Customer
Customer is the foundational link. It is the work of understanding who you serve, what they actually feel, fear, want, and say — to a depth that lets every downstream link speak in their language and address their real concerns.
“Can you describe your best customer’s daily frustrations and trigger events in their own language, with enough specificity that they would say ‘yes, that’s exactly me’ if they read your description?”
Best practice for the Customer link:
- Candidate market identification. — You have identified the range of markets and customers you could serve — by sector, size, role, geography, or other defining criteria (you may have already chosen a subset of the possible markets as part of your positioning – see Clarity).
- Avatar work — You have constructed a model of your chosen target customer’s working life, daily frustrations, fears, ambitions, and language.
- Trigger event mapping — You have identified (not guessed) the specific moments in a target customer’s life that turn vague unease into active concern. Triggers are sector-specific in shape and are the moments when prospects become buyable.
- Buyer journey understanding — You know how your prospects move from pre-awareness through casual exploration, shortlist formation, evaluation, and the early-relationship period.
- Stakeholder mapping — You have identified who is actually involved in the buying decision and what each of them needs from the marketing. For example for SME B2B services this can typically be founder + spouse + accountant
- Language harvesting — You have harvested the actual words and phrases your customer uses to describe their needs and problems, as opposed to the technical/industry insider words that your industry uses.
- Category awareness assessment — Do your target customer typically already know they need your category, or do they need to be educated into the category before being sold within it.
What it isn’t!
- Demographic profiling without psychological depth (age, sector, size with nothing about felt experience).
- Persona-building disconnected from real customer evidence.
- “We help businesses grow” — neither a customer nor a problem statement.
Further reading on the Customer link?
We cover the customer link in detail over a number of articles:
- Why Your Marketing Isn’t Working: The Customer-Link Diagnosis for B2B Service Owners
- How to Interview Your Clients to Discover the Real Problem They Hire You to Solve
- How to Choose Your Niche: The Decision Framework for B2B Service Firms
- The Additive Niche: How to Specialise Without Firing Existing Clients
- The 10 Trigger Events That Move B2B Service Buyers from Latent to Active Demand
- Should You Niche Your B2B Service Firm? The Case For (and Against) Specialising
- How to Define a Target Customer for a B2B Service Business: Frameworks That Actually Work
- The Customer Avatar for B2B Service Firms: What to Include, How to Build It, How to Use It
How can we help you?
Recipe 03: Customer Research & Analysis
Step by step instructions to interview your customers and discover exactly what moves them to buy, and the words they use.
Then use the results to create the four key documents you need:
- Your Customer Avatar
- Your Trigger Event Map
- Your Language Inventory
- Your Stakeholder Map
There are three ways we can work with you:
- Done-For-You (we do most of the work)
- Recipe Download (You follow the recipe and do all the work in-house)
- Hybrid (You download the Recipe and we kick start the process with you.)
You can find all the details on our Recipe 03 page here.