in terms of numbers of people (generally a market you can measure in thousands not millions), then you need to spend the time to get to know your customers and prospects personally. You need to be able to live in their shoes to be able to successfully know their motivations and desires. B2B is about committing to a partnership, and that means deeply knowing your prospects and allowing them to deeply know you.

We’ve found that even committing to just 10 customer and prospect conversations per week by each member of the marketing team, generates patterns and insights that can greatly influence strategy for the better.

There is no substitute for treating those you market and sell to as partners and friends. And in business, just like in all personal relationships, you want to partner with those you trust and respect. This relatively small piece of data is the biggest data of all.

https://www.b2b3.org/thought-leadership/content/big-data-b2b-marketing-style

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