The primary focus of today's masterclass revolves around the transformative power of defining a singular, shared customer avatar—a pivotal strategy that can catalyze exponential growth in your business endeavors.

By concentrating on the intricacies of one particular individual, rather than the nebulous concept of a broad target audience, we uncover the hidden potential to foster profound connections and engender loyalty.

We shall delve into the art of crafting a vivid, composite profile that encapsulates not just demographics but the very essence of the customer’s dreams, struggles, and aspirations. This nuanced approach not only enhances our messaging but also aligns our entire team, creating a unified vision that resonates deeply with our clientele.

As we embark on this enlightening journey, prepare to unlock the secret to making your business feel like home for your customers—because when you speak to one, you might just find that thousands feel seen.

Takeaways:

• In crafting an effective customer journey, one must focus on a singular avatar, which embodies a vivid composite profile of the target audience, allowing for deeper connections and personalized marketing strategies.
• By transforming generic demographic data into a detailed character, marketers can evoke stronger emotional responses, thereby enhancing engagement and fostering loyalty among their clientele.
• The shared avatar description serves as a fundamental element for business growth, as it aligns team members around a common understanding of the customer, facilitating coherent messaging and service delivery.
• Understanding the specific needs, aspirations, and challenges of one customer allows businesses to create products and services that resonate profoundly, thus avoiding the pitfalls of generic marketing approaches.

Chapters:

00:31 Understanding Customer-Centric Growth

02:02 Creating Your Shared Avatar

19:44 Understanding Your Customer Avatar

28:07 Understanding Julie's Aspirations and Values

32:51 Activating Your Shared Avatar

This episode part of the Force for Good Tool of the Week Series! Each week we feature one of the 100+ Force for Good Tools.

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Coco Sellman, the host of the Force for Good Business Show, believes business is a force for good, especially with visionary women at the helm. With over 25 years of entrepreneurial experience, she has launched five companies and guided over 500 startups. As Founder & CEO of A Force for Good, Coco supports purpose-driven women founders in unlocking exponential growth and prosperity. Her recent venture, Allumé Home Care, reached eight-figure revenues and seven-figure profits in just four years before a successful exit in 2024. A venture investor and board director, Coco’s upcoming book, *A Force for Good*, reveals a roadmap for women to lead high-impact, high-growth companies.

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Welcome to speak directly to one customer.

Ignite loyalty, revenue and impact using the Customer Journey Map.

I'm Coco Selman, five time founder, Impact investor and creator of the Force for Good system.

I am honored to be with you today and help you build exponential growth in your company.

What if your business is stalling because you're building everything without thinking about just one person?

Is your messaging so broad it never feels personal to the customers you care most about?

What would happen if you knew your customer by name, story and dreams and spoke to them like a trusted friend?

Visionary founders fall into the same exhausting trap of describing their customers by demographics and psychographics alone.

Here's the shift that changes everything.

When you email, speak or market with a single person with a name, profession, family, dreams and struggles and joys, you create connection that feels personal even to thousands.

When you build your business for everyone, your message feels generic.

But when you build for one specific human, it lands on everyone as though you're speaking just to them.

Today we're talking about one of the core growth elements of the Force for Good business system.

And that core growth element is the shared avatar description.

So your shared avatar description is a vivid composite profile of one person you are here to serve and I invite you to allow this one person to be fictional because then you can answer all the questions about who they are and what they need and you don't have to really know about a particular person.

So unlock that generic target audience, which is usually what we do.

This avatar is crafted to feel real so you can connect with your customers on a deeper, more meaningful level.

When you share this Persona with everybody on your team, you can talk about the problems you're solving in your company in the context of this one person that you can name.

So the first step to exponential growth isn't a new product or a bigger ad budget.

It is seeing one customer so clearly that they and everyone you work with you feels known.

We are moving into the shared avatar description and it drawing from a previous tool and masterclass where we used the authentic customer experience in that we created the fictitious character that you as an individual and someone else in your team can also have their own authentic customer.

So it's creating a person that you can hold in your heart and dedicate your service.

So this is where you pick one specific avatar that you want to share across your whole team and dedicate your company to it.

In later times, you can do the same for different segments.

Today I'm inviting you to create one shared avatar for your whole company.

You'll bring this avatar to life by defining details for one person, including demographics and psychographic.

Demographics include age, gender, occupation, income, employer, marital status, and other tangible attributes.

Psychographics are values and beliefs, aspirations, interests, lifestyle, health, goals, preferences and personality traits.

When we create an avatar that we can share across the team, it creates a level of specificity that empowers everyone to get on the theme page.

It creates products and services that resonate deeply, communicate with clarity and authenticity, and you build trust, loyalty and genuine connection with your audience because we've personalized who you're talking to.

When you define one customer by name so story and dreams, your business stops feeling like generic and starts feeling like home home for your customer.

Today's Focus Our core growth element is the shared avatar description.

We're going to be using a tool called the Customer Journey Map.

This tool has three parts.

We're going to focus on only the first part part in this masterclass in the workshop, we use the Customer Journey Map and we use the first section to define your shared avatar description.

We'll then help you identify one high leverage habit and one high potency action to move the wisdom you discover using this tool into action and get your flywheel spinning.

So go ahead now and download the Customer Journey Map, which you can get at a forceforgood Biz weekly tool.

It's available this week through July 6th for free.

There's resistance to defining one person.

We think we already know who we're marketing to, so we don't go to the process of doing it.

We fear that if we identify one person, we lose opportunities.

But by focusing on that one, we are too busy, we're moving too fast, we've got too many things going on.

We don't take the time to define one avatar.

It's vulnerable to realize we've been guessing.

It's vulnerable to realize that we haven't gotten specific.

So what often happens is we stop at demographics and never meet the human inside.

So when we go through the exercise today, you're going to need to build a person that you care about.

The final real reason we avoid doing this is we don't see how clarity with one person unlocks the connection to all.

And what we have to remember is specificity is your most powerful differentiator because only the specific feels real.

Now look at how you can empower yourself by having this single shared avatar that you can now talk about a customer as though she's a friend, just another person present that you can talk about with your team so your marketing stops sounding Generic.

The moment you start talking to one person, your team finally aligns around a shared picture of who your customer actually is.

You will discover that every message you send, because you're sending it with an idea of a person in mind, every message feels personal, even to thousands.

You can also build trust and loyalty that can't be faked because now you're thinking of an individual.

You stop wasting resources, right?

You start growing with intention.

Remember that you cannot build trust with a crowd.

You build it by showing one person that you see them.

So that is the goal.

Once you start to speak in terms where people can feel scene, where the audience believes you're speaking to them, you're able to connect and be of the highest service.

When you define your shared avatar description, you move from abstraction to emotion.

Instead of describing a segment, you describe a single person.

Instead of guessing what they care about, you walk through every thought, thought and feeling they are experiencing in your business.

Very powerful.

That's what we're going to be covering in this exercise.

So let's talk about some examples.

So a generic description might be our customer is a female entrepreneur, age 35 to 55, who wants to grow her business.

And then we can come over here and see more specifically through a paragraph version of your shared avatar description.

Our customer is Julie, a 38 year old founder of a purpose led PR agency in Chicago.

She's a single mom to an 8 year old son.

She dreams of scaling to 2 million in revenue, but she feels stuck because her team relies on her for every decision.

She's exhausted and she's afraid her vision will die in the grind.

See how different that is.

All right, let's try another one.

So we're going to look at it now from demographics and from psychographics.

We're going to do this in the exercise.

So as we go through this exercise, I invite you to imagine the answers to these questions now, like name, age, gender, encourage you to make up a name, don't have it.

Be somebody you actually know, because it'll start to bind you up when you start coming to things like, I don't know if they have kids or they have pets or what they read or where they go for on vacation.

Right?

So it frees you to have someone who is not real, who is fictitious, and you create an imaginary avatar and you craft this character as someone that you can then share with your team.

Right now we are targeting CFOs who are looking to purchase data aggregation and analysis software.

So I'm now the owner of a company that is producing SAS software that aggregates data.

And my primary customer is CFS, so identify the demographics first.

Michael.

He's 49 years old.

He lives in New York City but has a place in Woodstock, New York two hours away where he goes on the weekends.

He went to Boston College and he also has an mba.

He is a chief Financial officer with Reddish Capital Partners, which is a hedge fund.

There's about 150 employees there and there's 7 billion under management.

He has an annual income of 750,000 plus bonuses.

He's married to Elizabeth, the executive director of a children's mental health nonprofit.

They have three children, Ben, who's 15, Caroline, who's 12 and Jack, who's 9.

And they also have one golden retriever named Scout.

All right, lots more we know about here with Michael.

He values precision, transparency, results.

He's a professional.

He's rigorous about data.

Personally, he's committed to philanthropy and teaching its kids the importance of empathy and grit.

He's politically moderate, socially progressive and a strong supporter of environmental causes.

He's an avid skier.

He likes to go to chemo in Vermont and he also does some fly fishing in the Catskills.

He loves reading biographies of business leaders.

On weekdays he gets up early at 5:30am with Bloomberg and espresso.

He goes to the gym at Equinox and at the office before 7:30am he's often home late.

He spends vacations in places like Italy.

He likes ski trips to Vail beach, holidays in Nantucket.

He is very focused on his health.

He does peloton rides, morning strength training and fly fishing.

For relaxation, he reads the Economist, Harvard Business Review, Institutional Investor.

His favorite books are Principles by Ray Dalio and the Big Short.

He also listens to a few podcasts, Masters in business and capital allocators for music.

He loves classic rock, jazz and sometimes bluegrass.

He especially loves the Rolling Stones and Miles Davis.

His he is analytical, demanding, private, loyal, dry witted.

His social causes are connected to the environment, children's mental health and educational equity.

So his goals and aspirations professionally is to optimize reporting, transparency, improve fund performance, analytics, reduce manual reporting.

And personally he wants to balance intense work with family time, mentor young finance leaders and and eventually retire early to teach finance.

And so how he has met my company, SAS Co.

Michael first learned about my data aggregation platform from a Gartner report highlighting the software success improving reporting accuracy.

So this is the picture we are building today.

All right then you can take that and grow from Our customer is a middle aged CFO looking for data aggregation software to now be able to say Our customer is Michael, a 49 year old chief financial officer at a $7 billion hedge fund in New York City, married with three children and spends weekends in Woodstock, New York.

He's committed to precision and rigorous data driven decisions.

He feels frustrated by the inefficiency of manual reporting and the risks of errors.

He dreams of optimizing analytics and transparency across the firm so he can protect investors, empower his team and eventually retire to teach finance.

This is what we're looking for today.

It's important to know that neuroscience shows focusing on one specific customer rather than a vague demographic has a powerful effect on both your team and your audience.

When your team creates messaging or experiences with a vivid, real customer in mind, they produce more authentic, emotional, resonant content.

This is because the brain's mirror neuron system is activated by specificity.

When we imagine or observe the detailed experiences of one person, our own neural circuits for empathy and understanding are engaged.

This makes it easier for teams to step into the customer's shoes and craft messages that truly speak to the real needs and feelings of who you are meant to serve.

Now for your audience.

For your customer, this radical specificity means that they are far more likely to feel seen.

So even though you might be speaking to someone who doesn't have the exact description, because you're speaking to someone, they are more likely to feel seen.

Neuroscientific studies confirm stories about specific specific individuals rather than abstract groups trigger stronger emotional responses and deeper trust.

This creates instant resonance and trust, making your brand feel genuine and personal.

So where does this fit?

Where does this fit in the full force?

For good platform, look at the four page Growth plan.

The four page growth plan is your whole system for growth in just four pages.

It's your strategic plan for growth.

And on page one on the second part of the page we have know who you serve.

When you develop the shared avatar description, it empowers you to go back to this section on page one to refine it.

We're going to go ahead and open up the Customer Journey Map and again we're going to focus only on the first section today.

You can pick up the Customer Journey Map at of course for good Bid Weekly Tool so here's the tool itself and you'll see that the first section in the customer journey map is dedicated to helping you construct this shared avatar.

All right.

And so we are going to go through this journey of defining your avatar.

Go ahead.

Right now get yourself into a place where you can hear your answers, where you're free in your own mind to hear impulses from within.

Be creative and playful and fun, just like a child would.

You're going to make up a character here and know that you might change it later and that's fine.

Today you're just going to give yourself permission to answer all the questions, make them all up.

I'm going to give you along the way some examples of specific answers so that it hopefully perks you up to give specific answers in your description.

This is through the lens of a company that sells children's shoelaces.

Now you might have heard of this fictitious company in A Force for Good my book, we use it a couple times.

It's a very simple company.

All right, so who is your avatar?

Give them a name.

So in this case the example is Julie and how old are they?

And again, you're not going to give a range because nobody's arranged.

Right?

We're all one age.

So Julie's 34.

And what's her gender in this case, Julie happens to be female.

And where does she live?

She lives in Brooklyn.

That's who we're talking about today.

Julie, age 34, female, living in Brooklyn.

And where did she go to school?

She went to Binghamton High for high school and then Utica College and studied accounting.

Right now she's getting her MBA at night and her occupation is that she's a mom and a part time bookkeeper.

Her annual income is $50,000 per year and she has a spouse who is making $200,000 per year.

And is she married?

Yes, she's married to 38 year old Martha who is an architect.

So they have one child, five year old Pearl.

And of course this is the child that they are going to need shoelaces.

They also have a dog named Puddles who happens to be a 10 year old Brown mutt.

So now just take a moment and ask yourself these questions about your avatar and have fun.

Let them be colorful and interesting and delightful in the way that your company would be like, yes, this is exactly the kind of person that I want to serve.

That would really resonate with what we offer and our values and how we bring to life.

Solutions people need.

So in this case the company is selling educational shoelaces, shoelaces that help children Learn how to tie their shoes easily.

It's for children who are at that age, pre K and decay.

That's the company we're thinking about right now.

But as you think about your company, what's the situation for your target customer, your shared avatar?

All right, we did the demographic information.

Now we're going to look at this psychographic information.

This is the way they think.

This is what their belief systems are.

This paints a picture of who they are as a person.

So what are their values?

Ask yourself, what are the values and beliefs of this person?

So what's important to them?

What do they prioritize?

What are their political beliefs and what are their religious beliefs?

In this case, Shirley loves being a mom.

She wants to make sure her daughter Pearl has everything she needs.

Education is important to Julie.

Julie is a Democrat who fights for equality and justice for underrepresented people.

Gay herself, she is active in the LGBTQ community, cares about sustainability, family and career growth.

Answer the question for yourself.

What are the values and beliefs of your avatar?

Have some fun.

What do they believe?

What's important to them?

Next comes interests and hobbies.

Think about their name, who they are, where they live, their circumstances.

What are their interests and hobbies.

What are activities they enjoy?

To which clubs might they belong?

Which sport teams do they love?

What do they do for culture?

Answer those questions.

Just make it up.

Imagine who this person might be.

Julie is a long time New York Yankees fan, belongs to the Park Slope Food Co Op, plays softball in Prospect park on Sundays, visits the library with Pearl two or three times each week.

So now you're getting a sense this is who she is next.

What's her lifestyle?

What are the daily routines, social activities and travel habits?

What did this person do last Saturday?

What are they doing for social fun with friends next week?

So be clear, what's their life like?

For Julie, kindergarten drop off at Brooklyn Montessori is what she does every morning.

Then she runs home to work for a few hours and then she meets up with other moms and kids in the park or at the museum.

She loves the picnic with concert in the park with Martha and Pearl.

This gives you a picture of her life and her lifestyle.

Write down what you're seeing for your avatar and notice how you're starting to fall in love with this person.

This is who my company is meant to serve.

This is the person I care about.

This is somebody whose life and challenges I relate to, not because I'm like them, but because I understand and I want to serve them.

So next is Vacations?

What kind of vacations do they prefer?

Beach, adventure, culture, culinary luxury?

Julie loves an Airbnb near a beach where she can kayak, paddle board and read.

Julie dreams of going on a bike trip to Portugal with Martha.

So what are the things they love to do?

Is it a road trip?

Is it taking their kids camping?

Is it going on a safari?

Is it a cruise across Europe?

What is it that this person is loving to do?

Just understand their dreams in this way and then consider their health.

Are they healthy?

Do they have a sedentary lifestyle?

Are they challenged with health?

What are the things that give them activity?

What fitness activities or sports do they participate in?

Do they get involved with gym, yoga, running, dance or team sports?

Then you can go on and look at their things that entertain them.

Books, magazines and podcasts, the kind of media they consume.

Write down what that might be.

Julie loves the book Untamed by Glennon Doyle.

She also loves the New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander.

She reads several magazines including National Geographic, Sierra Magazine and the New Yorker.

So those are some of the things that you can start to know about who she is.

Write down what books, magazines and podcasts that this person might listen to and read.

And then what kind of music is in their background?

What do they listen to?

What genre?

What favorite artists?

What streaming services do they listen to?

Julie loves indie, folk, pop and singer, songwriter music.

Loves Randy Carlisle, Fleetwood Mac, Florence and the Machine and the Lumineers.

All right, so see how specific this is.

Write down the personality of your shared avatar.

Are they extroverted, introverted, adventurous, cautious, creative, friendly.

What are they?

Julie happens to be nurturing, dedicated, socially conscious, ambitious, active, community oriented.

What about social causes?

What social causes or charities do they support?

She's involved with the Human Rights Campaign, the Brooklyn Montessori P.

TA and she gives to the Sierra Club.

Think about their goals and aspirations.

Comb into Avatar and really have a sense for their goals and aspirations.

What are their personal and professional goals, desires and dreams?

And you want to have things that are general to who they are that have nothing to do with your product and service.

But you also want to have some in there that indicate how your product or service is important to them and the goals they're trying to achieve through your company.

So in the case of Julie, Julie wants to provide the best education and upbringing for her daughter Pearl.

She wants to maintain a healthy, active lifestyle with her family.

She wants to continue being an active and supportive supported member of the LGBTQ community.

She really wants to complete her MBA and advance her career in accounting, she wants to foster a supportive and loving environment for her family, for Pearl and Martha.

So now you have a sense of who she is.

Now you've created a person with a name and an age and a place they live and a family and a dar, then a fish and things they read and places they go on the weekends and daily routine.

So now imagine this person has come across your company.

How did they find your company?

Google search friend Recommendation ad on TikTok at a conference, on a billboard, how they come across you, Right?

And what was that experience like?

Julie came across savvy killing shoelaces when picking up her daughter at kindergarten.

She sees another child using the wide colorful laces and notices the child successfully making the bunny ears while trying to help Pearl get her fingers to tie her own shoelaces.

So that's where the journey begins with your customer.

And then they have this moment where they run into you.

This is as far as we go with the customer journey map.

Right?

Now take a moment and really digest what you've created, who this person is, and distill it down to a paragraph or two.

You have all the specific psychographic information and demographic information in clear bullets.

Then you have a paragraph, right?

And that paragraph can help you to describe among your team who they are.

So now you have really taken a moment to get clear and specific about one shared avatar and you can continue to home on this and connect with your team about this avatar and continue to grow who this person is.

So hopefully you're starting to see ways that you might have been marketing to a crowd and where now you can speak to one human and how that will engage your heart, your spirit, your team's alignment all at once.

And so that what you put into your materials suddenly becomes so much more personal, much more resonant in your audience.

So hopefully you're starting to see the power and fun and pleasure of knowing a single customer's life and story in detail.

Notice how knowing one customer's life helps you understand all of their lives.

So remember that when you speak to one specific person, thousands feel seen.

Now we're going to update your four page growth plan.

So now you're going to go back into each of these boxes and you might see some little ways you want to tweak so who they are, what they need and might be more detail.

You might upgrade your who, what statement.

You might understand their triggers, why they're triggered.

To buy the example, Julie was picking up her daughter from school and she saw another little girl with those shoelaces and that made the bunny so easy.

Julie was like, I need to go straight now for my daughter Pearl.

You might speak more clearly what you offer.

It might not be a change in what you offer, but how you describe it could help you develop your position statement.

Make it even more sharp, more articulate, more exact, more honest.

And you'll also start to see where you have your area of chosen greatness.

You might also start to have a sense for the feelings that they want to feel.

What are the feelings your shared avatar wants to have?

Are there any customer experience improvements you want to adjust?

This is how we are upgrading the four page growth plan this week.

Let's turn your ideas and wisdom into action.

The first way is through instituting rituals.

High leverage habits are repeatable practices that almost guarantee results.

All right, what weekly habit will keep you and your team aligned with your shared avatar description?

So perhaps the beginning of every marketing meaning you review your avatar.

Paragraph.

You might keep your avatar printed at every workstation.

You might share a weekly customer story with the team and reflect on how they're like or dissimilar from the avatar.

You might role play sales conversations every week with your avatar in mind.

So these are some ways that you can activate again and again so that it's not that you think about the shared avatar once, but you think about it every week, every day, every month.

Remember, clarity about one customer unlocks alignment in every department from product to sales to service.

Especially when you use these rituals to stay connected.

See the idea?

What is a high potency action?

That's the next question.

So we want to take one big action one time, high impact action to boost growth.

What action will you take this week to build connection?

Maybe you need to rewrite your homepage headline to speak directly to your shared avatar.

Maybe you decide you want to share your avatar description in all your in your next All Hands meeting, I invite you to interview three customers to further validate your avatar.

Find out more about their personal life, what they read, where they go on vacation, what their daily routine looks like, what their family looks like, where they give, et cetera.

Get it from three different individual people and then come back to your shared avatar and make some small tweaks and adjustments that help make this human that you just crafted even more human to you.

You could create a video describing your avatar's day and why you care.

If your customer doesn't see themselves in the stories you're telling, they will never believe you can help them.

So make sure that you have one voice that you're speaking to.

When you're talking through your email or your marketing or you're building your product, remember you're always speaking to one individual Persona, one avatar and that will give you the power to really speak and be heard.

So we did a lot Today you created your shared avatar description.

You also learned how to use the first section of the Customer Journey Map.

You improved your four page growth plan.

If you're doing these master classes every week, you're noticing a habit, you're using a new tool, pouring your wisdom into it, and then upgrading your four page growth plan.

See how that is a high leverage habit.

You also defined a high leverage habit statement specific to your shared avatar and one high potency action to put the shared avatar into place.

Your shared avatar description transforms guesswork into growth.

That is the goal of what we are doing here at Horse For Good.

So next I invite you to be sure to pick up the book A Force for Good.

The shared avatar is in chapter seven.

When you get the book, you'll also get the full Force for Good toolkit.

So a ForceForGood biz book is where you get the book and also be sure you are signed up for the Force for Good Tool of the Week.

Every week we launch a masterclass like this one and you've got the recording and links and it gives you access for the week to a specific tool like today, the Customer Journey Map.

You can get this at A forceforgood Biz weekly tool.

If you are ready to get your flywheel going, I encourage you to sign up for the Growth Accelerator.

It's how you can most efficiently install the Full Force for Good system.

A system of propelling X exponential high impact growth into your company.

It's a 12 module system.

It has video tools and assessments.

You can do it alone or with your team.

Tiered pricing starts at just $599 and there is a option that you can pay over time.

So a ForceForGood biz accelerator is where you can learn more.

Finally, thank you for being here and for being a part of this journey.

Thank you for creating a business that makes a difference.

The world is made better by women led business.

So let's all go make the world a better place.