Aveline Clarke: Hi. So in this lesson, I'm going to talk to you more about identifying your avatar. So your avatar is your who, this is the person whom you are selling to. Now, you could have more than one avatar. How do you know that? You would know it by hopefully being in business for some time and having experienced either different types of customers, or it could be that you have a partner or like a joint venture partner or someone who refers you or someone who [earns 00:00:48], sells your product or service, and developing those relationships could be really critical to selling whatever it is that you have. So they might be an avatar alongside your actual customer. So here's an exercise I want you to do, get out a piece of paper and a notebook or use a white board, do this with your team, do this with all the people in your team who deal with your customers. Now you would have looked at this probably in some respects in terms of demographics. So where do they live? How old are they? What's their income? Are they married? Do they have children? All of those kinds of things, you want to just outline that really clearly and you want to state... When I say where they live, where they live because you need to know what region you are targeting. So if you're in Australia, you might say that they are somewhere in Australia. It might not be that they are based in a city, so therefore your target might be living anywhere in Australia. You might have a business that is more bricks and mortar and you want to target local people, maybe you're a law firm and you have you work on state-based law and you want to just have people that come to your office. And in that respect, your avatar would be based in your town or area. So get really clear. Then you want to look at the pain points and problems that they have, list them out. You want to look at the way they buy, how do they buy? When you're doing this, I want you to think about in your mind a customer you've had or maybe you've had a few of these or lots of them in the past who have been really easy to sell to. So it's a customer that you love that is easy to sell to, they're happy to buy from you and they might even refer you to other people, have a think about that person. And let's say you are someone who has a number of innovative kind of products that you continually roll out, or whenever you have rolled out a new thing to offer this person buys it, so who is that person? Have a think about all the things that make an ideal customer for you in terms of that, are they a good referrer? Do they pay their invoices on time? Do they stay with you a long time? So think about that and come up in your mind's eye with a person who fits that in your business, then you will have a much greater idea of who they are. So as you are building out your avatar, as in how they like to buy, what their biggest problems are, what they need to overcome to purchase from you, you can think about them, it's like you channel their energy. So let's say it's John and John's your best customer and he's been a great customer of yours for a couple of years. Really describe John as you're building this out on paper or your whiteboard, what is it about John that makes John an amazing customer? So once you've done all of that, what I want you to do is name them. So obviously you'll know whether they're male or female, you need to give them a name. I recommend you don't give them the name of your actual customer because you want them to be unique. So let's say the customer you've been channeling and thinking about when you've created your avatar is John, you might call him Simon. And you want to get a picture and you want to create all of this in a template, you want to create a lovely document, one, two pages, whatever works for you, you want to list it all out, you want to put a big picture of Simon in there, name him. And then you share that with your team, the team needs to read over it and a hundred percent agree with all of the aspects of this avatar. And then that's it, PDF it, you can print it out, laminate it, put it in the office, share it around. That document needs to be used, almost abused. You want this to be one of those documents that you've reached for almost every day. Every time you are writing another email, every time you're creating a campaign, every time there's something new or a new product you reach for your avatar document, and you say, "Is this the right thing? Have we positioned it correctly for Simon? What would Simon think? What does Simon need?" That is the power of doing this the right way and from the perspective of who. You're business needs to focus on Simon first. Once you've got your customer avatar, I'd recommend you looking at doing this again if you have the kind of avatar that I spoke about earlier in regards to the joint venture partner. So, you do the same steps of analysis for the joint venture partner and come up with their name, the picture and everything. If you don't have that kind of joint venture partner, that doesn't matter at all, just stick with your customer because even having that second avatar means that you've got more work to do and you've got to ensure that you've mapped out a second journey for that different type of customer. You want to first focus on Simon, your main customer, and ensure that the journey is built out for Simon. Once you've got that avatar, everyone has read it, proofed it, agreed to it, you've made all the little tweaks, you've polished it up, created a lovely PDF, you need to embed that into your business and your team needs to love it. All the people that are involved in the customer facing aspect, the marketing and the sales need to own and love your avatar. All right, go forth, enjoy the exercise and have fun doing it.