The more you know about them and their needs the easier it is going to be to recognize the opportunities to sell them your products or services and to target them exclusively with your offers. Also, understanding your customers makes profiling them beneficial because they in turn will drive in new customers. Understanding your customers allows you the advantage of improving efficiency and improving customer service as you are better able to provide personalized treatment, tailor product offerings, deal with customers in a much timelier manner, and allows for better planning.

In order to succeed in today's very competitive environment, a business owner has to have the ability to predict how much their customers will buy and then how much stock and inventory they will need, these are the benefits of understanding your customer. Your customers are your most valuable source of information so it only stands to reason that because of this it is essential that you understand them. This understanding goes much farther than a standard customer profile of age, gender, income, and so on. You want to pry into their likes and dislikes and why they have chosen you to do business with instead of the guy down the road.

Imagine for a moment if you can, trying to sell your product or service to someone that you know nothing about. It is likely that you would not be very successful at all. The better that you know the customer, the better are your chances of success. When you understand your customers and their purchasing processes, then and only then, can you begin to align your strategy, hence making the best use of your marketing resources. Not knowing your customers means that you don't even have a true idea of who your target market is.

The results would be disastrous to say the least. If you own an appliance store, for example, a couple walks in and asks to look at a new washing machine. Of course once you clench the sale you will try to get them to buy a dryer too. You may or may not succeed in that are BUT what you should have gotten from that transaction is the status of their other appliances such as the fridge, dishwasher, and stove too. Maybe they said they would need a new stove soon but couldn't afford one now or perhaps they said that they were thinking about buying a couple new appliances at tax time. Whatever they said gave you a better idea of understanding them. It also positioned you in an area where you can use some of your marketing tools in the near future to continue on with building the customer relationship and understand your customer better. Understanding your customer needs will help you understand how you can help them.