Next thing we want to talk about is customer types. Even within a segment, customers come in, in various kinds of roles or types. I sort of prefer to call them roles, but the Customer Discovery crew calls them types, so let's, 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, or kind of customer involved. It certainly true of a complex business sale. There's somebody in a business who's going to use the product. There's someone else who's going to pay for it. There's someone else who's going to decide on in, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, but even in consumer sales I think it's going to be complicated. Think of a mobile app that you're selling to a teen. Unless that teen comes from a high income district, it's unlikely that 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 the person who will actually use the product or service. In the case of the teen, it's the teen who's going to be using the mobile app. In the case of the business software it's the analyst who's 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 roles. In some cases, the end user's important you know, in a lot of cases they're just not that important. They sort of have to take what they're given. So a value proposition that mainly solves an end user pain, you have to pay special attention to the other roles in the, 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 the solution gets adopted. In business, they're typically an executive or a manager. They're typically a, a level or two higher than the end users. They may, in some organizations, be multiple levels higher. And they may be fairly removed from the problems that make the end user in pain or want gain in the first place. In a consumer situation the typical decision maker's the mom or the dad in a family. It's the person who's going to pay for it. In in the case of you, you could also have teacher's, you could have coaches, you could have doctors, who make who are decision makers for individual consumers. Social worker's, in some cases might be the decision maker. It's the person who has authority, or the clout to decide which solution gets adopted. And, 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, so they're going to be influenced by the other, 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 there own that you have to understand or they're just not going to buy into it. So 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 oh, oh, 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. So beware identify the payer early and figure out who they are and, 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's 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, that appear. Another role you find in, in certain decisions is an influencer. They're person who kind of weighs in a solution or purchase. There's all kinds of different influencers. They may actually be outside the organization or family. So a typically influencer's a thought leader, is somebody who everyone looks to or in, in a lot of businesses, there's an organization that is 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 this stuff really well. We, we sort of follow them. They get excited by features or value propositions. There, the, and, and sadly, they're the ones that you often meet first when you're, when you're trying to sell something. And they'll get very excited about your product. They'll love it. Un, 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 that actually influence things. And, and a typical, typical sad scenario is that a powerless influence who gets really excited about some product or solution you're offering, and it just never gets anywhere. Month after month passes, and no decision's being made. That means you have a powerless influence here. A recommender is slightly different from an influencer. A, a recommender is a person who formally is asked to recommend solutions. So it may be somebody who has looked at all of the possible network monitoring tools. And has the five criteria that you need in order to pick. They, they, they dream up the feature list that you have to meet in order to sell a product. And they typically have a pretty rigid conception of their task. They're removed from end users. They're even removed from decision-makers. They're sort of in a world of their own and all they care about is sort of, does this thing conform to their check list? And then 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. So 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 analysis. 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 an professional who actually gets money from band-aiding the existing problem. So if you have somebody who's a consultant who comes in and and gets paid to solve a problem that won't go away. And your solution gets rid of that problem. It, it doesn't take much imagination to think that, that person is going to be a 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 it, or sabotage it, or, or make it impossible for the parents to come to a decision. So, saboteurs exist in consumer situations as well. And, id, identifying potential saboteurs is a, is a key part of customer discovery. Those are probably the main rolls that you run across in, in most kinds of sales. I, I you can imagine others but most solutions involve multiple quote customers and you have to understand all of their wishes and needs there, there towers of wishes and woe, their jobs that they need done and so on and so. This is one reason why you focus on a customer segment. It's hard enough to do this analysis on one little segment. It's almost impossible to do it for "everyone". So you got to pay attention to the end user, payer, the decision maker, the influencer, the recommender and yes, the saboteur in order to do your job next.
