Hi, and welcome to another clear-thinking session with Nicola.
This week's question came from a team member who was delegated the job of defining customer profiles: "Why do we need them?" It's a valid question, but I've never known a company be able to scale successfully without a deep understanding of their customer.
The primary reason you need this detailed documentation is that it creates sales governance. Without it, your team will waste time, energy and money chasing down stuff that isn't moving the business forward.
Why Customer Profiles are Non-Negotiable
- Sales Governance: You cannot create qualification scorecards or know what opportunities to take forward and what leads and opportunities to leave behind without clear criteria.
- Product Market Fit: How do you know what products and services to develop unless you know who you are targeting them with? You need to understand their motivations.
- Targeted Marketing: A deep understanding of your customer dictates your content strategy, messaging, and placement. This allows you to cut through the noise and talk directly to them.
- Resource Focus: You must focus your most expensive resource on your most profitable opportunities. Customer profiles allow you to identify high-value opportunities and accelerate them through a personalised customer journey.
The Three Layers of Customer Understanding
I use three core layers to break down customer profiles:
- Avatar: The business customer (the company). You should aim for a maximum of five types of business avatars.
- Personas: The people you sell to within those avatars, who hold varying levels of influence.
- End User: The person benefiting from the end product (e.g., a consumer, operator, or shopper).
Pains, Wounds, and Triggers
For every avatar and persona, you must define the following:
- Pain: The problem you are helping them solve (the before state vs. the after state).
- Wounds: Pain amplified. If they don't solve the problem now, how does it amplify into a deeper issue later (e.g., losing staff, reducing productivity, losing market traction)?.
- Triggers: The catalyst of change that makes solving the problem a priority. This is the moment just before they enter your sales cycle.
Ready to define your perfect customer and stop wasting energy?
Watch the full strategy video now!