In todays challenging business environment, pressure to create and maintain a successful strategy is more crucial than ever before. Businesses across all sectors are struggling to keep pace with performance expectations. Beneath this, businesses are also struggling to stay connected and valuable to their customers.

Companies across the board are finding that traditional approaches to understanding customer behavior are no longer enough to remain competitive. The need for further insight has become critical in the struggle to keep pace with performance expectations. A growing number of companies pressed to increase sales are reaching beyond standard research data into the perceptions and feelings of customers to gain behavioral insight and create more effective strategies.

In this context, common assumptions are made each day that marginalize success. In some, if not many cases, they can prove fatal to the business. One is that we know our customers. Particularly in B2B marketplace, it is not uncommon for management to assume that no one knows their customers better than they do. Based on this assumption, research is often reduced to a minimum if not eliminated entirely. Secondly, when they do reach out to gather market information, it is often done so with archaic, statistical methodologies. Both of these lead to disappointing results.

Consultants Michelle Helin and Linda Goodman, with extensive experience as strategists to leading international corporations (and associates of Transparency) are expanding this area of market research and giving business leaders solid, actionable intelligence toward increasing sales. Their approach is based upon the careful discovery and clarification of the emotional factors within customers that effect their business decisions.

What makes customers do what they do? What really motivates them? The fact is that most businesses today justify their strategic plans and business decisions without taking the time or making the effort to really listen and understand their customers. Really understanding the underlying emotion that drives a customer would give the business the unique opportunity to meet that need and build critical value in the relationship.

Helin and Goodman hold that traditional quantitative research, inherently designed to measure and verify, overlooks the crucial role of emotion in purchase behavior. Their answer is a process they refer to as Emotional Trigger Research, a methodology for obtaining true and meaningful insight to customer buying decisions. Using open-ended questions, intuitive listening, and deep, objective conversation, the goal is to peel back the automated response layers and discover deeper motivations. The approach is carefully designed to reveal the emotional triggers that would not be revealed through traditional forms of research yet radically affect business decisions.

In their practice, this use of conversational exploration has consistently produced a depth of insight that has created a significant market advantage for client businesses struggling with shifting dynamics in both their customers and their employees.

In a recent interview, Michelle Helin related the story of a leading global manufacturer of precision tools who suddenly saw plummeting acceptance rates among elite employee candidates. Emotional-trigger research was conducted to discover the root cause. The process revealed that the benefits that appealed to previous generations were no longer attractive to current recruits. Existing recruitment packages had been designed to appeal to a candidate’s desire for high wages and global travel, but today’s candidates, who felt the pain of growing up in “all-work-and-no-play” households, desired more balanced life incentives with personal choice options instead of structured career paths and requirements. When these changes were implemented, they doubled their acceptance rates within 18 months.

With current mergers, bankruptcies and buyouts on the rise, Helin shared another poignant example of a company in the global offshore industry that acquired two smaller companies in order to create an attractive alternative to the sole competition that dominated the marketplace. Although the new company had entered the market with quality products, strong field support and a positive reputation, customers shied away. Emotional trigger research found that the new company had focused so intently on the logistics of their mergers that they had created a communication void in their market. This lack of public communication allowed their competitor to control the message on the street and create fears in the minds of their potential customers. The process provided insight into these fears and enabled the new company to tailor new messaging to directly alleviate these fears. The new messaging helped them win over large numbers of perspective new customers.

Successful companies do not really begin to excel until they can actually deliver what the customer really wants. Each of these examples support the assertion that emotionally driven customers will actually hand us the keys to their loyalty if we embrace new processes for information discovery and learn how to listen at a deeper level. The reality is this needs to be a continual, cyclical process. It is the only way to create and maintain relationships that are based on a concrete need.

While good business theory teaches us to manage information to strategic advantage we also know that not all information is clear and tangible. Customers are people, and people are not always logical. Intangible factors, buried in the experience of our customers can, in fact, make or break our businesses. While there is a place for traditional market research in business management, innovative expanded processes like emotional trigger research are giving businesses today the critical knowledge and perspective necessary to move ahead effectively in a challenging environment.

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Michelle Helin and Linda Goodman are the authors of Why Customers Really Buy: Uncovering the Emotional Triggers that Drive Sales – available on Amazon.com at:

http://www.amazon.com/Why-Customers-Really-Buy-Uncovering/dp/1601630417