Your Customer Canvas (doesn’t exist)

I want to keep you from making a big mistake. 

It’s one I made, repeatedly, and I don’t want you to fall into the same trap.

I ran a marketing agency for over 12 years (it still exists, but I’m no longer in charge of most of the day-to-day operations). When I started it, I knew I had the skills and knowledge to help businesses make money. I thought that my business was “selling dollars at a discount.” I would make them make a thousand dollars, and they would pay me two hundred, and everyone would be happy.

Sounds logical, right?

Small problem… the businesses I was working with had one fatal flaw: they were being run by human beings. And human beings tend to mess things up (you and me included).

So how did this fool-proof plan go wrong?

Well, any number of ways… they were losing money on each sale because they didn’t have a handle on their profit margins, they went out and bought a new truck and increased their overhead, they had a hard time selling the customers I got in the door… and so on.

Eventually, I realized that I couldn’t shoulder the responsibility for the profitability of a business I did not control.

My point is: your customer is not a blank canvas onto which you can paint all your skills, knowledge, and experience and then expect them to get results.

They’ve got a lot going on in their heads that is going to interfere with your perfect plan.

Fortunately, there is a way to get around all that: you’ve got to know your customers extremely well, and then you can defeat these demons in their minds — demons that they are probably not even fully conscious of.

Let me ask you a few questions about your followers and customers:

What are they afraid of? What are they not telling their spouse or loved ones about what’s going on with this thing? Who are they angry at? Who are their enemies? Who do they blame for their failures? What is their feeling about the way the world is generally heading right now?

If you don’t have an accurate answer for every one of those questions, you’re fighting an enemy you can’t see, and the enemy is stronger and more powerful than you think.

You can’t fight this enemy head-on. You have to undermine it by making your followers and customers feel understood.

Your followers need to feel like they’ve finally found someone who understands what they’re going through, even though you’ve never met. Once you achieve that, you can initiate a transfer of confidence and help them to put hope in you that they were unwilling to put in themselves.

I’m going to be very blunt: you don’t want to do this alone, and I’m here to help. Sign up for my free daily Thought Leadership tips at You Can Be A Thought Leader.