Customer seat at the table

Customer Seat at the Table

I advise my strategic planning clients, “Everything in Strategy starts by getting clear on who, or what, your ideal target customer is. It’s the most important strategic decision you need to make.”

I call it your bullseye target customer, some call it your ideal customer profile (ICP). It’s the same thing.

I also teach a lesson I learned from my friend Doug Hall, a former senior member of the marketing team at Procter and Gamble in Cincinnati.

Doug said, “Delight the few, to attract the many.”

What Doug and the P&G team learned from decades of research is that you are far more likely to be successful if you target your brand to a very narrowly defined type of customer, the one right at the center of the bullseye, and you design your product or service to delight just that one type of customer.

Yes, you can still sell to people who are not your target, if they want what you make, and it is profitable to do so. But only where selling to these non-target customers doesn’t distract you from your bullseye focus. And only where it doesn’t force you to change or dilute your offering in any way.

The key to success is “Don’t try to be all things to all people.”

Strategy requires trade-offs. And if you are not willing to make trade-offs, then you don’t really have a strategy.

Strategy means saying YES to some things, and NO to other things. It also means saying NO to some customers and their demands. As a cautionary tale, read about the “Nantucket Sleighride” one of my businesses got distracted by when I lived in the USA.

As part of the strategic planning process, I take clients through a disciplined process to (narrowly) define their bullseye target customer. Then we priority rank the target customer’s goals and pain points.

Many clients like to give their bullseye target customer a name. Often, this is the name of a real customer that fits the bullseye description perfectly.

From there, they create some form of visual representation. For example, see the image at the top of this post that a client sent me recently.

As you can see, their target customer is in the farming sector. I’ve changed the person’s face, removed the customer’s real name, replaced it with the fictitious name “Rob”, and obfuscated the text to protect client confidentiality.

My client made a life-size cutout of their target customer, with a text description of the customer’s top 3 goals and pain points, and placed the cutout in their meeting room to give “Rob” a seat at the decision-making table.

The leadership team can look at this visual representation and ask themselves, “What would Rob think of this?” When designing new product offerings. When crafting their marketing communications. When building sales and customer support processes to optimize the customer journey, etc.

Another client is a leading flooring tile retailer with a national chain of stores. They went through this process and created a target customer persona whom they called “Rachel”.

“Rachel” is the type of person they most want to delight when she comes into one of their retail stores. The management team created a collage that covers the entire wall of their office – a collection of pictures that represent Rachel and her lifestyle: the house she lives in, the furnishings she likes, the clothing she wears, the type of car she drives, and all the brand names she identifies with.

The leadership team can look at this collage of Rachel’s life on the wall every day and ask themselves, “What would Rachel think of this?” When designing new product offerings. When crafting their marketing communications. When designing new displays for their chain of retail stores, etc.

This is exactly what companies like Procter and Gamble do. Product managers put a picture on the wall of the bullseye target customer for each brand to remind them of the person they need to delight with every business decision they make. A visual description of the target customer provides a constant reminder of the customer they are optimizing their business model for.

Who is your equivalent of “Rob” or “Rachel”?

How do you ensure the target customer has a seat at your decision-making table?

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Until next time…
Stephen