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The HaBO Village Podcast

How to Speak to Your Ideal Customer [Podcast]

Episode 20: In this episode, Michael and Kathryn talk about why it is critical to develop a buyer persona. By developing and using personas you can reach more people with a stronger message that turns more of those people into paying customers.

Business leader looking at buyer personas

In This Episode You Will Learn:

  • Why personas are relevant and how they will improve your business.

  • How to develop a persona using demographics and psychographics.

  • The 4 personality temperaments that you can use to help you develop your customer personas - Competitive, Spontaneous, Methodical, and Humanist.

  • How to do research on the internet to better understand your ideal customer's problems and how you might solve them.

  • Why survey's are an important tool for helping you determine the needs of your ideal customer.

 

"...If you don't understand who your customer is, everything else goes astray." 

– Michael Redman

 

References:

Ask by Ryan Levesque

Buyer Legends by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg

 

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Michael:           Hello and welcome to HaBO Village Podcast. I'm Michael Redman.


Kathryn:
         I am Kathryn Redman.


Michael:
         We are glad you're here today. Thank you for joining us. Today we're going to talk about persona developments.


Kathryn:
         Persona development. What is a persona?


Michael:
         A persona is a fictitious description of a customer, potential customer. We will call it a persona. Some people call it persona. Some people call it an avatar. Some people call it an ideal client. What we're talking about is how do you describe, why would we spend a whole podcast on persona development? What's the point of even understanding this and using one?


Kathryn:
         I'm going to tell you what the point is. Have you ever felt like you just didn't know how to reach your client or you are missing people or people weren't understanding who you are or what you do or what you're saying? Like what you want them to hear, they're not hearing.


Michael:
         Yeah. Do you ever think that when you're telling people about your product or service, they're missing the point, they're not getting it?


Kathryn:
         Yeah. Persona development is one big piece of answering that puzzle and essentially the overt benefit, that big reason to learn about persona development to understand persona development is that you can reach more people with a stronger message that turns more of those people into paying customers.


Michael:
         More paying customers.


Kathryn:
         Don't we all need more paying customers.


Michael:
         We need more paying customers.


Kathryn:
         All the time, every day.


Michael:
         We want more paying customers. We want more prospects. Let's talk about this, in some businesses, it gives you more leads. In some businesses that are just lead-driven, you need more qualified leads to talk to salespeople, understand your persona, and or create persona development. Here's what it looks like for us, real practically it's usually a piece of paper. Sometimes it's in a Word doc or something like that. What we do is we actually create them and print them out so that we have a description of a person. We know that our ideal customer, maybe we've got three or four ideal customers of what's going to happen, but that Half a Bubble Out, one of our ideal customers is a business leader who is in a small business of under a hundred employees. They are the decision maker. They want to be involved. They have tried lots of different solutions and they're frustrated and they want some help.


Michael:
         We know that we're talking to a leader and usually the senior leader in an organization, and sometimes we're speaking to a marketing person or an administrative assistant who is doing research for that CEO, founder of the organization. We start doing that. We have a typical person in mind, they're leaders. They make decisions, they're competitive. They want to make sure that they're getting their value. They want to make sure that they're growing things. That's one of our ideal customers. We would design that up and everything. We've got other clients where we've got a company that sells hay. Maybe you've talked about it before, sells hay to people who own pet rabbits. Right off the bat, we know that people who have pet rabbits are our customers, people who don't have pet rabbits aren't our customers.


Kathryn:
         That's pretty straight forward.


Michael:
         That's real straight forward, but it's important to know and then what makes up a rabbit, somebody who's going to have a pet as a rabbit? If you're in the video industry and you're a video producer or you create stuff like that, or you're in the plumbing, electrical industry, or you're a doctor, any vast array, this all works for you. What is the type of people that you want to do? We're going to talk about that today because I guarantee you that if you ever come and hire a company like Half a Bubble Out, this is one of the first things we're going to do after we talk to you and understand a bunch of stuff. If we start doing work for you, this is always critical. If we don't understand who the customer is, everything else goes astray. What you write on the website goes astray. Any emails you write go astray.


Michael:
         Any letters you write go astray because you're not talking to the people that are your customers, because one of the big mistakes, Kathryn, I mean you were telling me about this earlier and you mentioned it. What's the biggest mistake of not having a persona? When you don't have a persona developed and you don't understand it, what's the biggest mistake that you can fall into?


Kathryn:
         You market to yourself.


Michael:
         Why is that a problem?


Kathryn:
         Because you assumed that the world thinks the way that you do and that the people that you're trying to reach think the way that you do and understand the things that you understand. Most of the time if you're a subject matter expert, you start talking about and trying to answer questions that people are not actually asking because you're trying to market to yourself. If you are marketing to yourself, this is what you would want to know but guess what? Your customer isn't you. If you begin to understand who your customer is, it begins to change how you then message to them. Just a really simple example of this is if you're an IT professional and you're selling some sort of software or some sort of systems and you assume that everybody you're selling to is tech savvy.


Kathryn:
         You're probably going to have a problem because even what we have in our industry where we may be having a first point of contact with an administrative assistant who's doing research for somebody who's above them, that person is not at the same level as even the decision maker. How you would communicate to an administrative assistant in a tech company might be different than how you communicate to her boss. It's really understanding who are you trying to go after and what kinds of questions are they asking? What's driving them? What are the places that they're struggling that you can solve and how do you position your messaging so that it's actually answering those kinds of questions. Persona development is a lot about that kind of stuff.


Michael:
         Absolutely. One of the biggest mistakes we've seen in the last 15 years of helping organizations market their company is the entire idea of their marketing to them... It's the number one mistake is to market to yourself. It's the easiest thing to trip up in and not even know you're doing it. We've had people walk into our office and say, everybody like Katherine was saying, tech savvy, everybody, all our people are extremely tech savvy but what we realize is there is lots of research that says that the people you're addressing they don't understand the lingo like you think they do. It's cross industry, we call it gobbledygook. Okay?


Kathryn:
         Everybody has gobbledygook.


Michael:
         Everybody has gobbledygook. Here's a great example.


Kathryn:
         Tons of acronyms.


Michael:
         There is a national organization company that does this really highly respected works, A-list stuff. They do politics, they do business and stuff like that. What they do is they are trying to assess who their persona is and how do you communicate to them. The only thing they do, practically and they do it for politics. It's like, okay, what do the voters want and how are you going to communicate to them to motivate them to get to the polls and then to actually cast a vote in your direction. What do they want to hear from you? You don't want to say that just because you want to say what people want to hear, but what is the trigger for them. There's a couple of good reasons we're going to talk about that, but they did a research study and in that study what they came up with was they took senior leaders in the banking industry. They showed them a video of a presentation and every time that the buzzwords of that industry of the banking industry came over, they indicate it with their little devices they had, it was very electronic and very sophisticated.


Michael:
         They didn't understand what was going on and they were bored and they were losing interest. It turns out that the CEOs of the national and international banking industry actually don't understand all of the gobbledygook that people that are in sales and all this stuff throw out because they're trying to be impressive. When you read articles about what happened in 2008, it was amazing how many people were in the banking crash, how many people were making terms up intentionally, and they admitted it just to confuse people. You're not trying to confuse people, but it's amazing how often businesses are confusing. When they come to us, one of the first things we do is understand what is it you're selling, what does that mean, how do we put it in layman's terms and how do we find out who our personas are. We usually create somewhere between one and four personas and we're going to talk you through right now what that looks like so you can do this because this is something you can do.


Michael:
         We're going to start at a real simple level. I want you to think about this. Who's your ideal client? Most of you who are in business that are listening to us, right now pick three or four or two or three of some of your best clients over the last few years and think about, just think about them. How would you describe them? What type of personality are they? Are they a leader? What kind of positions do they hold in the company? Is there anything similar to that? If you're B2B. If you're B2C, business to consumer, what's common about them? Husbands, wives, single, children, homeowners. Is there anything common about them that you can start thinking about? What's the difference between somebody who makes a great customer, somebody who makes a really lousy customer?


Kathryn:
         Like Michael said, often the best place to start this kind of work is to think about two, three, four of your very best clients and what is it about them that makes them your best client? What is it that they are doing and what is it that they needed from you and how did those come together? That's one really great starting place is to identify your ideal customers based on the ones that you already have, that you're like, if I could have 25 or 30 or a hundred of those people, I would be stoked in my business. We all have those clients.


Michael:
         Well, and then you need to codify them.


Kathryn:
         They need to define what it is that makes them the ideal client.


Michael:
         Yeah, because that's a harder thing, right? How do I know what it is that makes them great? There's a couple of different things that we're going to give you some tools today, some ideas. We've already talked about creating multiple. There's two different things that go into a good persona and one is basic demographics, and then one is psychographics. At the end of this podcast or near the end, I'm going to give you a really great tool that I've discovered recently that we really like for this kind of research. It's called the DDS. I'm going to save that for a little later.


Kathryn:
         An acronym. It's like an industry term, DDS.


Michael:
         Right, DDS.


Kathryn:
         You're going to have to listen to the end to figure out what that is.


Michael:
         First of all, demographics and psychographics. Demographics are, Kathryn.


Kathryn:
         It's simple. Are they male or female? How old are they? Where do they live? Do they have children? What are their-


Michael:
         Just facts and figures, right?


Kathryn:
         Facts and figures. Where do they work? [crosstalk 00:11:27]


Michael:
         How do we define them by just facts. They're in this income bracket, they live in this area of the country, so on and so forth. That's always important.


Kathryn:
         Their occupation, that kind of stuff.


Michael:
         Whatever you're selling. The next part is psychographics. Psychographics is a really fancy term for saying what motivates people. Demographics are who they are. Psychographics are why they do it, what motivates them to do something. To discover some of that, we want to know what their trigger points are. We want to know what's important and we'll start looking at things like, what is the biggest... Here's a simple question. What's the biggest problem they face? What's the biggest problem they face? Then when you define that, start thinking, why is that a problem to people? What would motivate people? This is not rocket science, ladies and gentlemen, but at the same time it is actually so obvious it's missed all the time. Don't feel bad or if you've done it, go back and do this again in your company to understand because you're going to want to go, what's that pain point? Now we use a five point model right now, five or six point model of the before and after grid. We use this grid and basically you have just a small little grid that has two columns before and after.


Kathryn:
         The before one has a happy little dancey stick figure. I mean, the sad depressed stick figure.


Michael:
         Yes, before he's sad, depressed.


Kathryn:
         Sad, depressed stick figure. The after has a happy dancey stick figure.


Michael:
         Happy dancey. Then on the left side of this little grid are five different terms that talk about the different assets. What do they know? What do they have?


Kathryn:
         What do they feel? What does their average day look like and realize you're answering these not in general terms, you're answering these with regard to the product or service arena that you're working in. If you are a landscaper for example, we don't care about the parts of their life in this particular survey that don't have anything to do with keeping their yard tidy or something. If you're a landscaper and you're doing a before and after with an ideal customer, it might be that you know, how they feel. Before, they feel like they work all week and then they have to go home and tidy up their yard on the weekend and that doesn't bring them any life and that's their before. After, if you can provide service to them, how they feel as freed up to relax on the weekend. Before, they look like a bad neighbor if they don't do their job and like they don't care about their neighborhood. After, they're a rockstar neighbor because everybody knows that they love their house and that they're keeping care of the neighborhood so they become a great community member. It's that kind of an analysis. What's the before status and what's the after.


Michael:
         As you're thinking about your customer, your customers, how do you sort that out? How do you sort through the prospects? Because some companies are going to say, you know, we're getting a lot of people that aren't great customers. Well then define the ideal one that you want and walk through it because maybe what you're saying is your messaging, and this happens a lot, your messaging, you thought it was clear when you wrote it or had somebody write it. What turns out is you're making a promise in your marketing in your marketing message that is drawing somebody in that's different than the ideal situation you can solve. That happens a lot of times when you're trying to be all things to all people. First of all, when I say who is your customer? You cannot say everybody.


Kathryn:
         You can't say anybody with money.


Michael:
         It just makes everyone want to run screaming out of the room that's in marketing.


Michael:
         They're not, they're not good. Everybody is not a good customer for you. I realized that you want customers and you want them to spend money with you, whether they're a $2 item at the store, the grocery store, or it's a $20,000 service project. Not everybody is a good fit. When you're trying to build a passion provision company, this is even more important.


Kathryn:
         Because bad customers just suck the life out of you. Been there, done that. It is no fun. If I'm in a passion provision business and I am looking for ways to be fulfilled in my work and my journey, then one of the things you have to know about me for example, is that I really love helping people solve problems. When somebody calls and says, "I've got this issue, Kathryn, I don't know how to fix it." I can get on the back end of their website and go, this is what's going on, or you know what, actually it's all good. This is just what you're missing. Their response is, oh my gosh, thank you so much. I find great pleasure and fulfillment in that. That is just delightful to my soul. When somebody calls who's just angry and pissy and they want things that are unrealistic and we can't give them or whatever else, that just sucks the life out of you. No matter how much money that particular person might bring to the table, it is not enough to subject yourself or your team to that kind of torture. I really hate that stuff.


Michael:
         It's true. It's true. Again, it goes to motivation. Why? Okay, so you got demographics and psychographics. One of the ways we actually learn a long time ago really like this is I understand personality tests are really helpful. We use them for staff, we use them for interpersonal behavior so we understand our own strengths and weaknesses and at the same time we can understand other people's strengths and weaknesses. We can also understand how we communicate and receive information best and then how other people receive the information best. It really helps with our communication.


Kathryn:
         We're going to do a whole podcast on personality tests and some of that kind of stuff so you can look for that to cross reference.


Michael:
         This is a highlight. One of the things we do is we use temperaments. Okay. I'm going to give you a quick understanding of temperaments. Imagine a grid that's just two crosshairs, four quarters, four quadrants. With those quadrants, you have one quadrant is for what we call competitives. One is for spontaneous people, one is for methodical people and one is for humanists. Now on a podcast, this is a little harder to explain, so bear with me. You got four different types of personalities and they equal competitive, spontaneous, methodical, and we call humanist. Here's the way they're described. First of all, the competitive is, Kathryn.


Kathryn:
         The competitive is the kind of intuitive thinker, the creative thinker. The biggest thing that they want to know is does the solution that you are providing give them an edge? Does it help them get better at what it is that they're doing because their goal is competitive as they want to be better than everybody else in their industry? They want to lead the way, so they need to know that your solution, the stuff that you are providing is going to give them that competitive edge and it's going to take them to the next level.


Michael:
         If you take a competitive at home and you're selling them cleaner to clean the toilet, it's the same thing.


Kathryn:
         It's going to be the best cleaner there ever was on the market.


Michael:
         They want to know it's an improvement over what they've had. They want to know that it's better than anybody else's. They're going to ask the question, what's the best? A spontaneous person's going to really have two major characteristics and these are high level, but they want to know... The first thing they're looking for is, is this going to be now? Can I implement this now? They're very action-oriented, and they want to know, is it going to help me do something quickly? Can I get this done and off my list? Can I go quickly? Is it either going to be fun or it's going to get me to fun faster? They really enjoy life. They enjoy laughter, they enjoy life with the crowd. The last one is an NT that we talked about. I'm an NT. Kathryn is a spontaneous.


Kathryn:
         I just want to know how does this solve the problem I am facing right this second so that I can move on to the next thing because I just don't have any patience for longterm things.


Michael:
         Just so you know, when we slip into these, the competitive, there are letters that associate with this. When I say NT, that means competitive. I am realizing I'm mixing terms not to be clear. The spontaneous person, if you're going to speak to the spontaneous person, you don't want to tell them this is going to be better. You want to tell them that this is something they could do now and it's going to have quick results, and if it can't be quick results, if it takes long, at least it allows them to do something now and act now that's going to start them in the right to get everything going. It's going to get the ball rolling. That's real important. Now, if you're selling any kind of product, now you've got two personalities that are really different. Do you communicate that this is a better product? Do you communicate that it does what they want but it does it quickly? It allows them to get started quickly or action quickly or whatever. Those are two. Third is methodical.


Kathryn:
         The methodical. The methodical wants to know what the evidence is that you have done this before. What are the bullet points to say this is everything that we do. They want that features. They want to understand how you got there and they want proof and evidence that this is not something you just started to do last week because they care about the details.


Michael:
         They want historical evidence. Has this been done before? Is there any precedence? Is there any proof? Oftentimes they love efficiency.


Kathryn:
         Yes.


Michael:
         Right? What you start looking at is you start going, okay, these people, this is something you go, they don't care about competitive first. They don't care about quick first. They care about, is there a plan?


Kathryn:
         Is there proof?


Michael:
         Is there strategy? Is there historical evidence, is there proof? Has this been done before? If you can speak to them about strategy and a methodology, this is like we have a... You know what's great with methodicals? We have a five step plan. We have a seven step plan.


Kathryn:
         Your three step approach to-


Michael:
         This is wonderful. No, no, no, it's got to be a minimum of five for methodicals because they don't think it's long enough to be valid.


Kathryn:
         If it's a spontaneous, you don't want it to be more than three.


Michael:
         You don't want it to be more than three step.


Kathryn:
         Because otherwise it's going to take too long.


Michael:
         Now the final one is the humanist. The humanist is somebody who, their primary thing is how does this going to affect others and my relationship with others?


Kathryn:
         Will this improve my team? Will this improve the universe? Is this good for everybody? Will everybody be happier and at peace because we did this?


Michael:
         Super important with that. It's not that any of these perspectives ignore the other three, but what they do is depending on how strong they score in these areas, and it's only four groups in society. One of the things we talk about is you go back to 10,000 years ago when you find weird types of personality tests, earth, wind, fire, air, you know, it catalogs into four. Winnie the Pooh, Winnie the Pooh, Tigger, Piglet. Winnie the Pooh.


Kathryn:
         Winnie the Pooh, Tigger, Eeyore, and Rabbit.


Michael:
         Rabbit. These are things that happen, the personality test, and we'll talk more about these in another, but what they're all trying to do is how do we understand this thing of behaviors and people and how people see the world. One of the things Myers Briggs does is allows us with these temperaments, allows us to understand how people take in information and how they make decisions. That's just a big deal. You can see right off the bat that here's four different groups of people. What group are you in? I bet you if you're not intentionally thinking about all these things already and intentionally stepping outside of this, you're primarily speaking to your group because you're writing in the way you think about it, the way you take in information, the way that makes sense to you.


Kathryn:
         For example, a lot of folks in the nonprofit world tend to be humanists. They are about bettering the world. They're about meeting the needs of people, making sure things are taken care of. If a humanist in a nonprofit world wants to attract donors and funding from a competitive or a methodical or a spontaneous, they can't just talk about what they do helps people. Not that these other three groups don't care about that. They do care about it but what they care about is if you're a competitive, does it help people better than the other organization that's asking for my money? If you're a spontaneous, is there something that you can tell me that I can do now that would help? If you're a methodical, they want to know what's your plan and strategy long-term for carrying out the plan and the mission that you have as a nonprofit. If you just stay within your bubble and you market to yourself essentially, you're missing three quarters of the population, give or take.


Michael:
         Let's take homelessness. The competitive, you want my money to help with homelessness problem. Can you do it better than anybody else? How can you solve the problem better than you've solved it in the past? Are you improving in any way? The spontaneous, what can you do to fix the problem quickly or address needs fast? Because we all know that this can take forever and it can draw itself out and bureaucracy can screw up everything. How do you do that? The methodical is going, look, I want you to solve the problem but I need a plan because I'm not going to give you money if you don't have a plan. If you know that these four groups exist, then you're going to be in good shape but the humanist is the one that flocks to the nonprofit. As Kathryn was saying, and here's methodicals 45% of the population.


Kathryn:
         45% roughly are methodicals, 30% are spontaneous, 10% are competitive, and 15% are in the humanist category. That's how it breaks out.


Michael:
         That should equal a hundred.


Kathryn:
         Theoretically that should, 45 plus 30 plus.


Michael:
         100, okay, 10% are competitives. Don't worry about them, there's only 10% guys. Why?


Kathryn:
         The 10% that run the companies that you want the money from.


Michael:
         Huge percentage of CEOs and leaders and founders of organizations are NTs. Huge percent. What you've got is you've got to make sure that your, again, what's your market? Persona development. When you're talking to business leaders, I just gave you a huge hint. A huge percentage of them fall in the NT category. The ones that aren't NTs, they're spread out in the other three organizations, but there's a lot of methodicals running an organization in leadership positions. There's some spontaneous but spontaneous like to be outside and they like to have fun a lot. They don't want to be behind a desk nearly as much. Those are some things to think about in this temperament. Okay. What you're doing now, let's review real quick. The big idea is you're going to design a description of the ideal client, that's what a persona development is.


Michael:
         You can use a current client or a current customer or current donor to base this off of, okay, these three donors or these three customers are completely different from each other so I'm going to build a persona on each one. I'm going to create a fictitious name to protect the innocent and I'm going to do some of this stuff and then I'm going to describe their age and their occupation and do they have a family? I'm going to use that as a template. It's a really easy way to do this. Then you start going, what's important to them? Because if they're customers of yours already and they really like you and you can find diverse people like a competitive, a methodical, spontaneous, and a humanist, then now you have four different types of customers. You can go, well, let me just think about when I'm writing my website, when I'm writing email copy, when I'm writing direct mail copy, when I'm doing a TV commercial, let me think about those four people.


Michael:
         Now, if you don't have those customers yet and you're a startup, one of the things you're going to be challenged with is you're going to be trying to assess and guess at these things. You can look around and get a feel for this and depending on what market you're going into, maybe you do some interviews and stuff like that, but you can find out more. Now, here's two great strategies for you. We promised this, we're getting near the end. I didn't tell you about this one, but great strategy. Go to Amazon. The first thing you do is you go to Amazon and you look for four, five books that are very successful in that area. What I want you to do is I want you to find four or five books that are successful in that area that have a lot of reviews. You're looking for 100 to 200 reviews.


Kathryn:
         By that area, you mean the area that you're working in, right?


Michael:
         Right. Let's say you're working in podiatry and it's a weird one. Now you're going to go and you're going to look for books on podiatry, solving people's... Let's not pick podiatry because that gets a little bit more complicated. Let's pick relationships. You're going to go out and find these books on relationships and you're going to find the top five, four or five, six books on relationships that are really great and are really successful and they have a lot of reviews. You're going to go through and you're going to collect all of those reviews, put them on a spreadsheet. What you're going to find is you start to look at those. It's like doing interviews with potential customers. If that's the market you're going into, go after books in that market. Does that make sense?


Kathryn:
         Yup.


Michael:
         Then what you start to do is you start to read these reviews. Now, everybody has probably gone and read a review or two or written a review or two but here's what you may not have noticed. Reviews talk about why a book was so great and solves their problems, especially with bestsellers. Solves the problems they were trying to get. They sometimes, if they're bad reviews, talk about how lousy the book was in helping them solve a problem. It often periodically, people will mention this book was great, blah, blah, blah, it would have been awesome or it'd be great if you would address or tell us how to do X, Y, or Z. What you start to do is you see, oh, this is why those books are successful. This is what people are thinking, these are some ideas that they don't like and it didn't help. They start to articulate their true challenges and problems. This is in the words of the consumers. This is gold, folks.


Michael:
         This could cost you thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars to go out and have somebody do this kind of research for you and it's just sitting there in Amazon reviews. Now, the reason I got off podiatry earlier is because there's not a lot of books in podiatry. What you have to do is you have to go to forums and that's the second place you go. You go from book reviews and things like that out to forums and different areas. If you go to medical forums and people asking questions about problems to pain in feet and all that kind of stuff, there's so much stuff going on out there. You can start to pull the way people talk about problems in their own language. Then you might find ideas on things that aren't being mentioned. You're rarely going to invent a new world. The whole thing isn't going to change. It's not going to be, you know, you're not going to invent the next wheel most of the time. If you are, call Half a Bubble Out, I'd like to know because that would be an amazing product to be in front of and be marketing for.


Michael:
         Other than that, there's other people working in your market and they're being successful. Maybe it's in a different city, maybe it's a different area but every good market where people make money has competitors. It's really hard to make money in a market that doesn't have competitors and hasn't become somewhat established. New markets are great, they're really volatile. As you're thinking about this, these are some great ways to it. Now, here's the really cool thing that we've discovered and you may go, oh, this doesn't sound new at all. Do surveys. Now, do surveys like this. Ask less than 10 questions and ask multiple choice questions but what I want you to do is make the second question a deep dive survey. It's called a deep dive survey. This comes from Ryan Levesque's book, Ask. Really phenomenal. Ryan is a great guy. I know Ryan and I really respect his work and his consulting firm and his model and education.


Michael:
         He's got courses you can take, but the core of everything he does is if you ask people, so what's the single biggest challenge you have in this specific area of your life? You're going to get people to answer questions, and if they write those down in a survey and you asked that specific question, fill in the blank on what it is and you're narrow enough but not too narrow. There's that area of specificity. He calls it zone of specificity, that you can find out so much. Here's what's going to happen. You're going to go for about 500 surveys or you can do about 35 to 40 phone interviews and what you want to do is you want to be able to record that and transcribe it, but what you're going to start to see is in the customer's own words, the challenges they're having because you don't want to ask them what they want you to give them. You don't want to ask for the solutions that they can imagine.


Michael:
         You want to find out the problems they have and then say, hey, I can solve that problem. I guarantee you, this is the biggest breakthrough in research, customer research that Half a Bubble Out has had in the last 15 years. It is phenomenal. We love persona development. This is the best tool that I have found to give us good, solid, deep persona development. Takes time, takes energy. You got to go find those people and if you don't have anybody, you can find them on Facebook and start doing ads and driving ads to your surveys on your website. It takes a little bit of setup. Get Ryan's book, Ask.


Kathryn:
         They call it Ask or The Ask Method.


Michael:
         The Ask Method.


Kathryn:
         The Ask Method.


Michael:
         Good clarification.


Kathryn:
         It's because his name is awkward. It's L-E-V-E-S-Q-U, right? Ryan Levesque.


Michael:
         It's Levesque, pronounced Levesque. It looks like Levesque.


Kathryn:
         Levesque, Levesque.


Michael:
         Yes. I mean, if you think about it, okay, this is the deal. You guys can do this. Ladies and gentlemen, you have the ability to do this. This is something that can be very, very simple. It doesn't have to be full of the deep dive survey. It doesn't have to be all this different research. You can start with just sitting down and writing out on a piece of paper describing the ideal client you have and then start taking ideal client and divide them into four characteristics, if you will. The competitive people, the spontaneous people, the methodical people and the humanist. If you just do that, you will go a long way towards then writing all of your content to those four fictitious characters.


Kathryn:
         Well, you'll discover two as you get better and better at it. It's that you'll learn to write even within one piece of copy, you can learn how to address all four areas at the same time, which is a little tricky sometimes but it's not like you have to choose one of them. You can actually craft copy that takes in what's needed so that you're addressing that this is a new and improved solution that's going to give you cutting edge in your industry and here's the five step, five step proven way we've done it and so on and so forth. There's ways to craft the copy in such a way that you're telling a story about your product that covers all four of the needs of those major temperaments. When you start writing copy like that, you start appealing to a much larger population, again, than if you're just marketing to yourself.


Michael:
         One of the other books that we'll recommend to you, it's an ebook that you can get, I believe on Amazon. It's written by the Eisenberg brothers, Eisenberg being E-I-S-E-N-B-E-R-G. It'll be on our show notes page. Bryan and Jeffrey, we know Bryan and Jeffrey, they are brilliant guys. They've written four or five best selling books in the country and they are phenomenal business people. They actually pioneered a bunch of this stuff that we learned from them and from the community that we all hang out in.


Kathryn:
         Their book is called, Buyer Legends.


Michael:
         Buyer Legends.


Kathryn:
         Which is again a different way of saying persona, avatar, buyer legends. It's a very short read. It's a quick read.


Michael:
         It talks about how to understand the motivation of people. It's really what it does? That's what you're studying here and the more you understand it, these are all little fine points that as you sharpen them together with these other topics that we talk about on the podcast become powerful tools in the areas of leadership, marketing, management and finance to help you build a passionate provision company that allows you to have the money you need, the finances you need to be successful today and to grow into the dreams of tomorrow while having fulfillment for you and everybody in your company as you do it. Creating a place that people enjoy and that work. Work doesn't just provide finances. Work actually provides a much broader and deeper sense of the things in life we need as human beings and when people are happy and striving towards who they are and coming together to work towards a greater cause, that's huge.


Michael:
         Persona development can help you find the cash, find more money in your company to help achieve more of your dreams. That's today. We encourage you to go over to iTunes and hit subscribe over there. We would very much appreciate that. Tell your friends about us. Go to our show notes page at halfabubbleout.com/habovillage and you'll see our podcasts there. Leave any questions or anything like that. We would love to see that. Thank you very much for joining us today. We love doing this and we appreciate the feedback we're getting. For all of us here, from Michael.


Kathryn:
         From all of us, all two of us.


Michael:
         I know that sounds silly.


Kathryn:
         It does.


Michael:
         It just came out.


Kathryn:
         There's a bigger team behind us, but from all of us here at Half a Bubble Out.


Michael:
         There's a lot of us.


Kathryn:
         Specifically from Michael and Kathryn.


Michael:
         The other part of the building right now. Take care. Thank you very much, and we wish you the best. Bye-bye.


Kathryn:
         Bye-bye.