There are many things you need to do to establish yourself as a successful educational consultant. If you’re just launching your business, you have to set up your office, establish a legal identity for your company, create a website, etc.
As you go along, you have to establish regular marketing habits, learn how to manage your time as you juggle new product and service creation with paying work, and create a platform for posting content and communicating regularly with prospects.
Not to mention travel. And presenting. And invoicing…
It’s a lot. And it’s really easy to get overwhelmed and end up spending a good chunk of your time on activities that aren’t really all that important in the grand scheme of things.
Today, I want to share with you an activity that you NEED to do if you’re ever going to achieve your lofty goals for your consulting business. This activity needs to be done once very early on in the life of your business (or, if you’ve already had a business for a while and haven’t done this yet, it needs to be done NOW) and then it needs to be revisited and tweaked periodically as long as you own your consulting business.
When I explain it to you, your first reaction might be, “But that’s so conceptual, so high-level. I’m up to my elbows in day-to-day work. When would I ever find the time to do that?” But that would be exactly the wrong reaction. The truth is, you need to make the time because, if you get this right, it will make all of that day-to-day work go so much better.
This activity—and I’m not exaggerating even a little bit—is the most important thing you’ll ever do to ensure the success of your business.
What is it? Creating your “customer avatar.”
What is a Customer Avatar, and Why Do You Need One?
In general, a customer avatar is the ideal person that you’d like to serve through your business.
I’ll go into this in more detail in a moment, but for now, simply visualize in general the group of people you’d like to work with. The people who need your strategies, materials, and products.
You might be thinking, “Why do I need to visualize this group of people?”
Simple. In order to run a successful consulting business, you need to get hired. Hired to speak, to do workshops, to do classroom coaching, etc.
You will also need to produce products to diversify your business so you aren’t relying on only speaking income. For some consultants, this will be writing one or more books. For others, it will be creating online courses. For others, it might be writing curriculum materials.
And if you’re going to get hired, you need to know who the people are who are in the position to hire you. The more you know about their situations, their challenges, their needs, the better you’ll be able to position yourself as the solution—and that will lead to you getting hired more often.
Similarly, when it comes to materials and products, you need to know who the people are who are likely to buy from you. Again, the more you know about their situations, their challenges, their needs, the better you’ll be able to position your materials as the solution—and the more likely they will be to buy.
You can’t simply create workshops, coaching programs, and materials in a vacuum without knowing your “who.” That’s the kiss of death in business. You’ll end up with a lot of products and services that nobody wants.
The bottom line is this: the more clearly you can define who your ideal client is, the better you’ll be able to serve that person and the more successful you’ll be as a result.
What Do You Stand For?
Now, I think the explanation I gave above for why you need to really nail down your customer avatar is basic common sense, so I hope you agree with me that it’s an exercise you need to go through for your business.
If you’re still reading, I’m going to assume that you’re on board. So, let’s get into how to go about doing this.
I’ll walk you through the first steps you need to take in this post, and then I’ll follow up with another post in a couple of weeks where I’ll go into more detail.
The first step in the process may seem kind of paradoxical: you need to figure out and state clearly what you stand for and what your values are as a business.
You might be thinking, “I thought this was all about getting clear on who my ideal clients and customers are so I can serve their needs. So, why are we talking about me and my values?”
It’s a good question, but there’s also a good answer.
You see, you may not have thought about this before, but you don’t really want to serve just anyone.
For example, let’s say that you are a big proponent of problem-based and project-based learning. There are a lot of people in education who are also proponents of this approach. But there are also a lot of people who disagree with this approach and believe that direct instruction is a better model.
I’m not picking a side here, just giving an example. In this scenario, one of your values is that you believe in a problem- and project-based teaching approach.
Now, don’t you think that your ideal customers and clients would also believe in this same approach to teaching? Of course. You and these people are like-minded, meaning that they would be much more likely to hire you, buy your stuff, and become devoted followers.
Now imagine the opposite situation. Let’s say that you, as a problem- and project-based teaching devotee, somehow manage to get hired to present in a district that is full of direct instruction adherents. That would be a nightmare, wouldn’t it (for both you and them)?
Not only will you resonate more with people who are like-minded (your ideal customers), you’ll also enjoy working with them so much more than working with people who disagree with you on basic values and beliefs. Life is too short for that kind of nonsense.
So, the first step in defining who your ideal clients and customers are and attracting them to you is to get clear on what you stand for.
Here’s a simple five-to-ten minute writing exercise to help you nail this down:
“Exercise 1, Part 1: List your core values and beliefs concerning your work, using short phrases. These phrases should describe you as a person and also your business’s brand. Be as specific with your language as you can.”
“Exercise 1, Part 2: Answer the following two questions in a decent-sized descriptive paragraph each: (1) “Who do I want to work with?” and (2) “Who do I NOT want to work with?”
Obviously, the people you’d like to work with should mirror your core values and beliefs and the values you’d like your business to be known for, and the people you’d NOT like to work with will be those who in some way run counter to those values and beliefs, so the two parts of this exercise are really coming at the same thing from two different angles.
Once you’ve completed this short writing exercise, hang onto it. This will give you some material to use when you start writing your customer avatar later.
The Educational Consultant’s “Two Audience Problem”
OK now, before we go any farther, I need to address a problem that consultants often have when creating a customer avatar. I call it the “two audience problem.”
You remember, above, when I said that you need to know who the people are who are likely to hire you to present? And then, when I went on to say that you also needed to know who the people are who are likely to use your ideas, buy your products, etc.?
I’m sure that the thought went through your mind at that point that those are two different groups of people. The people most likely to hire you to speak in school districts are usually administrators of some type—principals, curriculum directors, department chairs, etc. But the people who are likely to be the end users of your information and materials are probably teachers.
Two different audiences. Hence, the “two audience problem.”
How are you supposed to write up a single customer avatar when you have to convince one group to hire you and convince the other group to use your strategies and/or buy your materials?
You might even be wondering if you shouldn’t create two separate customer avatars, one for each group. I’d advise against that.
Why? Suppose that you wrote up all of your marketing materials to speak to administrators. You’d probably get hired more often to present, but when you found yourself in front of your end users (teachers), your arguments in your marketing materials aren’t going to be the arguments that will be likely to convince them to take your advice.
Conversely, if you wrote up all of your marketing materials to speak to teachers, those who saw your materials might get excited and show them to their administrators, but the administrators would likely be unconvinced, as the materials wouldn’t be speaking directly to their needs.
The best advice about this problem from veteran marketers is to create a single customer avatar that includes key characteristics that both groups have in common.
Let’s take a look at how to do that.
Creating a Single Unified Customer Avatar
The easiest way to do this is to make a list of characteristics of each group, then look for commonalities.
For example, let’s say that you’re a language arts consultant who specializes in reading and writing workshop methodology for elementary school students. Your two audiences are thus (1) elementary school principals and/or district language arts curriculum coordinators and (2) K-3 self-contained classroom teachers and grades 4-6 language arts specialists.
You might brainstorm the following lists of characteristics for the two groups:
Group 1 (administrators)
- Always busy, harried
- Kind and thoughtful toward teachers and staff
- Care for kids, but expect a lot from them
- Often see instructional issues as black and white
- Tend to make quick decisions
- Clear-cut about what results need to happen, but can be flexible about how to achieve those results
- Sometimes make decisions based on the short-term rather than seeing the long view (for example, might feel pressured to focus on test scores)
- May know enough about workshop methodology to philosophically support it, but not enough to really know how it works
Group 2 (teachers)
- Kind and caring
- Thoughtful about their practice
- Flexible in their thinking
- Have high expectations for kids
- Visionary, like to plan ahead
- Team players
- Organized
- Good communicators
The goal now would be to create a single customer avatar that incorporates those qualities that these two groups have in common with your own values and beliefs (from the first exercise).
The result might be something like this: “Ellie Educator loves kids and believes that they can think at a high level and produce amazing work when given the freedom to follow their interests and express their ideas. She believes that great teaching involves as much personalization as possible within a framework that allows all kids to learn needed skills and content knowledge. She also believes that standardized tests and benchmark tests are important (even though she isn’t a real fan of them) because they give parents and district planners useful data. Toward this end, she believes that a reading/writing workshop model is the best approach for her language arts instruction, as it allows freedom of choice (what books to read, what topics to write about), which is motivational for her students, within an instructional framework that allows her to teach needed skills.”
That is just one paragraph of description that shows how a customer avatar can incorporate characteristics of both your key stakeholder groups: those with the ability to hire you, and those who will be your end users.
Now it’s your turn to take a crack at it:
“Exercise 2: Make two lists of descriptive words, phrases, and sentences that describe your two audiences—those who are in the position to hire you and those who would be your ideal end users. Once you’ve made the two lists, look at what they have in common, then write up a paragraph describing a person who embodies those overlapping characteristics while also reflecting a good match with your own values and beliefs.
Again, hang on to what you produce, as it will come in handy when you write up your more detailed avatar later.
The Goal: “This Person Gets Me!”
In an upcoming blog post, I will expand on this topic of creating your customer avatar. We will look at using keyword research, demographic data, social media chatter, and other sources of information to flesh out your avatar so it really “comes to life.”
The ultimate goal for creating a customer avatar for your business is for you to know, in great detail, exactly who you are speaking to whenever you post on your blog, do your podcast, post on social media, etc.
This clarity will allow you to speak to your ideal clients in such an authentic voice that they will read what you write or listen to what you say and think, “This person really gets me!” And when that happens, you have a fan for life.
