In a short time, the holidays will end and we’ll all be back at work looking to crank up revenues to make 2010 a great year. If you’re like most other businesses that sell to businesses, you’ll be looking for more sales-ready leads.

So what can you do to ensure the new year gets off to a great start?

My recommendation is that you talk to customers and prospective customers and learn absolutely everything you can about them:

• What are their pains?
• How do they make decisions?
• Who’s involved in decisions?
• Where do they turn for information?
• Whom do they trust?
• What language and terminology do they use?

Kadient, a software firm in the Boston area, took this to new heights, using cardboard cutouts and developing complete personalities of target customers. Let’s call this “customer intimacy.”

Why talk and collect this information? Jon Miller, VP, Marketing and Co-Founder at Marketo says that one of the principles of lead nurturing is that it must be valuable to them, and not just you. But how can you know if your content is really valuable?  You simply cannot know unless you have a deep understanding of prospective buyers — true customer intimacy.

If you think about it, customer intimacy will help you in all aspects of the business.  As you create content to engage buyers, you can make it very compelling with customer intimacy:

• Website content
• Blog posts
• Lead nurturing
• Sales conversations

Avitage, a partner of Find New Customers, recently hosted a webinar with Steve Rankel from Product180, who advocated companies go talk to customers.  He also said that in all his years of working with CEOs, precisely ZERO companies correctly predicted what customers would say.  So first thing in the new year, go survey your customers and target accounts.

For a good company to help you with this research, please visit Communication Strategy Group.

Happy Holidays from the Fearless Competitor