Martin Wallace - Do you know who your customers are?: I can show you

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Do you know who your customers are?

I can show you.

Martin Wallace

From the writer of 8 Simple Steps to Business Development

Introduction

Do you know who your customers are? Of course you do, if you are already set up in business you undoubtedly have a group of customer who visit you or that you do work for, you don't need any help getting to know them, as I'm also sure that if you are in the process of setting up your business you have an idea of what sort of people that you are trying to attract. But then again what about the customers you haven't met yet, how much do you know about them? Do you know where to find them? Do you know what they look like?

That's what this book is aiming to do, to help you identify who these customers are, to help save you time and money, to ensure that you are focussing your sales and marketing in the right area, allowing you the best possible chance to convert leads into customers.

It's no secret that marketing can be a bottomless pit into which money is thrown and unfortunately can very rarely reap results. In my younger days I worked as a driving instructor, with ambitions of owning a large driving school with lots of instructors working for me, one problem kept coming back, I could get enough work to keep me busy, but not to support another instructor certainly not a fleet of them, so I did what everybody else did, I took out an advert in the yellow pages, I combined that with the yell online site and telephone marketing site, all in all costing me around 5000 for one year. From that I received in total one enquiry, from a man looking for a cheap quote, I didn't get the job. My history and I'm sure many other peoples are filled with this kind of wasted spending, why? Because we didn't know how to target our customers, we didn't think about who they were.

So how will this book help you?

By helping you to put together an avatar of your customer, (no I am not talking about a large blue creature from a James Cameron movie), you may have heard the term before and possibly know what one is, but for the purposes of this book I will explain what I mean. An avatar is a representation of a person or group who your business is specifically targeted towards. It may seem like all we are doing is putting labels down of traits of customers, but I would say that during the course of this book using experience and examples I will show you how to go deeper into each heading to allow you to put together the most accurate picture of your potential customer possible.

To be clear, I did not develop the concept of the Avatar, I learned about it from a digital marketing specialist. When the concept was shown to me I was very much put forward as a digital marketing tool, however I disagree with such a limited view, the avatar works for all typed of sales and marketing, some people already use the concept, most without realising that they are, some using it fully but likely even more only partially applying it, leaving a wide scope for improvement in results.

A few years ago before I started using avatars, I had read James Caan's book, 'The Real Deal' (I have to say, actually quite a good book), while I was reading it he mentioned about the manner in which he got his recruitment business up and running, by profiling a sales companies ideal new recruit, once he had it right he pitched that 'fictional' person, as if he were a real candidate, to a sales company, they agreed to having a meeting with this prospect, so James then set upon the task of actually finding someone who met the profile. I was impressed by the manner in which he created a fictional person and was able to get them an interview. Although I wasn't aware of it at the time James Caan basically created an Avatar, he did the sales companies job for them in identifying who they needed, then he was able to target his search specifically, making that fictional character turned real person his first commission. I wonder how often he used that approach.

This is the power of the avatar, if you pull all the elements together correctly, it will allow you to find your customers, target them and sell to them, the sale itself should be easier because you will already know that the person that you are pitching too is ideally suited to your business and will have use for your products or services.

The Avatar will work by putting together ten subject titles and hammering down into the detail of those titles to build up the picture of your potential customer, weeding out the nonsense, the time wasting, attributes less likely to achieve a sale and most of all allowing you to concentrate the cost of marketing to areas that will actually show a return.

So let's get started with putting together your avatar, then you can start finding your customers.

Chapter 1

Location

Location might seem like a no brainer, such an easy concept, you might think I live in London so I want customers in London, I live in Milton Keynes so I want to target customers in Milton Keynes, easy!

Maybe not, at the time of writing this book, there are over 8.6 million people living in London, now if you happen to own a small barber shop on the Edgware Road, then a potential 8.6 Million customers might be a bit much, although we have a further nine subjects to help us reduce this number, we need to look at it a bit harder first. So a start would be to concentrate on just one small local area.

However your business might not be as local as a barber shop, I used to work for a Nationwide transport company, so my target customer base was at the time around 61 million people. Far too big a group to market to, also although we delivered nationwide we only actually had four hubs around the country, meaning that there were areas that we couldn't collect from very regularly as it depended greatly on were our deliveries were. Meaning we would break down our target area to around a thirty mile perimeter of each of our hubs, making it more likely that we could service those new customers well without outrageous cost to ourselves.

Working now as a freelance business consultant I have the ability to work anywhere in the world, giving me a target market initially of around 7 billion people, which seems like a high starting point. Looking at some limitations, booking appointments in 24 different time zones seems like hard work, along with the fact that although my skills are in business theory, sales and marketing which are all transferable, I don't speak the 6500 different languages of the world, which although the task could be overcome with translators, it seems like a market that is far too wide and varied, so I target my business primarily within the UK, however I am open to a wide variety of English speaking countries. However if I was an accountant, then it would probably find myself limited to the country I live in, as although the job itself can be done remotely, the skills need to be transferable and from what I know, the tax laws vary from country to country.