Getting to Know your Customers
If you don't know your customers your success in selling to them can only be luck at best. If you do know your customers then you can build products and sales processes that suit them perfectly. A sale is then a given as you will never be offering a product or process that is not perfect for your customer (in theory).
Whenever your business builds a new product, service or sales process the customer must be foremost in your mind. How does this thing make their life better? How will they know about it and it's advantages? How do they get one? It can be easy to lose sight of the customer as you are trying to solve all your problems and logistics but there is a technique that really helps you to focus. I call this having a Dummy Customer. Some call it a Persona but that sounds too complex to me so Dummy Customer because that's what it is.
A Dummy Customer is an amalgam of all the traits that your typical customers have. Demographics are interesting but they focus on information like age and income levels in a location. Interesting but you want to get to the living, feeling person who has needs they are prepared to trade cash to solve. A Dummy Customer should have these traits.
You will generally only want to have one or two Dummy Customers for each product. Having too many suggests that somehow you have not got focus. Let's build us a Dummy.
Building a Dummy Customer
For this exercise I am going to use someone I know fairly well - me. I don't have a product in mind but as you read through you should start to get some ideas of what I will want to buy. Maybe you will even figure that you have the perfect solution for my life - if so test yourself by sending me an email. If you do this just be sure to mark it appropriately or I will consider you Spam.
I have provided a pro-forma of the layout below as an Open Office .ODT or Windows .DOC file for your to download and work from.
 Open Office Writer .OTT |
Windows Word .DOC |
| Business | Your Business name - over time you may end up with a few of these for different businesses so best to tag em all | ||
| Product/Service | Product Name - each Product will appeal to only a certain range of people so again identify which Dummy Customer relates to which product or range of products | ||
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Insert a Photo here
cut from a magazine or borrow from the internet a picture of someone who represents this person. Try not to use a celebrity, just an ordinary person |
Name | Benedict - pick a name appropriate to the type of person | |
| Age | 39 - a range is ok but keep it narrow. 8 to 80 is a no no | ||
| Job | Web Sales Consultant, Software Developer, Musician - put a range of jobs that this person performs but be sure to keep in mind this is a 'real person' so Astronaut may be unrealistic | ||
| Hobbies |
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| Dreams |
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| Things We Know |
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| Buying Behaviours |
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What to do with your Dummy Customer
Once complete, this is the person you will build all products, services and sales for. Print this page out and ensure that it is referenced at all times when making any decisions that will affect this customer. If you outsource some marketing or development work then be sure to hand this page over as part of the brief so the outsourcer understands your target as well as you do.
If you want me to work with your business then please visit BRM Web Consulting
