I recently did a catch-up call with my old friend David Edelman of Boston Consulting Group. I went to college with him but didn’t know him then, but then we ended up working together when he was consulting and I was running global demand generation at SAP. When we last chatted at a great local Mexican restaurant (right before the pandemic closed it for good), he was CMO at Aetna, and I was deep in the world of intent data-driven B2B. Now he (and Boston Consulting Group colleague, Mark Abraham) have written a wonderful book – Personalized: Customer Strategy in the Age of AI. It seems like they’re onto something that’s resonating far and wide with marketers and other businesspeople (David’s LinkedIn has blown up to over a million followers). So last week, I decided to read it voraciously on my way to the B2BMX show in Scottsdale. I can tell you unequivocally that I agree.

Personalization is a supercharged catalyst for customer revenue growth

While the book certainly covers many B2C and B2B2C cases where the really, really big dollars in marketing are spent (and wasted), it explicitly speaks to the realities of B2B as well, devoting substantial space to the areas that we focus on here at Informa TechTarget. In their analysis, the authors cover the B2B Tech sector well, with detail that explains how companies that have focused hard on personalization are growing faster and delivering greater shareholder value than their peers.

Most important for my practitioner purposes, the book puts forward a very clear 5-point framework for personalization, drilling into each element in ways that I think will be very helpful to my Informa TechTarget colleagues in product, marketing and sales here as well as those in the industry at large.

Right at the beginning, the authors note that “customer priorities, not technology, should drive your personalization game plan” – so everything starts with potential buyers and the classic stages of a customer journey (from Awareness through Loyalty). It’s a helpful reminder and a simple rubric for teasing out important questions about where Personalization could impact performance in a range of go-to-market use cases.

To assess the impact of and guide the personalization efforts of any given business, they’ve created the BCG Personalization Index, which they dissect and discuss at length within the book.

Working from the customer’s perspective, they make the point that to win going forward, vendors should be aspiring to better empower, know, reach, show and delight the buyers they hope to attract and retain over time. This framework has me really jazzed because it so closely aligns with what we’re working on here at Informa TechTarget.

The 5 key steps for assessing personalization – How does Informa TechTarget measure up?

When we speak of Empowering the customer, yes we’re thinking of our clients for sure, but as publishers – audience builders – we’re thinking especially hard about the needs of our clients’ buyers. As the leading internet provider of B2B tech editorial, our 50 million permissioned readers – our clients’ buyers — count on us for the objective guidance they need to make better solution-oriented business decisions.

This part is key: In exchange for the information we provide free of charge, tech buyers give us explicit permission to track their topical content consumption behaviors and share the resulting intent data with our clients. Unique to our industry, this enables our in-house experts and our vendor partners to better Know the target audiences, what their day-to-day professional needs are, and of course, what they require to help them in making critical solution purchase decisions.

When you put this combination together: our deep behavioral and research insights and our incredible digital and physical network of touchpoints, we have an amazing ability to help customers and technology companies efficiently and effectively Reach and connect with each other.

And whether it’s via our 220 digital properties covering tech categories and vertical industries in multimedia, our more than 600 global events and festivals, or, ideally, both, we’re working tirelessly to help clients create the content and experiences necessary to Show their target buyers exactly what’s needed to make business happen. We believe that better than anyone else in the industry, we help buyers understand clients’ differentiated value and deliver Delightful experiences in the process.

Make the time to apply these principles to your own work

So far, I’ve spent a highly focused 6 hours or so, getting to know the ideas packed into this important book. Over the coming weeks, I’m going to keep coming back to it and using it to further energize our amazing teams here at Informa TechTarget. I very much believe that wherever you play in the go-to-market, you should consider picking up some copies for your team to dig into as well!