Welcome to Visionary’s Pursuit, a podcast where we explore what it takes to turn your bold and inspiring ideas into reality. I'm Carolina Zuleta. I'm a life and business coach and your host for this podcast. I'm thrilled to have you here.
Hi, welcome back. This is episode 86 of The Visionary's Pursuit Podcast. Today, I want us to talk about those people who, without them, we wouldn't have a business and who are the people that help us grow and evolve our business, and those are our customers. What I know about businesses that are successful is that they are obsessed with their clients.
They know them in detail. They know how they think, what they feel. They understand their problem, the problem at least they're solving in a lot of depth. And the other thing I know is that any company who can solve a client's problem better than anyone else is going to be successful because those customers will be in charge of helping you grow your business.
So today, I want us to talk about our customers in two moments. The first moment is when we're marketing to get them, to find them, to let them know that we can help them. And the second one is once they are our clients and as time goes by, the importance of us being able to continuously evolve to solve their problems. So when I was at the University of Chicago doing my MBA, I did a minor concentration in entrepreneurship.
So I took, I think all the classes they had to offer in entrepreneurship. And there were these sayings that, the professors would say often, "Cash is king." And the other one that they said all the time is, "Talk to your customers, talk to your clients, be in a conversation with them. Do not make assumptions.
Do not be in a silo imagining what your clients want or need. Go and physically pick up the phone, invite them to coffee. Be with them because they are the ones who have the answers to how you should evolve your product, to how you should market, where you should market, what messaging you should have."
This sounds obvious and I think very simple, but in reality, there's not a lot of companies that are doing it.
So At the beginning, when we're starting our company, this is a very important conversation we need to have is who are we selling to?
And it's not just in general terms, "Oh, we're selling to women." What type of woman? Who would be the woman who's interested in buying your clothes? And at the beginning, what I see is that many of us are scared of choosing just one profile because we worry that we're gonna leave other people behind. So what we tend to do is try to do everything for everyone, and that is a formula for failure. In fact, another thing professors would often say in business school was something like, "If you talk to everyone, no one will listen.
If you talk to one person, your customers will hear you." So it is so important to choose, not just, who are my customers? Women between thirty and fifty. Yeah, but women between thirty and fifty, we're all so different. Which woman? Where does she live? How does she think? What does she feel? What is important to her?
This is what we call the customer profile, and a great company that works with this, like actually uses it, is Anthropologie. So if you Google it, Anthropologie's ideal customer profile, what you will learn is that it's a woman between the ages of twenty-eight and forty-five.
She's creative, well-educated, she's well-traveled. They even know her income. She makes about two hundred thousand dollars a year or more. She lives in urban-minded places. She's not following necessarily the trends of fashion, but she does care about how she looks.
She does care about what she wears. And she also likes to curate her lifestyle, her home, how everything around her looks. and she also cares about sustainability and fair trade and brands that are supporting social causes.
So do you see how specific that is? It's not just a woman. It's not just a woman between this age and this age. They know where she lives. They know what matters to her. They know how much money she makes.
And in fact, when I'm doing this exercise with my clients, we go deeper. We understand what are our customers' deepest fears. What is waking them up in the middle of the night? What are their dreams? And maybe the dreams they've never told anyone. Because the more we understand the psychology of our clients, the better we're gonna be able to market to them, talk to them, communicate to them in a way that they're going to identify themselves, raise their hand, and buy from you. And then again, the fear when we're starting a business is, "But what if I leave this other person behind?" And I wanted to share that example of Anthropologie because I buy in Anthropologie and my mom has purchased in Anthropologie, and we're two very different women, ages, preferences.
Because Anthropologie is talking more to a woman like me, right, in many ways, it doesn't mean that my mom cannot buy there. My mom and I can go and shop together. So yes, in your marketing, in the design of your product and your services, you are gonna be thinking about just one person.
One person that represents the customers you wanna have. But that doesn't mean that people who are outside of that profile cannot buy. They will come and buy as well. But it is incredibly important to talk to one person
And this is also true if your company is more established. I think it becomes even, even more important sometimes because as your company is growing, it's so easy to get distracted by all these ideas.
And we start creating services, programs, offers because they're showing up, because someone told us that that's what they needed or that's what they wanted. But we forget our customer profile. Who is our ideal person? Who are we talking to? And every decision a business makes should be evaluated through the filter of that ideal customer, that one person that represents your customers, or if you're doing B2B, that one business.
So for example, one of my clients, she has a B2B business, and one of the things which we started noticing is that she had some clients that were very profitable, that her team loved working with them, and then other clients that were a pain, and they didn't even end up being profitable. Sometimes she had to, spend money in order to serve them.
And this was happening to her because she had forgotten or she was not paying attention to who her ideal customer was, and she was taking other customers just because they were willing to pay her money. When we had this conversation and she got, super hyper clear on what were the types of businesses that she loved working with, that were profitable, that, you know, would fit best with her team, and she started only allowing those customers, she started growing more sustainably, being more in love with her clients.
So if you have a business, I really encourage you to make time and answer as many questions as you can about your ideal customer profile. Think about demographics, their age, their income, where do they live? Think about their psychographic profile.
What are the things they prefer? What are the things that are important to them? What are the things they're confused by or scared by? What's waking them up in the middle of the night? And you can even talk about their shopping behavior. Do they like to go to a store where there's an experience like Anthropologie and
everything is so beautiful and curated? Or maybe they don't care about that experience, they just care about where to find the fastest delivery, and they prefer to shop in Amazon and not leave their house and have everything delivered home. You can think about how sensitive they are to the price.
You can also look at where do they like to hang online? Which social media do they follow? How do they consume it? What types of books and articles and magazines and newspapers they enjoy reading? What do they do during the weekends? What are other activities that they do that may complement the service you're offering?
There's a story that the founder, Tom Bilyeu, shared that he started Quest Bars and they started growing really fast and they were so excited. They're like, "Okay, what are we gonna sell to these customers? Oh, let's sell apparel to them. Let's sell T-shirts and hats." And they created a whole line of apparel for their customers and nobody was buying.
And the reason why nobody was buying is because they were mistaken on who their ideal customers were. They thought their ideal customers were people who were eating bars because they were on hikes or they went camping, they were outdoorsy. But when they took a deeper look, what they found is that really the people who were buying the Quest bars were the moms that were in a hurry and didn't have time to eat breakfast, or the people who had to skip lunch and they just needed something to get them by the day.
And those people were not interested in hats and apparel for workouts or hikes or anything like that. So again, think about it. This is a company who was already making hundreds of millions of dollars and they made a huge mistake that cost them a lot of money because they forgot who their ideal customer is.
Who are the people that are really buying your products and what are their needs and their preferences? So again, a reminder that if you have a business, it's always good, I think even doing it once a year, refining who your ideal customer is a great practice.
And then every decision you're making in your business in terms of marketing, you make it through the lens of what would your client prefer. And also notice the story from Quest, maybe you thought you were making bars for people who are athletic, but really the people who were buying them were a very different population and you need to understand those changes.
Which brings me to the second part I wanted to talk about today regarding our customers, and it's our ability to evolve as market circumstances are changing, as our customers' preferences are changing, and evolve with them and serve them better and solve their problems faster, easier, cheaper as, as times evolve because a lot of companies, get stuck on a product and they love the product they created, and they're not paying attention anymore to their customers, or they're not paying attention to how their customers are changing as other things outside of them are changing.
A great example is the story of Eric Yuan, the CEO and founder of Zoom. So in the 1990s, Yuan worked for Webex, and Webex at that time was the biggest and most significant web conference system that existed. In fact, I remember using Webex when I was working at Morgan Stanley, and that company was doing fantastic.
But with time, Yuan was paying attention to the trends, was paying attention that all of a sudden we all have a phone in our hand, and that how they had developed and built Webex wasn't gonna work for phones It had to be something more simple, easier to use. So he went and spoke to the executives of Webex and told them, "Listen, the future is internet.
The future is phones. Everyone is gonna be doing, you know, video conferencing calls, but not with this huge system that Webex needed." And they didn't allow him to even try to build a different system. They were stuck in the product they had created. They were stuck in looking at what had worked in the past instead of looking at how the consumer's behaviors were changing and what the future was bringing
So Yuan, in I think it was around 2011, he decided to quit his position in WebEx and go start something from scratch, and this is Zoom. And Zoom was focused on users' happiness, that it was simple, that it didn't require this password and log in here, and everyone needed to create an account. And the other thing that customers really cared about was that it was flawless, that they could rely on having a really good conference call.
And he had no idea the pandemic was coming, that it was gonna be so huge for all of us to be able to work from home and use these systems. And yet, because he was paying attention to the future, he was paying attention to how his customers were changing, evolving, now using phones, he was able to evolve with them.
And then, you know, now he's a billionaire who had an incredibly successful IPO, And Zoom has become, I would dare to say, number one or at least top three video conferencing platforms in the world.
So the second message I wanted to give all of you today is that yes, you have to be laser focused on who your customer is, what is the problem you're solving, but you also have to continuously be talking with them and listening and paying attention to market trends, changes in their behaviors so you can continue to evolve your business to meet their needs at any single time.
Because remember, the company that can resolve a problem better than anyone else is the one that is going to win. And the only way you can solve a problem for your clients is because you are listening and talking to them and getting super, super clear on what is it that they want, what is it that they need, what is it that is gonna make them so, so happy
In my world, in the coaching world, one of my favorite coaches is Tony Robbins. And Tony was characterized because his events were never online. Everything was in person. And I remember him talking often about how he believed that the only way to create these transformations in people is if people traveled and were there in person.
But when the pandemic arrived, he could no longer host these events with three, five thousand people at the same time. So he had to evolve to doing something online. And instead of staying with his old belief that in order to create transformation, people had to be live, what he did is he actually partnered with Yuan from Zoom, and they created this wall of screens and all these things to create an amazing experience so he can continue to do his events online.
And even to this day, when he's again hosting events in person, he's still continuing to do those events online because he has discovered this huge population that for financial reasons or because maybe they have a mobility problem or they have little kids at home, whatever other reason they cannot travel and be in person, who he could also serve and he had to challenge his own belief and learn that through a screen, he could also create a transformation as I've said multiple times, and I'm just gonna say it one more time, talk to your customers constantly.
Refine your ideal customer profile at least once a year. Pay attention to how changes in environment, especially right now where AI, where there's so many things changing so fast, and talk to your customers, how can you serve them in this new world? Don't try to solve problems for everyone. Don't try to solve all the problems your clients have.
If you're a small company, choose one problem, one type of client, and become the best person to solve that problem for them. And I assure you that if you are the best at it, your customers will be in charge of telling other people about your services, and you will have a very successful business.
And if you want help with that, that's what I do with my clients as well. I guide them through a process to help them get clear on their customer avatar, and then through coaching, I help them eliminate any fears they might have of missing out on a part of a market or not being sure if that was the right customer profile to choose. And also, as their businesses grow and they continue to be my clients, what I'm doing is paying attention to what they're telling me and reminding them over and over again to put the filter of their client for all the big decisions they're making for their businesses.
So if you're a new entrepreneur, let's talk. I can help you design your initial customer avatar. And if you have a business that's a little bit more evolved, that has grown more, let's sit down, let's refine, let's make sure that all the decisions, hiring decisions, - the acceptance of clients, marketing decisions, all are aligned with that ideal customer you wanna serve.
All right, my friends. I'll see you next time. Bye.
If you're currently pursuing a big, bold idea and would love some support, let's talk. In my coaching program, I'll teach you how to manage yourself, your own thoughts and emotions. as well as your team and your money so you can turn your beautiful idea into a reality. Go now to carozuleta.com slash consult that is c a r o z u l e t a dot com slash consult and complete the form to book a complimentary call with me.
See you there!
