Ultimate avatar
By PROVOK & REVOKE
In the previous chapter, we chose a good market for your business and a specific niche.
This chapter also reflects a critical strategic and commercial decision. Choosing the perfect target is a follow-up to your previous decision.
At this stage, we become more nuanced about who we serve and, more importantly, who we do not.
Our goal is to define our target precisely so that we can help them solve all their specific problems.
In other words, we will help a single avatar solve a particular problem in a singular way that eliminates their most significant objections right from the start.
The method.
Let’s get down to the first step of the workshop: gathering relevant information.
To draw up the ultimate profile, we’ll create a form with the questions below and send it to your current customers.
1. Form and customer survey.
The most crucial point is ensuring they fill out the entire form to get as much helpful information as possible. We’ll ask questions about all the relevant details you want to discover and exploit later.
Protip: You can review it with them live on a call for a stronger engagement.
Here are the data we’ll be collecting:
- Demographics:
- Who are they:
- Job title
- Role in the company
- Years of involvement
- Age
- Sex:
- Male
- Female
- Political affiliation
- Geographic location
- Digital location
- TikTok
- Discord
- Messenger
- Telegram
- Snapchat
- Slack
- Marital situation?
- Single - Couple - Married - Separated - Divorced - Widowed
- Business partnership status:
- Partnered in business - Solopreneur
- Who are they:
- Business stats before & current:
- # of employees
- Churn
- Pricing
- Products
- Customer lifetime value (LTV)
- # of customers
- Niche
- How long in business
- Total sales
- Cost of Goods Sold (COGS)
- Gross profit ⇒ Gross margins
- Aspirations:
- What was their goal upon purchasing your services/products?
- What problem were they trying to solve?
- Buying process:
- What's the single biggest reason they bought?
- Was there a trigger event that caused them to buy?
- Did they consume any specific piece of content?
- Was there a specific testimonial they consumed?
- How many pieces did they consume?
- When did they first hear about you vs when they bought?
- Where did they first see us?
- Did someone refer them?
If you don't have customers yet:
The best way to get started is to choose a target you know well from your professional experiences.
Risk-averse VCs invest in start-ups that know what they’re getting into. They choose companies based on their founders and the target these founders have chosen: the one they know best.
Serving the people you can help best is the key to your company’s success. When your bowl gets too small, you can swim in deeper waters.
Without a customer survey, let’s draw up your avatar based on your field experience.
Of course, you’ll need to carry out this survey as soon as you have a large customer base.
2. Identify who spends the most.
Rank the answers according to the customers you like best, who spent the most, and who stayed the longest.
Focus on the top 20%. Ignore the others.
3. Let's find their similarities.
We're going to list their 3-5 biggest shared qualifiers.
To do this, make a simple one-column table, a bullet point list, or a list like the following one.
Shared qualifiers: Qualifier 1, Qualifier 2, Qualifier 3, Qualifier 4, Qualifier 5.
4. Execution.
- We only speak the language of our perfect avatar everywhere, all the time.
- Be upfront about your customer requirements.
- Make sure all advertising is aimed directly at them. You'll repel the wrong customers and attract only the right ones.
- Stop selling to anyone who doesn't meet your ideal customer criteria. Seriously, stop. Then, double your efforts on the channels through which those specific people arrive.
- Re-design the sales process.
- Examine what drove your best customers to buy.
- Reverse-engineer their buying process. Then, we make it happen on purpose for all your future customers.
Laser Focused ICP & Personae.
Many people confuse ICP with personae.
We hear about ICP mostly from sales reps, personae from UX designers and product designers, and buyer personas from marketers.
We’re going to put the church back at the center of the village by starting to shit royally on the opinions and debates of these three professions.
We want to give your business the best possible weapons, not endorse a particular profession to satisfy bruised egos.
To do that, we’re going to open the dictionary and put everyone on the same page once and for all:
What is an ICP?
It’s all in the acronym: Ideal Customer Profile.
This is where people often get it wrong.
They think of the customer as a person ... and often believe that the ICP is the person who has the power over the purchasing decision.
... And that’s not always true.
The “customer” is the natural or legal person who buys from you.
In other words, the “customer” is a company in B2B and an individual in B2C.
The ICP is, therefore, the typical profile of the company or individual who buys from you.
What is a persona?
A persona is the representation of a stereotypical fictional person.
This persona represents a target group of individuals with common characteristics.
Reading these two definitions, we quickly understand that a persona is a way of representing a stereotyped version of characteristics shared by a group of individuals and that an ICP is, in a way, the persona of our ideal customer 😱
Now that the cultural point is made let’s use what we’ve just learned to help your business solve real problems and bring value to your market.
To do this, we’re going to draw up several profiles:
- Your brand’s ICPs.
- Decider personae.
- Buyer personae.
- Initiator personae.
- User personae.
- Influencer personae.
- Gatekeeper personae.
Your form results will help us draw up all these profiles with precision.
In the following tables, you’ll find all the criteria enabling us to draw precise and valuable profiles.
Sometimes, a persona can fall into two categories.
A buyer persona can also be a user. If either of these cases occurs, remember that it’s not bad; it’s just reality.
Don’t worry, this won’t be a problem in the future.
Ultimate ICPs.
Here’s your new ICP template. It’s pretty straightforward but really useful in day-to-day life.
- The niche they’re in.
- Number of years they're in business.
- Number of employees.
- Number of customers.
- Total sales.
- LTV.
- Churn rate.
- Their perceived problems.
- Their real problems.
As usual, you can do this with ease using the business playbook.
Ultimate Personae.
Here’s your new persona template. Simple, straightforward, but real-life-proof:
- Persona's ICP.
- Type:
- Buyer
- User
- Influencer
- Decider
- Initiator
- Gatekeeper.
- Job title.
- Company role:
- Leader
- Management
- Worker.
- Years of involvement.
- Age.
- Sex: Male or Female.
- Political affiliation:
- Ultra right - Ultra conservative
- Right - Conservative
- Centrist - Sideliner
- Left - Progressist
- Ultra left - Ultra progressist
- Geographic location.
- Digital location:
- X
- TikTok
- Discord
- Messenger
- Telegram
- Snapchat
- Slack
- ...
- Marital situation:
- Single
- Couple
- Married
- Separated
- Divorced
- Widowed
- Business partners status:
- Partnered in business
- Solopreneur
- Hopes and dreams list.
- Pains and fears list.
- Barriers and uncertainties list.
- Buying reasons list.
- Goals upon purchasing list.
As usual, you can do this with ease using the business playbook.
Avatar dream outcome.
Now that we have established the profiles that form our avatar, we need to articulate each persona’s dream outcome.
It's like catalyzing their deepest desires in a clear, simple sentence.
Fortunately, all humans have deep, persistent, and unshakeable desires.
That’s why people split up, why wars are declared, and why some people are prepared to die for a cause. Humans are stubborn. It’s a fact of life.
We will use this reality to capture the attention of your ultimate avatar.
Warning: our aim here is not to create desire.
We will channel the desires’ forces that pre-exist in your personae’s heads and hearts. We will then satisfy these desires through your offers and monetization system.
Your avatar’s dream outcome expresses burning feelings and experiences that the prospect has already fantasized about. It’s the gap between their current reality and their innermost fantasies.
Our aspiration is to accurately describe their dream so they feel deeply understood. We also want them to know how your solutions will enable them to make that dream a reality.
The dream outcome is simple.
The customer experience is what increases or decreases its value.
Protip: In general, the dream outcome a prospect values most is the one that most clearly helps them gain status.
Ultimate Dream Outcomes.
In the following table, we’ll list the different dream outcomes for each of your personae.
The most important dream outcome is your buyer persona’s dream outcome. Without it, the others are useless because the first step in bringing value is to sell.
Here’s the classic template for a captivating dream outcome.
Dream Outcome Template:
XX Specific Outcome in YY Time Period without Biggest Pain/Fear.
Of course, we can deviate from this and allow ourselves to be creative.
Whatever the means, the result must be as captivating as a liposuction clinic’s dream outcome:
Lose 40kg in 1 hour without any scars or pain.
What makes the difference is making your offers attractive AND, above all, true in every respect.
No lies are allowed because lies make your customers disappointed, and your salespeople look like common rug sellers.
Once again, there's an easy way to articulate your personae' dream outcomes in the business playbook.