There are few certainties in marketing, but one thing I know for sure is that the most successful people in software, engineering and technology are those who really know their customers. There are numerous ways of gaining deeper insights into your customers, but a good start point (that is often overlooked) is analysing your own accounts and asking these important questions:

1. Which of your customers are generating the most revenue? Produce a list of your customers, sorted by total revenue and start looking for patterns. What are the defining characteristics of your most valuable customers? What do you know about these people and their challenges that could help you shape product marketing and sales campaigns?
2. Which customers are yielding the best profit margins? If your products and services have significantly different profit margins – for example software licenses vs consultancy – then dig deeper into the analysis to show not just revenue, but profit contribution per customer. These figures may challenge your ideas of who your best customers are.
3. How much is a new customer worth, on average? By working out the total value that each new business generates in their first few year or two as a customer, you can decide how much you want to spend to acquire new leads. This knowledge is essential for setting marketing budgets and evaluating ROI of campaigns.
4. What is the ROI on your key marketing activities? It’s usually quite easy to break down what you have spent on advertising, major events, social media, etc. However, for the best insights you need to (manually) attribute customer revenue to each of the marketing activities which generated or contributed to each lead.
5. Which are your star products, your cash cows and your question marks? If your accounting codes have been set-up with sufficient granularity, you should be able to see how much revenue each of your products and services has generated. With this extra insight, you can start making more informed decisions about which you will promote, which you will develop and which you will test more actively in the market.

As with all management information, the important thing about these kinds of insights is how you apply them to your decision making and planning. I help the directors of software, engineering and tech businesses to develop effective marketing strategies and create the messaging, campaigns and sales tools to implement them.