The second eBook of the AI, Automation and Tools category. It takes the assistant you set up in the opening eBook and points it at the part of your business that's hardest to keep moving consistently: finding the next customer. Practical workflows, no spam, no shortcuts that will damage your reputation.
Members ebook·7 chapters· 40 minute read
Chapter 2
Defining Your Ideal Customer With AI Help
How to use the assistant to write a sharp, useful picture of the customer you're aiming at next, without ending up with a generic profile that fits everyone and helps no one.
Almost every lead generation problem starts with a fuzzy picture of who you're aiming at. The owner says they want more customers. Asked who, they say 'anyone in the area who needs us'. That's not an answer. It's the absence of one. The result is messages that try to appeal to everyone and connect with no one, lead magnets that solve a problem no specific person has, and follow-ups that don't quite know what to say.
The assistant is genuinely useful here, but only if you start with what you already know about your real customers, not with a blank page. A profile written from imagination is a profile that will mislead every other decision you make. A profile written from three real customers is the start of work that pays back for years.
This chapter walks you through the process - what to give the assistant, what to ask for, how to edit what comes back and how to keep the profile alive instead of letting it gather dust in a folder.
The full chapter has the prompts, the editing checklist and a worked example for a service business and an online shop, plus the trap of writing a profile that's too narrow for the actual market you sell to.
Start with three real customers, not your imagination
Pick three customers from the last twelve months. Profitable ones. Ones who came back, or who fitted exactly the kind of work you want more of. Not the worst, not the dream. The good middle ones. Write down, in plain language, who they are, what they do, where they live, why they came to you, what they bought, what they were worried about and what they said afterwards. Half a page each is plenty.
Now paste those three descriptions into the assistant and ask: 'Based on these three customers, can you describe the kind of person I should aim my marketing and sales work at over the next quarter? One page, plain English, no jargon. Cover what they're worried about, what they value, where they look for businesses like mine, what would put them off and what would convince them.'
What to do with the first draft
Read it carefully. Two or three things will be wrong - usually because the assistant has filled in something it didn't have evidence for. Cross those out or fix them. One or two things will be right in a way that surprises you - patterns you hadn't noticed across the three customers. Mark those. They're the most valuable parts of the document.
Then ask the assistant for two specific things you can use this quarter. First, three places this person might look when they're starting to think about a business like yours. Second, three things they'd want to see on your website before they got in touch. These two lists are the bridge between the profile and the actual work.
What a useful customer profile contains
A short description of who they are - role, situation, location
What they're worried about right now
What they value when choosing a business like yours
Where they look when they start that search
What would put them off
Two or three real customer examples that fit
Avoiding the too-narrow profile
There's a trap that catches owners who get too keen with the assistant. The profile becomes a single fictional person with a name, a job title, a hobby and a favourite coffee, and the owner starts treating it as the only person they're allowed to sell to. That's too narrow for almost any small business.
Better to think of the profile as a description of a kind of customer, with two or three real customer examples that fit it. There's room for variation. The point is sharpness, not exclusivity. You're trying to reduce the number of bad-fit conversations you have, not turn away anyone who doesn't match a single fictional person.
When to write more than one profile
Some small businesses serve two genuinely different kinds of customer - say, homeowners and letting agents for a plumbing firm, or one-to-one clients and corporate workshops for a coach. In those cases, write a separate profile for each. Don't try to merge them. The whole point of the document is to make later decisions easier, and a merged profile makes them harder.
Don't write more than three profiles. If you think you need five or six, the deeper problem is that your business is trying to be too many things. That's a different conversation, and one the Foundations and Brand and Messaging categories are better placed to help with.
Keeping the profile alive
A profile that lives in a folder you never open is no profile at all. Keep the document somewhere you'll see it - the same notebook as your three numbers, the document you open before any sales work, the file pinned to the top of your desktop. Refresh it every quarter. New customers, new patterns, new things you've learned. The assistant is good at this refresh too. Show it the current profile and three new customers, ask what's changed, edit the result.
What to do this week
Pick three real customers. Write half a page on each in plain language. Spend twenty minutes with the assistant building the profile from those three. Print it out or pin it somewhere you'll see it. Use it next time you write a message, plan a campaign or sit down to sketch a lead magnet. Refresh it in three months.
Recurring principle for this chapter: start with the customer. For more on the deeper work of customer thinking, look back at the Foundations and Brand and Messaging categories. For the next step on prospect research and list building, look ahead to chapter three.
The rest of this chapter walks through the practical steps, the templates and the checklists you need to put it into action. It includes worked examples, copy frameworks and the small decisions that make the difference between a plan that sits in a drive and one that gets used.
Inside you'll find a step-by-step playbook, a downloadable template, a checklist you can run this week and a short list of common mistakes to avoid before you start.
The full action plan, broken into weekly steps.
Ready-to-use scripts, templates and checklists.
Worked examples for different sized businesses.
Common mistakes and how to avoid them.
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