Understanding what a customer needs compared to what a customer wants can be two very different things. In the competitive landscape of B2B professional services, understanding client needs can be the difference that puts your firm ahead.
Any of your competitors can offer a service. Truly understanding customer needs requires going beyond delivering a service and instead delivering the right solution.
Firms that know how to identify what their customers truly need and provide tailored solutions to those needs will be consistently more successful. This article explores how to identify customer needs and implement best practices for understanding customer needs in B2B professional services.
Why understanding customer needs is important
Beaton Benchmarks research finds up to 40 per cent of clients say firms that pitch for their work do not understand their business. This raises a critical threat for those firms: clients will feel misunderstood and take their business elsewhere. They are willing to “shop around” if their needs aren’t met or if they feel they are receiving cookie-cutter solutions to their unique problems. It’s why regular customer needs analysis is so important for firms that want to stay competitive.
Beaton’s Marketing, BD and CRM Effectiveness Report surveyed more than 700 clients of professional services firms across Australia and New Zealand, finding the most valuable client relationship management (CRM) activities involve and necessitate understanding of customer needs. A firm’s ability to proactively resolve issues for their client was the most valuable CRM activity, with 94 per cent of respondents saying this has a strong or significant influence on the relationship. It inherently requires an understanding of those client problems and needs in the first place. Similarly, firms working with clients to understand their customers’ needs (and thus being in a better position to advise the client on those customers’ needs) came in close second, with 91 per cent saying it had a strong or significant influence.
When you understand the unique circumstances and goals of your B2B customers you can:
- Proactively resolve issues
- Deliver tailored, relevant services that customers and clients are more likely to return for
- Build trust and deepen relationships
- Discover opportunities for new work, growth and innovation
- Encounter less friction while achieving the above
Understanding the unique needs of B2B buyers
Business-to-business (B2B) customers are unique and far more diverse than individual customers in business-to-consumer (B2C) markets. Even within the same industry, such as law, clients have totally different market positioning and goals, with distinct projects at play. They tend to require more complex, tailored sales efforts. Understanding customer needs in this context is intricate. You can’t just “rinse and repeat” like some B2C products may be able to. There’s also a greater focus on long-term return on investment (ROI) and value as B2B clients seek to find the best advice and solutions for their organisations.
Common characteristics that differentiate B2B buyers from individual consumers include:
Long and more complex buying cycles: B2B customers of professional services firms are purchasing complicated (and expensive!) service-based work. They usually go through several stages of decision-making, and quite a few decision-makers, before deciding whether to use your services.
Sales are relationships, not transactions: Related to the above point, the nature of advisory work is never as simple as a one-off transaction like ordering a new toaster from Amazon. B2B customer sales involve lengthy processes of working together to identify needs and collaborating on solutions that align with their goals, often on an ongoing basis.
Trust and reputation are paramount: Given these lengthy, ongoing sales relationships, it is critical for the client to trust your firm’s expertise and professionalism. Businesses look for partners they can rely on long-term to help make critical decisions for their business. Beaton research shows trust is becoming even more important as use of artificial intelligence (AI), the media, politics and misinformation are contributing to an environment of mistrust.
Influenced by multiple stakeholders: Unlike B2C purchases, B2B ones often involve several decision-makers, often in different departments with unique pressures. Identifying and clarifying customer needs and expectations must account for these varied perspectives.
What are customer needs?
Customer needs in B2B professional services often go beyond the deliverables being requested.
Beaton’s Marketing, BD and CRM Effectiveness report finds that building a strong personal relationship with clients is the third-most valuable client relationship management (CRM) activity after proactively resolving issues and working to understand their customers’ needs. The fourth was acting on feedback. The common thread between these CRM activities is they go hand-in-hand with understanding customer needs.
Research by Harvard Business Review aligns with these findings, noting that B2B customers – more than B2C customers – prefer interactions that not only answer their business needs but also fuel human psychological needs. Such psychological needs include being offered sophisticated choices, making human connections and receiving service that will teach them to solve problems and grow independently, even if doing so costs more time and money. This reiterates the importance of emotional needs and meeting those through good communication and relationship building from the start.
The three basic client needs that professional services firms provide for are:
- Functional – what the client wants to achieve or solve.
- Emotional – how the client wants to feel, such as valued, understood, communicated with, supported.
- Strategic – long-term goals tied to their business vision.
A firm that excels in understanding customer needs will answer all three.
Business-to-business (B2B) customers are unique and far more diverse than individual customers in business-to-consumer (B2C) markets ... They tend to require more complex, tailored sales efforts. You can’t just “rinse and repeat” like some B2C products may be able to.
Challenges in understanding client needs
Understanding client needs is critical to delivering exceptional service and a great client experience, but it comes with several challenges. The most common mistakes professional services firms can make include:
Assuming one size fits all
Clients vary widely in their goals, expectations, and preferences. You might be delivering services that are technically correct but if you fail to tailor your offering, you risk missing the mark. A strong customer needs analysis process, using crucial tools we delve into below, helps avoid this by ensuring each client’s unique situation is considered.
Expectation gaps
When there is a mismatch between what a client expects and what a firm delivers, customer satisfaction can erode quickly. This is particularly crucial for influencing the value your customers and clients perceive they are receiving. Beaton research has found that clients of firms that demonstrate cost consciousness – by offering clear and regular communication to clients about how they are spending the clients’ money as well as options to reduce costs where possible – feel they are receiving greater value. This highlights the need to clearly define, communicate, and revisit expectations as part of an ongoing determining customer needs process.
Failing to adapt to changing needs
Client priorities can evolve rapidly due to market shifts, internal business changes, or external pressures. This is where CRM tools that prioritise ongoing customer needs assessment are critical. Monitoring for changes and examining client preferences in the market can help you remain proactive about changes.
Customer needs assessment: How to identify client needs and expectations
1. Regular feedback surveys
One of the most efficient methods of customer needs assessment for professional services firms is through regularly surveying your customers. This enables you to capture broad client sentiment on service quality, pain points, and expectations as they arise in real-time. Client feedback software like Debrief can make sending regular surveys easier, with the backend support of a professional research team combined with the ease of self-service dashboard to understand insights.
A regular feedback survey system can help you to map the journeys of your clients by surveying them at the beginning, middle, or end of a project. It can also help you segment the results to identify different needs of customers. Asking for regular feedback – and then addressing it with action – forms the backbone of any customer needs analysis.
2. Relationship building, face-to-face communication
As Beaton’s Marketing, BD and CRM Effectiveness Report discusses, clients are looking for more in-person business development and relationship building than they currently receive from firms. While the use of remote or virtual meetings have a place, the stilted and transactional nature of online conversations might mean you miss an opportunity to discover customer needs. Pain points or changes in client needs can be easier to tease out through a free-flowing conversation with your client in person.
Such in-person interactions will help you to identify and clarify customer needs and expectations more than digital tools. Remember that this is a skill that does not always come naturally – especially in the age of remote working. You may need to consider education or BD training for your client-facing teams to upskill in what we call “valuable conversations”.
At the same time, you should be strategically addressing your firmwide CX strategy. Conducting this type of customer needs assessment demonstrates commitment and care, which can differentiate your firm in a market that values trust and authenticity more than ever.
Understanding customer needs allows professional services firms to build trust and long-term, profitable client relationships.
3. Competitor benchmarking and industry data
Benchmarking helps firms discover client needs by taking a step back and providing a broader view of how their services compare to industry standards and competitors. By systematically measuring key performance indicators (KPIs) against top-performing firms, businesses can identify gaps in their offering that may not be immediately obvious. These gaps often point directly to unmet or evolving client expectations.
Importantly, benchmarking can reveal trends in what clients value most across the market, such as faster response times, more proactive advice, or better digital experiences. This also allows firms to look outside their own four walls, learn from best practices in the market and adapt strategies to stay competitive. Read Beaton’s guide to business benchmarking here.
4. NPS tracking and data analysis
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is one of the most valuable key metrics for firms to quantify client satisfaction and loyalty over time. NPS, which measures how likely clients are to recommend your services, serves as a simple yet powerful indicator of whether you are identifying and satisfying customer needs. When analysed alongside other data points such as client retention rates, service usage, and feedback trends, firms can identify patterns, pinpoint areas of excellence, and uncover emerging issues before they escalate. Read our comprehensive guide to NPS tracking here.
Conclusion
In today’s competitive B2B professional services landscape, the most successful firms are those that consistently and accurately identify client needs to deliver tailored, value-driven solutions.
Tools such as customer feedback surveys, NPS tracking and competitor benchmarking enable firms to conduct regular customer needs analysis and act in real time on the insights. Combining these tools with a strategic approach to in-person interactions and customer needs assessment helps strengthen relationships while avoiding pitfalls like assuming your clients have uniform needs, or that they won’t change over time.
Ultimately, the ability to clearly identify and address customer needs in all their forms is what sets top-performing firms apart. They transform service delivery from a transactional interaction into a trusted, strategic partnership that is more valuable to both the client and firm over time.
Achieving high NPS just became a whole lot easier
Use our platform, Beaton Debrief, to collect client feedback and act on it in real-time with our interactive dashboard. Sign up for a free trial today.
