Catch your clients by building an end user profile

Last week ​I was watching Criminal Minds on TV and it suddenly struck me how running a business is kind of like working for the FBI.

You must come to accept that to win in business, you have to develop the service you deliver on what the customer wants, rather than pushing onto the market the type of service that you want to sell.

Check your ego at the door and you'll win this game.

Instead focus on creating a profile of the decision-making unit, not just the customer. The end user is the individual who will actually use your service. But we all know that the end-user is not always the driver of the decision to use your service. Sometimes it might be a spouse or a friend, sick and tired of hearing about a certain complaint that finally pushes the end-user to do something about their problem.

The decision-making unit is the group of people who actually decides whether the customer will buy your service. There are three types of decision-making units:

• Champion: the person who wants the customer to purchase the service; often the end user.
• Primary Economic Buyer: the person with the authority to spend money to purchase the service. Sometimes this is the end user.
• Influencers, Veto Power, Purchasing Department (when talking about a corporate client), and so on: people who have sway or direct control over the decisions of the Primary Economic Buyer.

You want to build a profile of the end user that is specific enough calculate the Total Addressable Market size of your beachhead market. Your focus will be on the end user, because if the end user does not want your service, you won't have a business.
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Your goal is to create a description of a narrowly defined subset of end users with similar characteristics and with similar needs. You do not want to spend your time and resources trying to be everything to everybody.

You can break down individuals based on demographic and/or psychographic features. Some potential characteristics to include in your end user profile are gender, age range, income range, geographic location, what motivates them, what they fear most, who is their hero, what they read, and the general reason they are buying this service.

If you don't have someone from the demographic already as a client, then you need to find one.

Your analysis of your target customer is nowhere near complete, but the End User Profile points you in the right direction for further steps.

If your next step is to find a room for rent then let us know :)