“When you’re creating a sales process, you need to have a clear picture of who you serve.” – Anthony Coundouris in today’s Tip 659
How about you? Do you Thin-Slicing your customer’s profile?
Join the conversation below and learn more about Anthony!
4Qs Framework
run_frictionless Website
run_frictionless: How to free a founder from a sales
Anthony Coundouris on LinkedIn
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Anthony Coundouris. Anthony has a decade of experience consulting with technology and SAAS startups. He specializes in designing automated sales and marketing systems and is the author of the book run_frictionless. Here he is:
Anthony Coundouris: Thanks Scott, for having me on the show. In today’s Daily Sales Tip, I’d like to teach you a technique called thin slicing. Now, if you’ve guessed, I’m an Australian, you guessed, right? Fun fact about Australians. Most Australians don’t eat kangaroo meat. It’s not considered delicious. Here’s the definition of thin slicing.
When you’re creating a sales process, you need to have a clear picture of who you serve. Thin-Slicing is the act of breaking down customer profiles into variants according to a significant data point, such as attitudes, all buying triggers. If we thin slice customer profiles, we discover new variants, we can serve that our competitors may have missed. Here’s why I want you to start in slicing.
I’d like to tell you a story about a friction test we conducted in 2016 on hairdresser salons in Australia. The findings of this report would help software as a service company out of Ireland develop a go-to-market strategy in Australia. To the untrained eye, small business salon owners all look the same. However, under closer scrutiny, we discovered small business salon owners were not as homogenous as we first thought. Instead of one profile, they were better thin-sliced according to the attitude into two types of variants.
We call type one variant entrepreneurs and type two profit maximizes. The entrepreneur types fall asleep each night, dreaming of growing their brand and turning their business into a franchise. The entrepreneurial types were also more likely to take space in the CBD, display expensive hair care products, and into haircare competitions. They were on the lookout for software, with audit trail features to help scale their operations.
Conversely, the profit maximizers took space in urban malls and they did not like software features like audit trail. Quietly, they wanted customers to pay cash and therefore avoid declaring all their profits. Their pursuit was not to scale their operations, but to maximize profits.
Now summing up if you did what we did and decided to serve entrepreneurial types today and never served the profit maximizes, you made a good call. Here’s why.
Firstly, you saved yourself. Thousands of dollars in sales commissions paid on attracting the wrong customer profile of the 4,000 salons only 25% were entrepreneurial types. Secondly, you made a stack more cash because you used your resources to serve customers who really need you. When you become an expert, serving a specific variant, you block out competitors and can charge premium. Lastly, you optimize how you serve customers for fewer number of customer profiles. Instead of serving two, you served one variant only. You created a frictionless customer experience inching up your net promoter score.
Scott Ingram: For more about Anthony and about thin-slicing and the 4Qs framework it belongs to, head over to DailySales.tips/659 and we’ll have links to everything for you there.
Once you’ve done that, be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!