How to define your ideal customer
What is a Customer Avatar?
I want to talk a little bit about the customer and why it’s important for you to know how to define your ideal customer
For example, if you read a lot of literature out there, they’ll talk about the demographics of a customer. Their hair colour, whether they’re Gen Z or not. While those things are important, I don’t think that they really are that important.
When you are getting going in your sales journey, things that I think are way more important when thinking about your customer is, what’s the problem that you are solving with your product or service. What problem is that addressing for these kinds of people?
What problem are you solving, for what kind of people
If your product is related to child health care, most likely your customer is going to be new moms or moms of their child’s age group because a mum that has a newborn baby has different concerns and worries and expectations to a teenage mom or dad.
So those are two very different customers, even though they are both moms or parents, their focus is extremely different. For example, an infant mom or parent of an infant would most likely be thinking about nappy rash, whereas a parent of a teenager may be thinking about hormones and what emotions a teenager is going through.
That’s how we think about how to define your ideal customer. Defining them very differently, even though they have very similar characteristics.
If you want to know more about the Sales system and what the difference is between Sales and an Offer, then check out the Post about that here
Does hair colour and schooling matter?
Now, things like what school you went to are really not important when thinking about how to define your ideal customer as a new sales adventure. Personal attributes really don’t talk to any of the problems or concerns a person may have. In Sales, what you want to think about above everything else, is the problem that you solve, and who you solve it for.
The four pillars of a great Sales System
What you do want to consider though. The four building blocks of defining your customer is
Who is your customer?
The WHO of how to define your ideal customer is related to the problem that you are solving. If you are dealing in an IT environment, it’s going to be the IT business person and what solutions you provide to the challenges they have,
People are only doing two things. They are moving away from pain or moving towards pleasure.
Define the problem that you solve.
So you really want to try and understand. The problem in relation to the person that you’re solving it for and who that person is. Is it the finance manager? Is it the IT executive? Is it the moms? Is it a dad? Who is that person and what is the role in the solution you provided?
Where is your customer?
The second thing that you want to think about is the. WHERE.
Geographically, where are your customers, where are they and where do they hang out? Where do they go, because, when you are going to try to create a conversation with your customer you want to know where they are.
If you are dealing with people interested in fitness, going to a shopping mall is probably not the best thing, but going to shopping malls that have gyms in them is probably a better idea because that’s going to be where your customers are likely going to be hanging out. Also, where kind of relates to online, but less so. That’s more of a who because online is a mix of people.
If you are creating any sort of advertisement or content and content is another thing, but when you are having these conversations or you’re trying to define who your customer is, understanding just geographically where they are is really important.
It might create thoughts about the kind of language that you want to address. It might create things about local colloquialisms that you can introduce in your conversations. It will just help you understand that person a little bit better when you think about where they are.
How to interact and communicate with your customer
Then when we get into how.
The “how” is really going to be, how are you going to interact with them?
Is the best method of communication with this potential customer going to be online? Is it going to be e-mail? Is it going to be snail mail? Is it going to be social media now? Most likely it will be a combination of those things, but you want to think about how your communication is and where is the strong point of your communication.
Once you have enough data, you can sort of build up more decision-making around that and refine it.
What if things change?
Remember, your sales system is not a forever plan. It’s a plan for right now of how you are addressing an issue. So you want to move forward with your sales plan and your sales system thinking about the WHO, WHERE, and HOW in a lot more detail that will actually just help you when you are packaging or planning your sales efforts.
Whether your sales strategy is inbound or outbound and when you’re thinking about the offer you’re trying to make, knowing who your customer is, knowing where your customer is and knowing how you want to communicate with the customer is really going to be the advantage that’s going to make the difference in your sales efforts.
What to say to your customer
Now the last component of thinking about your customer is going to be what?
What is actually not your product. Lots of people think that when I say what, that it’s about their product and say, “didn’t you deal with that in sales?”. What has got nothing to do with your product. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling baby nappies or gym fitness things or a health drink or even baked beans.
The “What” is going to be all about “What” are the messages that you want to have with potential customers and at each touch point, what are you going to say and what do you think they are going to say back?
Think of it as going through the conversation in your head and just going like, “So this is probably how it’s going to go now?”
If you just getting started in your sales journey, you’re probably feeling overwhelmed and will probably define a very short journey, but you want to try your best to kind of pick out more detail about what those kinds of conversations are.
If you are finding yourself having a bit of trouble with defining that side of your conversation. Please reach out to me at richard@richardtalks.co and tell me what it is that you are struggling with and I will get back to you with my point of view and maybe we can get on a call.
As you get more mature with defining your customer journey, your “what” should encompass between 7 and 14 expected interactions with your customer. The reason for that is that if you think about any sort of natural relationship that you have in the real world building up trust and building up rapport, in the real world, you probably never trusted someone at the first meeting.
We always sussing out if this person is trustworthy or not. You know, we do this on autopilot mode. Our brains, the gecko brain, the ancient brain that takes over and is trying to assess danger and threats. That’s all it does, and that’s what happens. So the more you’re interacting with someone, the more you can guide that conversation into finally making your offer.
In your entire customer conversation, you’re trying to establish whether or not that person has the need that you are solving.
So that’s what I want to share with you today around this customer conversation and defining who your customer is. While it may seem like quite a daunting task at first, the more you work through it version 1, version 2, and version 3. Remember, none of these are forever plans. They are meant to evolve, but it is important that you start so it creates a great sales system.
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