Avatar Obsessed

This is the Momentum Podcast.

You should be obsessed with your avatar. When you understand who you're talking to from a marketing perspective as a business owner and when you understand the type of person that your product creates, it will define how you market, how you deliver your product, and how you speak to the members of your program. In this episode of The Momentum Podcast, Alex is going to speak to owning your avatar and what it means to become the leader of the movement your business is trying to create. I'm so excited for you to hear this message. I hope you enjoy.

I'm Alex Charfen and this is The Momentum Podcast, made for empire builders, game changers, trailblazers, shot takers, record breakers, world makers and creators of all kinds. Those among us who can't turn it off and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy, and we are obsessed with creating momentum so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution. Sure, we pay attention to their rules, but only so that we can bend them, break them, then rewrite them around our own will. We don't accept our destiny, we define it. We don't understand defeat because you only lose if you stop and we don't know how. While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo, we are the minority, the few who are willing to hallucinate there could be a better future and instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real. We are the evolutionary hunters, clearly the most important people in the world because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent, positive human evolution and we always will be.

Recently in our company, we had to ... Or we didn't have to, we decided to make a pivot to make a considerable pivot and start calling on a new avatar. As part of that, I've been working on our avatar documents a ton. I also trained our entire membership on how to get really clear on their avatars, and if you're not familiar with the term in business or in marketing, an avatar is the composite of the person that you call on. It's like, who is it that you're calling on? What are their needs, their wants, their frustrations, who are they and then how are you helping that person?

Understanding your avatar is everything in business and in major corporations that I've worked with knowing the avatar is ... I mean they invest millions of dollars in ... I remember working with Home Shopping Network. They refer to her and she and there's this master avatar, they have sub-avatars and they have an entire department that just studies the people that buy from them, the women that buy from them and one of the sub-avatars probably is now men, but it was by and large a female older buyer, they knew everything about her. Knowing your avatar is everything, and with one of the businesses that I worked with, I got to watch this up close and personal. See one of the things that I recommend entrepreneurs do, and one of the things I recommended in my training that entrepreneurs do is avatar interviews.

We have a process where if you can sit down and talk to about 20 avatars, you will understand your product so much more clearly and you will understand the outcomes that it creates so much more clearly. You'll understand what you should be selling and how you should be selling it. Just after 20 interviews. If you do 50, you will understand a market intensely and you'll probably have modified your product and started to see much higher conversions, much faster sales, and if you do a hundred more avatar interviews, you will own a market. I've proven this. Over my shoulder here is [inaudible 00:03:57] three of them, Cadey and I earned those in the last crisis and I earned them by selling to real estate agents and I wasn't a real estate agent.

So I became obsessed with the avatar. I did over a hundred interviews. I understood what their problems were. See when you do avatar interviews, you start understanding what people are feeling ... Like you actually, you can start finishing their sentences after about 20 or 30 and by the time you've done a hundred, you know how to sell them, you know what their needs are, you know what their unspoken needs are, you can tell one of them that you have an insight from another one, and it's incredible what happens if you're willing to do avatar interviews. I share this strategy with everyone and one of the really incredible examples of avatar interviews is when I used to work with Targus. So you know, I remember Home Shopping was obsessed with their avatar, Logitech obsessed with their avatar. Targus' computer carrying cases was much smaller, it was a much smaller company than either of the other ones when I first started working with them and Howard Johnson, the original owner and CEO was ... When I started working with them, they were in the 20 something million, and by the time I was done, they were in the hundreds of millions, and when Howard exited, they were over a billion.

So it was a really cool growth story and there's a major reason why Targus has continued to grow and here's what they did. So when I started working with them way back when, it was when notebook computers first came out and they were not like this, they were like this thick and they were loud and you needed a special case to ... They came with a case, but they were really pretty terrible and so people bought cases and Howard obsessed over the mobile computer market. He obsessed over notebooks. He obsessed over the people carrying the notebooks when ... At different times when we were working together, when we started ... Like I said, when we started, he was about 26 million, went to a billion. At different times when we were working together, especially at the beginning, he would come, we would travel together, we would go visit clients together and if there was someone standing anywhere near him using a computer carrying, he would ask him.

He'd say, "Excuse me, can I ask you about your case? Why did you buy it? What did you like about it? Show me what features are important to you," and he would do it constantly. We didn't actually travel together until the second or third year that I knew him and I had no idea that he just did this constantly, obsessively was always asking people about their computer cases and I just stood there and watched him and he was completely obsessed with his avatar.

Here's why I share this particular story because Targus was able to go and it, and it wasn't just him. A lot of his team, especially the marketing team did the same thing and they would constantly be asking people things because Targus went from just being a computer carrying case company to computer carrying case and then accessories and mobile computing and all types of other things, and as they grew their products in new categories, that were constantly being created, continued to succeed as first run products. That is a really incredible track record to have, especially in the computer electronics industry.

A huge part of the reason that Targus had that is their obsession with the avatar and Howard, the CEO of the company, hundreds of millions of dollars, still asking end users all the time for input to see if he heard of something, and I asked him, "Don't you hear the same things all the time?" He said, "Yeah." I said, "So then why are you consistently asking every time?" He said, "Well, I'm listening for something new. I want to hear if there's a new perspective. I want to hear if there's something I haven't heard about yet." So there was just this consistent obsession.

The reason I share this is when I share with entrepreneurs, they should do avatar interviews, they often ask me, "Well, can I have somebody else do them for me?" Well, here's my opinion on being an entrepreneur leading a movement. You should know more about your movement than anyone else. You should understand them better than they understand themselves. You should know what their issues and their challenges are. You should be able to tell them challenges that they haven't been able to describe. Here's how I'm able to do that a lot of the time for entrepreneurs that are building the team, building teams. I've talked to hundreds of them and before we started our coaching products, the current iterations of our coaching products, I talked to over a hundred entrepreneurs, building a team and asked them what type of things they were struggling with, what issues did they have? What challenges were they facing? What were their fears? What were their needs? So that I understood what the market that I was planning on working with really needed.

When you're willing to do this, you, it completely shifts how you will not just build your products, but how you'll sell them and how you connect with people and here's where it's really magical. If you're willing to go out and connect with a hundred people that are your avatar and really understand them at a deep level, you personally will take on so much information, so much knowledge, so much of a sixth sense about your avatar, that you'll energetically project to them that they should work with you. I've just watched this so many times. I know that there's this outcome. If you're willing to do a hundred interviews with the right avatar, if you have a few that are wrong, throw them out and do some more and hit that hundred mark of really solid avatar interviews. You will magnetically start attracting them to you.

Again, I've just watched it too many times and I'm watching it right now over and over again. If you're willing to put in the time here, this strategy will absolutely shift your business and put you into a level of momentum you probably didn't know was possible. We actually just shared this in our new momentum, or sorry, in our new foundation program where we're helping people figure stuff like this and other things out about how to move forward with their business and how to understand what to do next. This Thursday, I'm doing a webinar and I'd love for you to attend, go to clarityduringcrisis.com. I'm sharing exactly how to understand this crisis so that you can make the right decisions, adapt to the emerging market because it is shifting and then overcome what's happening here so you can continue to grow your business and make a massive impact. Check it out on the webinar. Go to clarityduringcrisis.com, sign up for this Thursday. I look forward to seeing you there and thanks for being here.