I want to know the people that I am working with by better determining who I am trying to reach
In this 5 part blog series we are going to walk through a process that helps you nail who your customer is or should be. This is important because many of us don’t see the customer when we start our entrepreneurial journey. We may have a clear vision of the value that we are providing or the problem that we are solving. Often these are in glorious Technicolor. Customers are grey and sketched at the side of the screen.
We will walk you through 9 simple steps over a series of blogs. Each post will ask a couple of questions about who you are targeting. The result is that you will have a picture of your customer that would make Leonardo da Vinci smile.
Why is this important?
If you can visualise your customer then it is a LOT easier to find ways to sell to him. Compare a ‘businessman’ or ‘a younger Steve Jobs’. When you think about ‘a business man’ you can think of many ways to design a product that will be attractive to him. When you think of a young Steve Jobs it is f***ing obvious what will fly and what won’t.
You also start to understand the customer far deeper. Instead of doing something TO him you start doing something FOR him. You connect with his wants and desires. You move from selling snake oil to creating value.
Let’s get going.
What do you call your customer?
I worked with a tech company who called their customers audiences. Audience 3 was HR Managers. Audience 29 was Leadership Development Consultants.
For some reason, no one at the company had any emotional connection with the customers. The marketing was poor and sales and customer feedback were even worse.
We made a simple change. Audience 3 became Helen. Audience 29 became Ian. We chose the names based on people we knew who fit the target profile. Giving the customer a name, not a number, dignified them. We respected them more. It was the start of the turnaround in the marketing and the sales for that startup.
How you name your customers is up to you. It should be clear. Having clear names makes it easy to communicate with the team about how to treat customers.
Here is an example. In a restaurant I once worked with a person dining alone was called ‘Alice’. The family with small children ‘Peters’ and the older couple was the ‘Jones’. These labels brought clarity to the staff. Each label signified a set of rules and behaviours that was optimal.
Other ways of doing it are to use alliterative names
- Chuck the CEO
- Bob the Builder
- Charles & Camilla the Couple
Here you provide a name and rhyme it with their job title or function
In the next post, we will cover
- Customers Needs
- Simple Visualisation
