Next thing we want to talk about is customer types. Even within a segment, customers come in various kinds of roles or types. I prefer to call them roles, but the customer discovery crew calls them types, so let's stick with that. The types come about from the fact that most sales, you might even say every kind of sale, needs more than one customer or kind of customer involved. It's certainly true of a complex business sale. There's somebody in the business who's going to use the product. There's someone else who's going to pay for it. There's someone else is going to decide on it, etc. But even in consumer sales, things could be complicated. Think of a mobile app that you're selling to a teen. Unless that team comes from a high income district, it's unlikely they're the ones that are going to be paying for it. Someone else is going to be paying for it, which means someone else is probably going to approve of it, someone else is going to recommend it and so on and so forth. These are customer types. Let's start with a typical role of the end user. The end user is a person who will actually use the product or service. In the case of the teen, it's the teen who is going to be using the mobile app. In the case of the business software, it's the analyst who is going to be using the software in their day-to-day work. The thing about end users is they may or may not be important to the overall decision. If you're doing customer discovery and all you talk to are end users, you're not going to find out anything about why that company or enterprise or family won't buy it because you're not talking to the other roles. In some cases, the end user is important, in a lot of cases they're just not that important, they have to take what they're given. A value proposition that mainly solves an end user pain, you have to pay special attention to the other roles in the customer segment and make sure you've got those roles nailed in terms of understanding. In particular, you have to understand the role of the decision maker. The decision maker is the person who actually makes the decision. They have the authority or the clout to decide what solution gets adopted. In business, they're typically an executive or a manager, they're typically a level or two higher than the end users. They may, in some organizations, be multiple levels higher and they maybe fairly removed from the problems that make the end user in pain or what gain in the first place. In a consumer situation, the typical decision maker is the mom or the dad in a family. It's the person who's going to pay for it. You could also have teachers, you could have coaches, you could have doctors who are decision makers for individual consumers, social workers, in some cases, might be the decision maker. It's the person who has the authority or the clout to decide which solution gets adopted. Typically, a decision maker is highly influenced by the needs and wants of the other customer types, with the possible exception of the end user, oddly enough. But they listen to everyone in the ecosystem and they try to reach a balanced and fair decision, in most cases. They're going to be influenced by the other roles. The decision maker may or may not be the same as the payer. This happens all the time in enterprise sales, where procurement is actually the payer and procurement isn't going to sign off on anything until they've had a chance to review it. And they have pains and gains all their own that you have to understand or they're just not going to buy into it. They're the person who has the budget for the solution. They're often a powerful decision maker. They often don't appear until pretty late in the process. They say, yeah, we gotta talk to Ed. Ed's the guy who's going to pay for this thing and Ed walks in and says, why wasn't I consulted about this? I don't want this thing. We're already committed to something else, blah, blah, blah. Beware! Identify the payer early, and figure out who they are, and try to figure out something about their pains and gains. They're typically motivated by cost, benefit, ROI, and they're typically insensitive to the needs and wants of other types. Purchasing could care less whether people like it. All they care about is that it is the low cost or high ROI solution. Now they may have emotional needs of their own that cause them to act differently but those are their business motives that appear. Another role you find in certain decisions is an influencer. They're a person who kind of weighs in on a solution or a purchase. There's all kinds of different influencers. They may actually be outside the organization or family. A typical influencer is a thought leader. It's somebody who everyone looks to, or in a lot of businesses, there's an organization, there's a company that's thought to be the leader. So, we always do what so and so does for their IT, they think about all the stuff really well, we follow them. They get excited by features or value propositions. And sadly, they're the ones that you often meet first when you're trying to sell something and they'll get very excited about your product. They'll love it. Unfortunately, the payer, the decision maker, the end user, all those other people, have to be taken into account. You can't just go with the influencer, you have to weigh their power to actually influence things. A typical sad scenario is that a powerless influencer gets really excited about some product or solution you're offering and it just never gets anywhere. Month after month passes and no decision is being made. That means you have a powerless influencer. A recommender's slightly different from an Influencer. A recommender is a person who formally is asked to recommend solutions. It may be somebody who has looked it all of the possible network monitoring tools and has the five criteria that you need in order to pick, they dream up the feature list that you have to meet in order to sell a product. They typically have a pretty rigid conception of their task. They're removed from end users, they're even removed from decisions makers, they're in a world of their own. All they care about is does this thing conform to their check list? Finally, a role that you gotta pay a lot of attention to, particularly in business situations, is a saboteur. A saboteur is someone who actually loses out if your solution is adopted, and so they may not admit it, and they may be covert about it, but they're trying to make sure it doesn't happen. Typically, it's a person or group who's benefiting from the current situation. Let's say there's an in-house business intelligence group and you have a new business intelligence solution that's going to make ordinary users able to do their own analyses. You can imagine that that business intelligence group is not going to be happy about your solution and they may not say so. They may say that it needs more study, or it lacks features, or this and that. But, in fact, they're against it. Another is a professional who actually gets money from bandaiding the existing problem. If you have somebody who's a consultant who comes in and gets paid to solve a problem that won't go away, and your solution gets rid of that problem, it doesn't take much imagination to think that that person's going to be saboteur. Saboteurs occur in consumer stuff too. If you have some new video game and your little sister doesn't like it, your little sister can veto or sabotage it or make it impossible for the parents to come to a decision. Saboteurs exist in consumer situations as well and identifying potential saboteurs is a key part of customer discovery. Those are probably the main roles that you run across in most kinds of sales, you can imagine others. But most solutions involve multiple quote customers and you have to understand all of their wishes and needs, their tower of wishes and woe, their jobs that they need done, so on. This is one reason why you focus on a customer segment, it's hard enough to do this analysis in one little segment. It's almost impossible to do it for quote, everyone. You gotta pay attention to the end user, the payer, the decision maker, the influencer, the recommender and yes, the saboteur in order to your job. Thanks.
