Becoming the Expert - Know your Market

Hey, it's Jermaine Edwards, your customer growth guide. If you're new, welcome. If you're old, welcome back to the fold. In this video, we're continuing the customer mastery series and looking at being the expert to your most important customer. This is 3 videos. The first video we're looking at is market. How do we understand the market? The quality of our understanding will determine the impact that we can have with and for our customers within their own business. So So let's get started. Let's have a look at the marketplace here. Now, when we think about the marketplace, the industry, what comes to mind? I imagine competitors, customers, a range of different things that might be applicable to your industry or the industry of your customers. But I'm going to introduce you to 3 specific areas that I think might be very, very helpful to you in thinking about how to position yourself and how to consider what things might influence the way your customer might think about their own business and how that relates to you as a partner and supplier to them. So a question to you: how well do you know your customer's market or industry? Now, I ask that question because for us, the more we can understand about the things that influence the way in which our customer thinks about their business, the departments that operate in it, the better prepared we'll be to be able to support, shape, and solve real problems with and for our customers. This is a really helpful exercise for you to go through individually with your team or wider as a company. So let's explore these three different areas. So first, with the insider marketplace that we see are things that impact the actual organization. And impact can be defined in two ways, perhaps more ways, but I'm gonna give you two. The first thing here is anything that is immediate. So let's imagine for a moment in your industry, what things, if changing your market, which you have to immediately respond to? Well, one of those things might be government legislation, something regulatory that has come into the marketplace might need an immediate response. Because not doing that, not following and being compliant, can mean something that falls into the second area, which is cost. So anything that gives immediate change, immediate thing that needs to happen, anything that gives a cost to you or your customer's business, it's something that has immediate impact. And you can see this within the marketplace. If for whatever, whatever reason, you see a notification that says something legislatively, from a government perspective, has come into your customer's industry, in your mind, you need to be thinking to yourself, does this fall into an I? Is this something immediate? And does this have a cost implication to that customer? If the answer is yes, then we can respond to that proactively, or we can move into the second category, which is around change. Now, change is something and can be compiled into two specific areas. Change is something that is ongoing in that marketplace, and change is something that operates around the competition, the competitive landscape of that particular marketplace. So ongoing can be customers. So customers are constantly changing, the needs are changing, your products and services will have to adapt. Those things are ongoing. So within the marketplace, You want to be thinking about how is your customer changing the way in which they serve their customers? How are they shifting and moving their products? How are they responding to the competitive landscape? What does that look like? What are the changes happening there? What kinds of new things are developing? That's really helpful for you to consider as a business. The last area here is the strategy. What kind of strategies are actually being deployed in the marketplace by your customer and perhaps by others? And there are two areas that we can look at here. So the first is actually labor. What does that look like? So actually, labor plays a lot and has a big, big impact within the context of any particular marketplace. The cost of labor goes up if, for as a, as a strategy, the, your customer decides, actually, we want to go to a brand new marketplace, and therefore, actually, the cost of labor is now going to go up for us. That means something significant for you. So if you're a national-local player and you know that your customer is now focusing more on international things, cost of labor is going up, guess what? They're going to have to find some ways to either reduce costs somewhere else or allow them to— or you need to think about whether or not they, they're taking that investment hit long term with a view that they'll make money in the future from these different markets. Labor makes a big difference. How they're recruiting or not recruiting in their business makes a difference to how you think about their play, their strategy in the marketplace. The other area here is around technology and innovation. Technology and innovation. So within the strategy here, are they investing in specific ways to do things better? Are they looking at new innovations that are coming into their marketplace? What does that look like? You can actually be the person who's getting that information, not just first, but actually giving giving that information to your customer first if you're seeing as a strategy these things are being looked at directly. So you can see just how powerful this can be, is this really simple exercise. If you looked at your customers' industry marketplace and just said, hey, what are the ICSs for this particular industry? What things are immediate and costly? What things are ongoing and have competitive interest? What things might impact labor? Is anything happening in the labor market within that industry? And what things actually have around technology and innovation. If you can consider that and begin to work on it, you have a really powerful one-page document that allows you to have a very meaningful conversation with your customer even before you've seen video 2. So download the workbook, it will give you some guidelines on how to think about this specific area of market, and I'll see you in video number 2 where we talk about risk and how these things connect. Together.