MBA2409 How to Identify Your Ideal Customer + Free Ride Friday

We've all been there. You hold on to a coupon, hoping to cash it in at the store, but then you forget about it and suddenly you've got a mountain of useless expired coupons.

Do you think this one's still good? Free milk.

Oh, mate, that expired in 1993.

Dang it.

Fortunately, there are better ways to save money. Like by switching to Geico, you could save about 900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

Oh, how about this one? Half off floppy disks.

Now you should try a bit of spring cleaning.

It feels good to save big. It feels good to Geico. Ready to save on new tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event, celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster. And with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals. Hey. Oh. Welcome to the $100 MBA show, the business podcast that doesn't waste your time with straight to the point practical business lessons. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zenholm, and today is Free Ride Friday where we give away a free ride to the dollar, our MBA program over at 100mba.net. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. Listen in on Friday. Like today, we're going to announce this week's winner a little bit later in the episode. In today's episode, you will learn how to identify your ideal customer. Ideal customer is different from your avatar. An avatar could just be who you want to attract your brand to, your content, to your videos. But your ideal customer is who do you want to attract to buy your stuff? Because not everybody should be your customer. So when you're starting a business, when you're growing a business, when you're trying to be strategic about who buys from you and who do you want to deal with who'd be perfect for your products or services? This is where today's lesson comes in. I'm going to walk you through exactly how to identify and know who's best to sell to. Because not all customers are created equal. Not everybody can afford what you want to provide. Not everybody's going to be happy with the value provide. Some people are just not going to appreciate what you have to offer. On the flip side, you want to find people that are in love with what you got that feel like they're getting a steal that are happy to pay any amount to get what you are offering. So let's figure out, how do we find these people? How do we identify them and go after them so that our business is not a pain in the neck. So selling our products and services is a joy and things come easy. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. I want to start with money. Yes, money. Because that's what makes a business go around. So before we get into how to research and understand your customers and get the right information, we have to get real about who not only can afford our products or services, but are happy to pay. That what you offer and what you charge is not a stretch. It's not burdensome. It's actually an easy amount for them to pay, whether it's regularly, every month or every year or one off. This is why you need to work on your pricing intelligence. This is a deep dive into your pricing and not just slapping a number on your product page and saying, this looks like a good number, $79. It's about understanding the perceived value you offer. Understanding that, hey, in your customer's mind, are they willing to pay more than whatever you're suggesting? Does $79 and $99 live in the same place in their head? Do they just feel like there's no difference? So why are you shortchanging yourself $20? Especially when you're offering so much value. What you want is customers that are happy to pay what you offer and don't feel like it is a stretch. So let's understand how to do this. One of the easiest ways to do this is to do each sale personally, meaning you're actually closing sales on a call, on a zoom call, one on one at the start. This is incredibly powerful because you get to learn what people's willingness to pay is. This is very easy to do, especially even the services, if you're doing contract work or you're doing consulting or coaching, because this is usually how you do a sale. But obviously, if you're selling a course or a piece of software or a physical product, this might be outside the normal way you sell, but it's okay to do this in the beginning. And we'll talk more about why this is so powerful for other reasons. But right now what we want to do is nail what people are willing to pay. And we want to make sure we're going to the maximum so that we're maximizing our value. This is why price tiering is so important. Whenever you're on a call with somebody trying to close a deal. Let's say for example, you are closing a one on one coaching deal where you're going to coach them for a year. You want to tier your pricing to understand one, are they able to pay certain amounts and then two, if you're able to give more value, are they happy to pay more? So a good way is just have three tiers. One is a very basic way to do things which is like, hey, I will coach you one on one via email and this is the package. Package two is I will coach you one on one via email. But plus we'll have a call once a month to make sure you're on track. And then lastly, you're gonna get the call once a month, you're gonna get the email, but also you can message me on Viber or WhatsApp anytime you want and I'll be able to get back to you in a few days. And each one has an increasing price. So say for example, your first package is $10,000, the next one is 14,000 and the last one is 16,000. And even if you're not trying to close the sale at the moment, you could just ask them from these three packages, which one would you be interested in if you were to agree to move forward and work with me? I'm not asking you to make an appointment now, but which one would appeal to you? And if somebody says 16,000, no problem, I want to go for the max, that's what I want. Then you know this type of customer, the customers you're trying to attract are happy to pay 16,000. If you get on a call and the opposite happens and somebody says, actually all these are expensive. And what you do is after each call is you create a profile for each customer. This takes a little bit of work, but it's really important because you're really going to be able to maximize and grow exponentially versus dragging your feet and not making enough money for your business. So what do these profiles do? Well, they identify the attributes of each type of customer. So maybe the one that said, Yep, no problem, 16,000, you have some attributes, like what kind of business do they run, their average revenue per month, how long they've been in business, where they're located in the world. You basically have a whole bunch of demographic information, as much information as you can gather to identify who is this person and how can I find people like them, where do they hang out, what social media platforms are they on? So I can advertise there. I would come up with at least 20 to 25 different attributes that can identify each customer. The opposite is true with maybe somebody says, this is too expensive. Now you have a pretty good understanding of the type of person. Now, obviously we're looking for trends here, patterns. And after you do about 10, 15, 20 calls, you're going to start seeing, oh, wow, there is a lot of commonalities between the people that are happy to pay my price points. And there's a lot of commonalities, people that don't want to. And you basically list those commonalities, usually about four or five things. And you just steer clear from those customers and you focus on the ones that have commonalities that want to pay. This is a really good exercise. And by the way, highly professional sales teams do this all the time. Companies that rely on sales and sales calls, they do profiling all the time so they don't waste their time with talking to customers that are not in the position to buy. That's why I want to start with money. So now you're starting to identify who are the people that are great for your business, for your products and services. Now on these calls, you want to talk to these customers and ask them about their pain points, what they love, what they hate, and why they choose you or why they are having this conversation with you. Have a real talk and get some real insights. Why? Because what you're gonna do is make sure you record these calls and transcribe them. And you can do this with AI very easily. We use a tool called CastMagic and it does transcriptions for audio and video very, very easily. Awesome tool. And the point here is that you wanna use the same language as what they use in your call. So once you've identified, okay, this person is the type of customer I wanna serve, I'm going to use their transcription, use the language they use to describe their pain points, to talk about the things they love about my products or services or what they're looking to solve or things they love about their business or what they want more of. And I'm going to use all that language in my sales copy, on my website, in my videos, in my content, in my social media reels, because I want to use the same language that will attract the same type of customer that I want to serve. This is why these calls are so important. Even if you don't normally close deals like this, you should do this anyway for 15, 20 customers to gather enough critical data so that you can start to have this information at your disposal so you can Identify your ideal customers. Now, I know we've been geeking out a little bit. We're going to geek out a little bit more. You know, we're talking about customer profiles and gathering data and getting insights. Now we're going to go even deeper with social media. You're going to do some stalking. Not the weird stalking, but I'm talking about going into your analytics and social media, understanding who's clicked on your posts, who's viewed them, who's liked them, who's commented, who's engaged. And you can get your EA or somebody on your team to do this where they grab all this data. Okay, great. Here are the people that have engaged with your posts consistently. Let's create some profiles on them, get some research on them, set up a call with them. These people are engaged. These people like what you are putting down. You want to identify who are these people that are loving what you're putting down. Who are these people that are loving your products and services, loving your content. They're most likely going to love your offer. Next, be a part of the communities that have the people you want to serve. So say, for example, you've identified, hey, my ideal customers are business coaches that are trying to make a million dollars a year. That's an identifier. I'm gonna go into every group, every forum that will have these types of people in there. And I want to be as helpful, as friendly, as good as a group member as I can be. I'm not advertising, I'm not working with them. I'm not trying to, you know, spam this group. What I'm trying to do here is understand who these people are. I want to observe, I want to engage, I want to soak in all the vibes that are happening in this chat, in this group. Again, you're going to understand their language, you're going to understand their pain points better, and you're going to be able to create better products and services based on this. This is gold, R and D and it's absolutely free via these groups on Facebook and other places.

We've all been there. You hold onto a coupon but forget about it and suddenly it's expired.

Expired in 2012. Dang it.

Fortunately, by switching to Geico, you could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

It feels good to save big. It feels good to Geico.

You've made it on time for the McDonald's breakfast menu. You think to yourself, finally, I could start my day with my perfect breakfast. But what if breakfast could be even more perfect with the hot honey sausage egg biscuit, it finally is. This won't last forever, so go to McDonald's and get it while you can. Ba da ba ba ba.

Next, don't be afraid to run experiments on your pricing pages. Offer new packages, email a segment of your list, a high priced offer, and see who bites. So then you can tag those people in your email list in your CRM. VIP customers. These guys are great. They buy what I put down. And you can't know this until you run experiments, until you try things, until you offer things, until you bundle things. Try to run an experiment once every six weeks. One, it's gonna get you more sales. Two, it's gonna get you more information on who are your best customers and who are the best types of people that you wanna serve. Three, it gets you a profile that you can then say, okay, what are those attributes of those people? Let's find those people. Now, you saw that I talked about tagging VIPs. It's very important for you to identify your VIPs in your customer list. You gotta spot who are the most loyal customers and who spends the most with you. And you can probably find this out in your payment processor. This is very easy to do if you use stripe, it tells you who has spent the most with you, their top 10 top 100 customers. But that's just one angle, how much they're spending. You also want to find your evangelists. The people that are like your biggest cheerleaders, that are always showing up to your webinars. They're showing up to your lives, they're commenting on your posts. These people help spread the message and you want to treat them like gold. So maybe do a special event for them, a special webinar, special training, special offer. Maybe if you're in a major city, throw a party and say, hey, come to my party. Listen, it's a privilege. You have people that love what you do and love what you put out there. You gotta nurture that feeling. You gotta make sure that you tell them, hey, you're not gonna regret following me. I actually treat you well and I reward people that cheer me on and are supporting our content and supporting the business by spending more. These people, when they're rewarded, they feel like they're part of a tribe, they're part of a great group and they will continue to do their evangelist behavior, evangelism over and over. And it could be simple things like sending them a gift in the mail, like a T shirt or maybe even just an actual gift, like a Google HomePod, like one of those small speakers or a pair of earphones or a portable phone charger. Things that you know everybody's going to use and it's just a nice little thing to get in the mail. It feels like a special little incentive for being somebody special in the group. Lastly, trust your gut. When you're working with customers, when you're talking to customers, even pre revenue, when you're just doing these customer interviews and you're writing all this data and you're collecting all this information, you know all that is fantastic. But sometimes your instincts know things before the data actually catches up. If your gut says a certain group, a certain type of customer is your ideal customer, go deeper, Explore. Trust your gut, but verify Entrepreneurship is a mix of data and intuition. Don't forget the intuition part. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. Hope today's episode was helpful. If you need to re listen and take some notes, go ahead and do so. But today's episode's not over. It's free Ride Friday. Let's give away a free ride to the $100 MBA over at 1-000-mba.net and the winner is Micah Roccia. Micah is from Germany. He says superb podcast. 5 stars. I love your podcast. I listen to it every morning when I'm driving to work. I haven't had education of an MBA before, but you make it simple and quick so even I can understand it. Thanks for all your effort and interesting topics you choose. Hear you soon. Micah, thank you so much for that amazing review. I absolutely love Germany. I visited back in 2017. My uncle lives there in Stuttgart, one of my favorite countries in Europe. Thanks for supporting the show. Your mission is to email me over at omar100.mba.net so we can hook you up with the free ride to the 100 RMB over at 100mba.net. Thank you so much for listening. Make sure you hit subscribe so you don't miss a beat. Guys, we are going nowhere. We're going to continue to give you amazing business lessons in 2024 and beyond. Hit subscribe so you don't miss an episode. You'll have it right in your feed ready for you. Go ahead and hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app right now. Before I go, I want to leave you with this Understanding your customers is crucial to the success of your business. The better you understand our customers, the better chance you have of giving them what they want and serving them with pride. Serving them consistently and for years to come. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

You've made it on time for the McDonald's breakfast menu. You think to yourself, finally, I could start my day with my perfect breakfast. But what if breakfast could be even more perfect with the hot honey sausage egg biscuit? It finally is. This won't last forever, so go to McDonald's and get it while you can.