Marketers should strive to know their B2B customers better. As implausible as it may sound, since it’s the essence of their job, B2B marketers may not always have a clear idea of what their customers actually want. In this podcast, Andrew Deutsch from the Fangled group discusses the misalignment in what marketers ‘perceive as customer requirements‘ versus what their clients actually desire and like about the product and company. It will be a surprising and worthy revelation for many of our peers. But delving deeper into what he says may ring a bell for a few of us with significant marketing mileage. By the end of this discussion, marketers will appreciate the worth of listening to customers and building action plans based on qualitative research. Here’s an account of my interview with Andrew Deutsch. 
B2B marketers should strive to know their customers better

Many B2B businesses do not know who their customers are
Businesses do have a notion, but don’t necessarily know their B2B customers in and out, which they should. One of the major problems is that companies promote things that they’re proud of and founded their business on, in ways that really do not matter to the customer. This is because these aren’t the underlying motivation or reasons for which people do business with them.
This is a business problem prevalent across the globe
There isn’t a region of the world where Andrew hasn’t come across it, with varying degrees. Some countries like Germany or the northern part of Italy have very strong engineering and manufacturing capabilities. Companies in these regions sometimes don’t recognise the need to grasp their clients’ requirements nor serve them better to make them feel valued and part of the business.
Companies that are world leaders in certain industrial segments aren’t immune either
Let’s imagine that you put your engineers in charge of sales and you manufacture cars. Now the consumer for a new car is looking for certain benefits, e.g. he wants to impress people of the opposite gender and be “the coolest dude out there” Andrew said.
He talks to the engineer and the latter says, well, this has X horsepower, we use Y type of steel, etc. The customer doesn’t care about any of that. “Am I going to impress the girls?” is what he would ask.
Hence, it may be a possibility that the buyer of a sports car starts with a very different mindset than the people who design and market it.
When you can bridge that disconnect to what is the actual value people desire out of their purchase, it gets much easier to meet them at their model of the world and show them that yours is the right solution
Technical features of the product are important, but it’s just one of many things for B2B customers
Let’s take an example to elucidate this, Andrew added. Let’ say we, as a B2B customer, are working to purchase a brand new high-tech laser cutting machine for our manufacturing company. We want that laser cutter to be able to cut up to a certain millimetre of steel at a predetermined grade, rate and speed.
Three vendors have the machine which meets our requirements, and the pricing is somewhat similar. But as a manufacturer, what am I looking for? It will do what I need it to do, but I also want to make sure that there is good customer service available.
What is the annual cost to power that machine? How quickly can I repair downtime? Is it something that has modular components? All of those things are what I’m really looking for. I want to make sure that this machine never shut...