The sixth eBook in the Foundations category. It walks the customer choice in detail - the cost of trying to serve everyone, the four-criteria fit test, the high-value segment patterns to look for, the profile sheet that turns a segment into a real person, and the way to commit to a first target market without closing doors forever.
Members ebook·5 chapters· 15 minute read
Chapter 1
Why Not Everyone Is Your Customer
The hidden cost of trying to serve everyone, in plain numbers and visible symptoms.
The everyone-customer is invisible. Owners who serve everyone don't realise they do, because they're never actively excluding anyone. They're just answering whatever enquiries come in and writing copy that won't put anyone off. The result is a business that looks open and feels stuck.
The cost shows up in five places - the website, the marketing, the offer, the conversation and the price. Each one quietly underperforms because none of them was designed for anyone in particular. None of the underperformance is dramatic. Together it adds up to a business that has to work twice as hard for the same revenue.
This chapter makes the cost visible. The next chapter starts the work of choosing.
The full chapter has the five symptoms of the everyone-business, the maths of speaking to everyone versus speaking to one and the conversation that usually surfaces the problem.
The five symptoms
You're serving everyone if
Your homepage headline could fit a competitor in a different city
Your enquiries arrive from wildly different customer types
Your conversion rate is low and uneven
Your prices have to flex on every quote because the customers vary
Your marketing channels feel like a guessing game
If three of these are true, the business is currently aimed at everyone. None of the symptoms is fatal on its own. Together they hold the business at the size it is. The fix is the choice this eBook walks.
The maths of speaking to one customer
A homepage written for everyone might convert at one and a half percent. A homepage written for one specific customer who recognises themselves in the first sentence might convert at four percent. That's nearly three times the revenue from the same traffic, with the same product, at the same price. Nothing else in marketing returns that kind of multiple from a single afternoon's work.
Why owners resist it
Three reasons, in order. Fear of leaving money on the table - if I aim at landlords, what about the homeowner who calls? Fear of being boxed in - what if landlords go quiet next year? Fear of being wrong - what if I pick the wrong segment? All three are answered the same way: the choice is for one quarter, and the page on the wall can be rewritten the next.
The conversation that surfaces the problem
The fastest way to see whether you're serving everyone is to ask one trusted customer to describe what your business does in one sentence. Then ask three more. If the four sentences don't match, the business is serving four different customers - and none of them well. Owners are usually surprised by the answers. The surprise is the data.
What it costs to keep deferring the choice
Each quarter without the choice, three things happen. Marketing spend converts at the lower rate. New hires and freelancers can't be briefed clearly. The owner ends up in the middle of every decision because the criteria for what fits aren't written down. Compound those over a year and the cost of not choosing is much larger than the cost of choosing the slightly wrong segment first time.
What to do this week
Run the four-customer sentence test. Ask four real customers, separately, to describe what your business does in one sentence. Write the four sentences side by side. If they don't match, you have your answer about whether the business is currently aimed at everyone.
The recurring principle this chapter sits on is start with the customer. Without the customer choice, every other decision drifts. The next chapter, Customer Fit and Buying Likelihood, gives you the test that ranks plausible customers against each other.
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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