Know Your Avatar

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I don’t talk about theory, I don’t talk about anything that we have never done. I only talk about stuff that’s currently working, so let’s get at it. A couple weeks ago, while wrapping up the week, a couple of faculty members took me aside and said, can we chat with you for a minute? I said, sure, what do you got? And so they sat me down and they said, what we’re trying to figure out is how can we better position our businesses to upgrade the type of clientele, get in front of more eyeballs and kind of polish up our offering, if you will.

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And I said, OK, let’s rock and roll. I said, so I get a piece of paper and I said, let’s do a quick three point exercise. And I said, number one, who is your avatar? And that’s a fancy word for your perfect customer.

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And both of them, ironically, have a very similar avatar, which is the CEO of a two year old company or older, meaning not an upstart, not a entrepreneur between projects, not a serial entrepreneur. They work really well with funded businesses, companies that have been around for a couple of years. They’ve got through the growing pains.

They have a few employees, two thousand employees. They’re up and running. I said, OK, so your avatar is an executive, specifically even hopefully a CEO, possibly.

(1:26 – 1:56)
Basically, somebody in control of an organization or a small company. They said, yes, perfect. I said, OK, number two, where do groups of your avatar hang out? And they kind of paused for a minute and said, where do groups of CEOs hang out? I said, yeah, where do groups of CEOs hang out? Where do groups of executives, leaders of company, leaders of organizations hang out together in a group? And they kind of went silent for a bit.

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But then all of a sudden they started saying things like, well, you know, business conferences. I said, no, I think that think differently. Think outside of business conferences, if you will.