Do you know your customer AT ALL?
A brief history of my selling career to date:
Professional Selling since 2008
B2C Financial Services
B2B Solutions
B2B SAAS
B2B Enterprise
B2C Coaching
B2B Consulting
I’ve sold over the phone
I’ve sold through social
I’ve sold virtually
I’ve sold in person
I’ve sold in 10 countries
Across all these industries, verticals and mediums, one thing will forever ring true.
Getting the absolute customer fundamentals right is critical for sustained success in selling.
As a founder you might get so caught up in your product or solution that you lose sight of what you set out to do and for whom in the first place; Your Buyer Persona and Ideal Customer Profile
As a salesperson you might be getting so into the weeds of your daily deals that you forget the fundamentals of who you’re actually serving and why; Your Buyer Persona and Ideal Customer Profile!!
And that's why this tool will help hit the reset and get you back on track.
I’m putting this out there because, well it's something I definitely needed and still use today… just in a nicer format. It helps take you deeper than just a Buyer Persona and add meat on to the problem your solving.
The Customer Foundation
This will help you set the foundation for anything strategic and for everything tactical. It revolves around your customer, what they care about, the problems they face, and how you fit in to their world. This framework is a test to see how well you know the people and the problems they face.
You fail if you can’t make it concise!
Example of a terrible conversation:
Me: “Who’s your customer?”
Founder: “Everyone can use this”
Me: 👀
Founder: 👀
Me: …
Look, as a new startup, or new product launch you might be worried about going after the wrong market, focusing too early, segmenting down too much, finding the wrong niche.
But,
Not doing this is the exact thing that’s going to kill you and your team.
By going broad too early, you’ll end up with a “Homer car” of a strategy (and if you don’t know the reference… we cant be friends).
Just because you create focus for NOW , doesn’t mean you can’t change your mind later down the track if you realise the market is too small, or that you made a mistake. This is why collecting data is important so you can iterate and evolve what you offer based on what you find out from the market. So, record your calls, use tech like otter.ai and CRMs like HubSpot to collect data. Make notes during and after your sales calls, brief and debrief with your team to understand what happened better.
The key is to at least put your metaphorical stick in the ground and decide on a direction you want to go. Pick the problem you want to focus on solving, and a narrative thats important to your buyer, and go all in.
The below is a framework that I’ve used up until now that helps structure my focus and create strong narratives that resonate with my buyers.
NOTE: The framework is ‘A WAY’, not necessarily THE ONLY WAY. But, maybe it’ll help you start to figure your sh*t out.
It’s designed to help you solve those early days of confusion about where you want to take your solution.
The Customer Foundation Framework
OK look, the name kinda sucks, I’ll be honest I came up with it spare of the moment as I just wanted to get it out to the world to use.
This single document can lay the foundation for everything you want to build. It puts your customers and their problem front and centre of you strategy.
The challenge is in the simplicity of what it aims to achieve… Can you succinctly answer the below questions?
You may feel tempted to rush through this but, if you do and don’t take the time to truly understand (and validate) the answers then you’ll be setting yourself up for failure and confusion.
These questions aim to help you create the right narrative, create the right problem statement, and really solve the right problem for the right person at the right time.
The answer to these questions will shape your:
✍️ Website and Copy
✍️ Your content strategy
✍️ Marketing strategy
✍️ GTM
✍️ Sales approach
✍️ Hiring strategy
✍️ Pricing strategy
So this is the Customer Foundation:
It’s a common thing for the basics to get overlooked, especially when they are stripped back to ther simplest form. This one pager can have dramatic effect on leading your team.
In the early days of your company, review this at least every month to see if what you knew when you started is still true today, or if things need to be updated. Take note of what works and what doesn’t. Record your buyers’ preferences and how best to engage them. Record what’s most important to them and their priorities for fires that are burning. How does this map to you product/ solution roadmap.
This is your cheat sheet for the basics.
Drop me a message if you’d like to run a live session to put this together. You should couple it with doing a root cause analysis to make sure your level of thinking is correct.
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