EverydaySpy Podcast - Where Your Ideal Customer is Hiding

Episode Date: August 31, 2021

To wrap-up Season 5, Andrew is taking you on a deep-dive into how his company uses CIA personality testing to find and identify the perfect customer for any business. If you run your own business, or have a career in sales, HR, customer service or senior management, DON'T MISS this incredible HACK to find the customers you've always dreamed of. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My name is Andrew Bustamante, and this is everyday espionage. I have had an absolute blast with this season talking to you and talking about all the specific applications of tradecraft that I use in my business, in my everyday life, and how you can use them in your career, in your everyday life with family, to keep people safe, to grow your business, to grow your clients. And I wanted to end this season with a quick story. So recently my team got together and we decided that we wanted to ask ourselves the question about how we serve our customers better. Now, if you're a business owner or if you are in a career that serves individual customers if you're customer facing, it's always a good exercise to take a few minutes to stop and think about how can we serve our customers better.

And I was really excited to sit with my team and walk through it because they realized early into that conversation that we didn't know exactly who our ideal customer was. Who was that perfect customer that we knew we could serve to the highest level for a long period of time? So we went through what was known as an avatar exercise. Now, I'm not talking about avatar, the Disney movie, the avatar, the blue aliens. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about an avatar as in the picture of a person who,

who is that perfect customer. So in our avatar exercise, what we did was we built out a big whiteboard, and we broke that whiteboard into a grid of two by three. And we started talking about who is that customer in terms of their psychography. Psychography, meaning what are their psychographical traits? How do they think? How do they feel? What do they value?

What is their mindset? We started talking about them through a demographic lens. demographic meaning what's their age what's their income how big is their family what's their educational background how much do they work how much do they earn and then through a physical lens physically meaning are they in shape are they out of shape what do their daily habits look like what are their hobbies what are the things they like to do they like to play games do like to play puzzles so we had this grid and we started going through and identifying who our ideal customer was who was our ideal avatar. Now here's what came up in that conversation for us. We quickly realized that we were

kind of, we were kind of guessing. And if you've ever run a business or if you're running a business right now, it's never a good feeling to just guess. So we started trying to look at our current customers and see who of our current customers were customers that fit into our ideal model. Now, the problem with this exercise is that if you've got customers, then you know no customer is really the ideal customer because every customer is just another customer. And customers come to you from different backgrounds and different interests and different value sets. And it's very hard to prioritize or rank order existing clients, existing customers. So again, we were running into these roadblocks as we tried to identify our ideal customer. So what we ended up doing that worked is that we finally

decided that instead of trying to look at existing customers and reverse engineer the ideal customer and instead of trying to define some ideal customer out of thin air, what we decided to do was look at ourselves, look at our company, look at everyday spy, and decide what did everyday spy stand for? And when we started to list out those characteristics, those characteristics that we knew, the values that we had, the value that we knew we could. bring, the expertise, the experience, the passions, the interests. When we started to build out this idea of what we were and what we stood for, it became crystal clear to us who we would be able to serve at those highest levels.

Because when you're a business and you're trying to find your ideal customer, it's really not about finding the customer. It's about finding your own internal purpose, your own internal interests, your own internal why your passion for what drove your business in the first place. Whether you're a zipper factory or a pencil maker or a life coach, there is some passion somewhere, some deep-seated interest that drove you to start that business. Maybe it's making money, maybe it's solving problems, maybe it's ingenuity and innovation. There is some passion that drove you to start your business. And then you find that and you tap into that, you get that much closer to tapping into your ideal

customer because your ideal customer is going to be the customer that shares your passions and shares your interests. Now, after we had a whole wall full of our own values, character traits, interests, passions, hobbies, et cetera, then we made a rubric that was four simple questions. And these four simple questions were the questions that we used to identify what the term ideal meant. Now, here they are. One, does the customer pay money? Because if a customer doesn't pay money, they're not really a customer at all. So in order for them to be the ideal customer, they had to be a customer that paid money. Second, is that customer in sync with the company?

Now, we defined in sync to mean somebody who pays money, does the work, values the product, and doesn't ask for a refund. Now, if you've ever been in a business where somebody buys something from you and then they don't do the work, or they buy something from you and then they ask for a refund, or they buy something from you and then they fill your inbox with customer complaints, you know exactly what it's like to deal with a customer who is not in sync. These are all those customers out there who let invoices go 35 or 40 days before they pay. They want payment plans and they stop paying the payment plan halfway through.

Those are not your ideal customers. But your ideal customer is the person who pays on time, does the work that you tell them to do, and then makes the accomplishment, they want to make and does not ask for a refund. Those are the first two of our four criteria. They must pay money. They must be in sync with the company.

The third criteria is they must act quickly. We didn't want customers who were going to sit around in Hem and Haw and debates. Those are not ideal customers. We do have those customers and those customers are always going to be welcome. But they're not ideal. The ideal customer is the one who sees you, learns about you, understands that you can solve their problem, and then they jump right in with both fees. they start taking action.

That's the customer who's in sync. That's the customer who pays money. That's closer and closer to the ideal customer. If it takes a long time for you to convince someone to buy or if it takes someone multiple iterations of you proving your value, they might be a good customer, but they'll never be the ideal customer. So here we have the first three of our four ideals. They must pay money.

They must be in sync. They must act quickly. Now, so far we thought we were pretty close. to our ideal customer with just these three ideas on the board. But then we had one extra idea that got thrown in that absolutely put a needle sharp point on our ideal customer. And I have to give credit to our youngest and newest team member who actually made this idea. Because what they ended up saying was, Andy, would you spend a week in Africa with your ideal customer? And in my mind, the answer was crystal clear. Yes. I, I.

I would spend a week in Africa with my ideal customer. Now, if you've never been to Africa or if you've never left the United States, or if you've only left the United States but you've never gone to a third world country, when you take someone to a third world country, to a developing nation, when you travel with them, it is a major investment in the relationship because there's all sorts of unpredictable, uncomfortable things that can happen. You become very intimate very quickly because there's only one of the person in the whole world you can count on, and that's the person you're traveling with.

So when this young member of our team suggested whether or not I would go to Africa with our ideal customer, it became the perfect final lens for me to be able to define who that ideal customer was. So now we knew, we knew our ideal customer was someone who paid money, was in sync with the company, acted quickly, and who I would be willing to spend a week with in Africa. So then we knew our ideal customer was someone who would pay money, be in sync with the company, act quickly, and I would be willing to travel with them for a week in Africa. What an awesome rubric. So through those four questions and cross-referencing that against all of our values,

all of our priorities and interests as a company, we very quickly were able to identify that ideal customer for us. that individual who we would be able to serve now and in the future at the highest possible levels, making the greatest possible impact. And when we define that person, we were able to then cross-reference that back to their Myers-Briggs personality type indicator. Now, if you followed me or if you followed everyday spy for an extended period of time, you know, I make a big deal out of Myers-Briggs because Myers-Briggs is the standard for how CIA assesses personality in both officers and in Target agents abroad. So it's always powerful to me and always powerful to GEHE when we can break someone down by a personality type, a four code indicator using Myers-Briggs. So we took all of these values,

we took those four questions, and we started to say, where would this person land on a Myers-Briggs personality type indicator exam? And we pulled out all the stops and we identified. Where would they land on the introvert versus extrovert spectrum? Where would they land on the intuitor versus sensor spectrum? Where would they land on the thinker versus feeler spectrum? Where would they land on the perceiver versus judger spectrum? And we put the marks on the wall. We all agreed and we ended up knowing, ended up discovering that the ENFJ Myers-Briggs personality type is our ideal customer. Like just think about that. We were able to nail our ideal customer down to a four-letter Myers-Briggs indicator code. It didn't take long before we were able to backtrack that code to know that 2.5% of the American population is ENFJ.

68% of those 2.5% are female, 32% are male. We suddenly had this crystal clear image of who our ideal customer was. Who was the person that we could serve best? Who was the person that was most likely out there looking for solutions like the solutions that we have to offer? And there it was. Staring us in the face, two years after I started a business, it was right there. And the next thing that happened really just blew my mind. I started talking about the fact that our ideal customers were ENFJ.

I posted it on social media. I sent it out in an email. I started sharing it with the world. And lo and behold, some of our best customers are most. most loyal customers started chiming in via social media comments, emails, phone calls, text messages to tell me that they were ENFJ personality types. It was awesome. So why am I telling you this? I'm telling you this because if you're in a position where you are in charge of sales, in charge of recruiting, if you're in a position where your client facing, you're an account manager,

you're an executive for accounts, you are in a position where you need to intimate understand who your target ideal customer is. If you run a business, whether your business is a shoe store on the corner or whether your business is a pest control management company, you have an ideal customer. And when you know who that person is, you maximize your revenue, you maximize your bottom line, you maximize the positive relationships you have. And that just makes your company, your business, and your income stronger. If you're looking to break into a new job, if you're looking to.

identify the right career field for you? The same exercise applies. What are the things that matter to you? What are your values, your passions, your interests? And then where out there do you see the same values and interests reflected back? That is your ideal customer. Because remember, if you're looking for a job, the job that's going to hire you is just as much of a customer as any customer who pays someone else for a service. You've got to remember that you all have something to offer. You are a valuable resource on your own, and the company looking to hire you is a customer looking for your service. When you know what matters to you and you know what matters to your ideal customer, you're able to find that ideal customer and make awesome things happen. But you have to stop

and ask yourself, what is my value? What are my values? And who can reflect those values back at me? because when you're in sync with your ideal customer and you're serving them to your highest possible level, you build a level of trust and a level of loyalty that makes it possible to do the impossible. And that is everyday espionage. It's been great to have this season with you all. I'll see you after a short four-week break and we'll kick off season six. Take care, everyone. Godspeed.

Everyday espionage is dedicated to one thing. Educating everyday people. I know that not everyone will listen, but those who listen will learn. If you learned something new today, click subscribe, review, and share the podcast with a friend. Find me on social media at Everydayspy or on my website, Everydayspy.com. If you are up for a special challenge, visit Everydayspy.com forward slash operations. And join me for an authentic spy training mission. And above all else, remember that knowledge is freedom.