Someone once said to me, “There are only three value propositions that you can offer when selling to a business: [help it to] make money, save money, or save time.” It made some sense, because businesses are artificial constructs that, as diverse as they are in terms of industry, size, and culture, ultimately aim to generate profits. That is the raison d’etre of a business underneath their self-proclaimed lofty-high visions and missions. Businesses are as economically rational as real-life entities can be.

Just as we can tell what businesses want by examining their underlying purpose and goal, we can tell what consumers want by examining their underlying purpose and goal. The only problem is that consumers (and indeed people) vary widely in their objectives in life, so any attempt at distilling trends is probably useful only as interesting reading material at best, not a strategic guide. The right question to ask when faced with such information is not “Is this information useful?” but “Is this information applicable to my specific industry and set of customers?”

There is no short cut when it comes to knowing what consumers want – what they want varies so widely and changes so frequently that finding out what consumers want will necessarily be a laborious, continuous, non-scalable process. Fortunately, there exists a universal (and arguably indispensable) method to unfailingly find out that information: cultivating relationships. Consumers are people after all. The more time and effort we spend with them, the more we learn about their wants and needs, even (and some say especially) if we do not ask them directly. No one likes to be dissected with blunt little tools, such as interrogative questions.

Some may say that cultivating relationships with customers goes without saying and that they have been doing it more than enough. Others may say that it works only for B2C businesses or small businesses or specific industries or geographical markets. I say, no. All of business requires trust, and trust can only come from effective relationships. Even large, multi-national businesses are made up of people.

In fact, we have been selling to small businesses for some time now, and the important thing that we have learnt after interacting with literally hundreds of customers is that there is no room for complacency when it comes to understanding the customer. You cannot understand your customers enough; there is always more to learn, and every ounce of knowledge makes a measurable difference to your business, as if there is no saturation point.

Understanding the customer is something even highly-profitable companies should never overlook or belittle. For the rest of us, perhaps it is wise to double or triple our investment into understanding our customers (if our existing methods are working) or change our existing methods if they are not.