10MINMC.Ep.22.AUDIO
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Trey Sheneman: [00:00:00] Most businesses guess who their customer is, but the pros, they listen until the customer actually says it for them. Today I'm gonna teach you how to steal your customer's words so that you can win their wallets.
Welcome to 10 Minute Masterclass, your weekly mic Drop for Business breakthrough. I am your host and lead MC Trey Sheneman, and it's my goal each and every week on this show to deliver to you timeless business principles to help solve today's business problems. Now, the way we do that is by teaching through what I call the four core drivers of growth, marketing, sales, operations, and leadership.
Now, I had a friend of mine who's been an avid listener of the podcast, [00:01:00] jump in my dms recently and say. But Trey, there's a fifth driver of growth, and he said product is the fifth driver of growth. Now, I just wanna say out loud before we jump into today's content, I'm just assuming you have a decent product.
That to me is like table stakes for being in business and being able to really satisfy your clientele is that you have a decent product. So yes. There is probably a fifth driver of growth, but I've never been the one who's ever been hired before to build a product. I've always been the one that's been hired to take a product that exists and to scale it, which is why we talk about the four core drivers of growth that we talk about.
So now that we got that outta the way to my buddy, let us just jump into today's content. So in today's episode, we're gonna be down in the messaging driver again, and we're gonna be specifically. Talking about discovering your avatar. Now, people will use interchangeable phrases for the word avatar. I will use interchangeable phrases for the word avatar.
I might say something like your ideal customer profile. I might say your persona. I might say your avatar. But for [00:02:00] today, let's say your avatar. Your avatar is. The profile of your ideal customer and the persona that they are. See how I did that? You just put 'em all together and it sounds better. So the main thing that I want to teach you today though, when thinking about profiling your avatar is what is called voice of customer research.
Now, I want to give a plug to one of my former bosses, solid leader, great thinker, Ryan Leveque, founder of the Ask Method Company. Uh, author of the book Ask If you've never read. Ask. Ask is probably, in my opinion, actually, actually it's right here on the top. I didn't even plan that. It's right here on the top.
It's probably one of the best books on teaching you actually how to go and do voice of customer research. So I would recommend that as a good read. But the idea of Voice of Customer Research is, is that. At the end of the day, really good marketing. When done correctly, using voice of customer research no longer is a megaphone.
It becomes a mirror. We want to reflect back to the market, [00:03:00] the words, the feelings, the emotions of what our best customers are. Best avatars are already telling us about the product that we sell, the way that it solves what they had going on in the first place, and how we could communicate that out to other people.
So. We want, we wanna really lean into this idea of reflecting the future that your customers desire, that your prospects desire, and using the words of your existing customers to paint that picture. Now, once you've done voice of customer research correctly, it's gonna affect everything. It's gonna affect your ads, your landing pages, the way you frame your offer, the way you write pitch decks.
If you are in the B2B space, it might even eventually affect future feature releases or things that you do to your products. So. I wanna walk you through the way that I would conduct voice of customer research in today's market. So step number one. As I would go and find like my 10 best fit customers, my most recent best fit customers, uh, people that are, uh, writing reviews, people that are calling in, people that are posting on social.
I would find the people that are really, really excited. So you [00:04:00] could look at things like the, your chat thread. You could look at your email inbox, you could look at sales call recordings, you could look at survey responses, Amazon reviews. There's a lot of ways for you to identify who these best fit customers are based on the things that they're saying about you already.
So you wanna build that list. Then from there, you wanna actually conduct an interview with those people. You want to get 'em on Zoom or you want to get 'em on the phone and you wanna walk through their, the way that they talk about these five buckets of customer research, number one, their pains, what were they struggling with when they found your product, their desires, what did they wish their life had looked like?
What were their triggers? What, what happened to make them start seeking your product out? Their objections. What kind of things did they hesitate about before they ultimately bought, and right now, what are the transformational words they use to describe the way they feel now after buying your product, after using your product?
If in doing this research, you start to hear some of the same [00:05:00] phrases bubble up time and time again from these customers. That's when you, you'll know you're getting what I call the golden nuggets from the golden buckets. It's in these nuggets that you're gonna find incredible copy. Like if you, if you're in the, you're trying to sell to safe, rational CFOs.
And if five of the 10 customers all say I was drowning in spreadsheets, well, that might be a, a phrase you want to earmark is something that you could use. So once you've done all that, you have the answers to those five buckets. You wanna build your avatar profile out then based more like a, like a mad lib than it would be a resume.
So you want to create a profile that answers who are they really like, based on what they said, what did they, what did they believe about the problem that they had? What did they fear would've happened if they didn't solve the problem? What transformation were they craving and what transformation did they get?
And now that you know that about these people, where are the places that these sorts of people are already hanging out? What social networks, what podcasts are they listening to? YouTubes? Are they following? From [00:06:00] there you want to tie that entire profile together into a single descriptive statement about your avatar.
Okay. And the framework for this, and I'm gonna work with my team to either get you guys a visual of this, maybe we'll put it up on the screen, but it's basically, I help in brackets identity. I. Who struggle with in bracket pain get in brackets desired result without in bracket objection or friction. So let me give you an example of this.
I help CFOs at growth stage startups who are tired of spreadsheet chaos, get clear, accurate forecasts in minutes without switching accounting software. That would be an example of a great avatar profile statement. It kind of covers all those elements of having a good avatar. So once you have all of that built out, now you wanna take this profile and you wanna leverage it everywhere that you're now doing marketing.
You want to rewrite your landing pages and homepage headlines. You wanna refine your ad targeting and copy sharpen your webinar template and its layout. Work on your sales scripts, weave some new [00:07:00] hooks into your organic content. Take this profile and the examples of the way you would talk to this person and share it out with your entire team.
If you're using an agency, make sure you get it to your agency. If you're using just an internal team, get it to them. You wanna make sure that everybody has access to this, because ultimately it becomes the guiding light principle that you're gonna use to build all of your go-to-market strategy from.
Because the other catch here is, is like once you've done this once and you've rolled this out across the team, it's not rare, let me say this. It's, it's really consistent for us to find with our clients that we work with, that they actually have more than one. They have more than one avatar. Most of the time there's a central avatar, like a core revenue driving avatar, but then there's these fringe or these peripheral avatars that we need to think about.
And so it's in the nuancing of rolling this, this kind of core avatar profile out where you see where it's working and where it's not, that you're able to then step back, look at the data and figure out, oh, we [00:08:00] actually have got to literally nuance this here or there. And so just to recap, you want to take your best customer, you want to use those places that I said to do your research.
You wanna make sure that you then get 8, 10, 12 of those best customers, real humans on an interview. You want to conduct the five golden buckets interview that we walked through earlier. You're gonna get all that language out from them. You're then gonna use their words. To build an avatar profile and come out with, come up with one sticky statement that kind of summarizes the avatar in one line, and then you're gonna make sure that you leverage that out as far and as wide as you can to make sure that you get the maximum impact that you can from something like this.
So when you do this, uh, make sure you do a couple of things. If you've not gone to 10 minute mc.com, so one zero MIN mc.com and signed up for 10 minute takeaways. Please do I, I've never really pitched that on the pod, but that's something that I'd love for you to do, especially. If you're listening to this [00:09:00] episode, because once the 10 minute takeaways for this episode comes out, so 10 minute takeaways comes out once a month.
It's a digest of all four episodes from the month, and it includes some sort of a tool that you can use to apply what you learned on the episode. And I know, excuse me, that the tool. For this episode is going to be how to conduct a proper customer interview, which I think is one of the most underutilized things that happens across big business all across America.
So make sure you sign up for 10 minute takeaways. Do that, I hope. I hope that you'll get value outta that. As always, my goal with this podcast is just to keep it dense, super practical. Something that you can use straight away. So if you have any questions from this content, don't uh, hesitate to shoot me a DM on LinkedIn.
It literally happens every week right now from something that's coming up on the pod. I'm more than happy to discuss, and if you're here and you've been here this long, you might as well go ahead and hit that follow and subscribe button and make sure that you get the rest of the episodes. Um, I gotta report.
Last week from my team that we have just crossed 20,000 downloads [00:10:00] on this podcast, guys. So blown away by the support. Thank you so much for listening. I hope that this week's episode is one that challenges you like the rest hopefully have, because if it doesn't challenge you, it can't change you. Before we wrap up today, I wanna remind you about our season sponsor Live Well Membership.
If you like to travel, there's no better way to do it than traveling with Live Well, it's Luxury Travel without the timeshare traps. You can go and find out more about it at livewellmembership.com. So go book your next vacation and until next time, we'll see you on the flip side.
