VIDEO: Identifying Your Core Customer

The Foundation For Everything We Do

In order to build a solid foundation for everything you do within your company, you need to be able to identify and understand who your core customer is. In this week's Ask Rob, I talk through how you can really dig in and gain insight into what makes your core customer tick.

Transcript

So your question is, "What's the foundation for everything that we do inside our company?" And the answer is two words: core customer. 

And I'm not talking about everybody that buys from us, but I'm talking about who's that subset of customers that are loyal, that pay on time, that value what we have, provide referrals, and pay us our price so that we make our profit. 

We need to identify who they are so that we can focus our resources on them, and we also need to understand where do they hang out online, where do they go, what websites, where do they gather information? But to identify our core customer, we really have to dig in. 

This is something where I wish I had done it differently when I when I was a first-time CEO, because I focused on the demographics - what industries, what was their job title, what segments of the industry, was it male/female, what was their age. 

But I believe that that's actually less than half of what you need to know about your core customer. You have to identify them and understand them as a real human being, as an individual, and that's all about understanding the psychographics. 

Because when we make decisions, whether it's for personal life or professional life, we do so with emotion. And on the professional side, of course, we're going to do our due diligence, but there still is emotion. You know, what are our fears about making this decision? What are our fears about deciding from this particular vendor? And what's our guilt about making a decision? 

So we really need to dig and understand the psychographics, which I believe are more than 50% of identifying who your core customer is, and there are some great tools out there.

Robert Bloom wrote a book called "The Inside Advantage," that's just absolutely phenomenal, and Shannon Byrne Susko also recently came out with a book called "The 3HAG Way," but also dives deep into who your core customer is. 

So if you really want to understand the foundation of your business, you need to dig, and you need to dig in and understand who your core customer is. 

If you want some help doing that, give me a call. 

Thank you.