Knowing your messaging target in the B2B world is critical to the success of that message and critical to the customer experience. ANY type of messaging requires a carefully aimed target: marketing, order/product notifications, status updates, surveys, and so on. At the root of that process is your B2B contact management.

To start off with great contact management, you have to make sure the system in which you manage your contacts is set up to allow you to choose your groupings and add various criteria. In other words, using a billing software as a CRM might not get the job done.

Next, a great way to choose your groupings is based on personas. If you’ve never gone through a customer persona exercise, I highly recommend it. You can do so by assigning “personalities” to your different customer segments. It really helps you to get into the mindset of what that customer thinks and needs. Along with each persona, you can understand their level of influence and power with-in the business and how they are involved in purchasing and consuming your products/services.

Once individuals with-in each business have been assigned a persona, you can build your various campaigns around that knowledge of each target. Who will receive what type of messaging? Mapping out all types of current and desired messaging in one location can help you understand who should receive what and when they should receive it.

And lastly, make sure you can utilize this valuable targeting information from any other platforms that are distributing information to customers. For example, if you are sending satisfaction surveys, are you able to base the recipient on your detailed customer data from your CRM tool or are you pulling that contact information from a separate platform? Having a centralized location to pull intelligent contact information can be what makes the difference between an average campaign and an excellent one.