Who Is Your Customer?

One of the most important questions to answer in business is, “Who is your customer?” Most companies think that they know who their customer is, and maybe they do. I want you to dig in a little deeper to make sure you understand your customer. This chapter will explore how to do that and how to best define your customer. We will look at a core philosophy and some approaches you can take to make sure you are focusing your business in a way that will bring you and your customer's maximum value. If you are like many companies, you have defined “customer personas” in your product and marketing teams and sometimes in a customer journey in a post-sales team. Each of these has a slightly different view of your customer. The customer personas from each of these perspectives often are very different, and it's important to understand them in order to synthesize an overall definition of who your customer is. Let's look at these customer definitions separately.