Professor Xavier from the X-Men Comic Book (and recent movie franchise) missed his calling.

Profession Xavier is a guy who was born with the ability to read people’s minds and, for some crazy reason, it never occurred to him to get into marketing and sales.

The good news is that these days you don’t have to read your potential customers minds to get an idea of what they want and how to sell it to them. In the last 100 years, direct response marketers have devoted their lives to understanding how consumers work. You can use their hard work and research to market your product better.

In growing my various businesses, I realized that one of the most important things that I could do was to figure out what people actually want.

Over the last four years, my company developed a formula to help small businesses understand their potential customers.

It’s called the “Core Creation Formula” and it is responsible for millions of dollars in revenue for businesses all over the world.

The Core Creation Formula has 3 Parts:

1. The “Audience Core” (Who They Are)
2. The “You Core” (How You Relate to Them)
3. The “Product Core” (How what Your Selling Fits Them)

Once you understand these three concepts, you’ll be able to get in your prospects heads and beat any competitor.

Let’s Get Started.

Part 1: The Audience Core:

Who is Your Audience (Really)?

Most people open up a business because they are passionate about something. They have an idea that others will want what they have but give little thought to understanding who their customers are. Most businesses that end up failing do so because the business owner didn’t have a good understanding of their potential customer. This misunderstanding makes running a business more difficult than it has to be.

In this section, we’ll be going through a key set of questions that you have to answer to understand who your customers are.

The Questions we Need to Ask Ourselves:

Who Are They?

1. My Ideal Customer is Exactly ______________ years old.
2. My Ideal Customer is a Male/Female.
3. My Ideal Customer makes around $______________ per year and does this as a ___________________________ (job title).
4. My Ideal Customer has a _______________________ level education.
5. Does my ideal customer have kids? Yes/No (circle one)
6. If the answer to #5 is yes, list the ages/sex of the kids below.

What is their End Goal?

1. Right now my ideal customer wants to be _____________?
2. Ex. a millionaire, pain-free in their lower back, a pro golfer, etc
3. What about their Personal Life is stopping them?
4. What about their Education/Experience Level is stopping them?
5. What about their financial situation is stopping them?
6. What about their emotional situation is stopping them?

How does not being able to achieve their end goal affect them?

1. How does the problem affect their personal life?
2. How does it affect them financially?
3. How long has this problem been going on?
4. How have they tried to solve the problem to this point? (other solutions)
5. What would their life be like if they were able to solve the problem?

How We Answer Them:

Now that you know the questions you have to answer them. The best way to do that is all dependent on whether you already have customer or not.

If you have customer in your business already you just need to pick out 5 of the customers that:

• Are your top customers (top spenders)
• Are your favorite customers to service (you actually enjoy them)

Once you have these customers identified you need to fill out the questionnaire above with their information. You’ll notice that a lot of these customers will be similar.

If you don’t have customers in your business already (maybe you’re a startup or transitioning to a new industry I recommend using the following websites to get an insight into your chosen industry.

 

Audience Research Tool #1:
JustMediaKits.com

This is a useful site designed to help companies figure out what magazines they can advertise in to reach their audience. It is useful to us because we can learn a lot about our potential audience by visiting the site.

To Use JustMediaKits Follow the Following Steps:

• Step 1: Click on the “All Magazines” Menu Item
  
• Step 2: Find and Click on the Industry you’re looking for
  
• Step 3: Pick a Magazine in your Niche and Click on it.
  
  
• Step 4: Click on the “Media Kit” link on that page.
• Step 5: Look for “audience” or a similar term on the website it takes you to.
  
• Step 6: Grab the Info you Need.
  Using this very powerful technique we now know exactly who reads this magazine and we can use this information to target this exact audience.

Audience Research Tool #2: 
BuzzSumo.com

Now that you’ve located a magazine and got the audience info you can jump over to a tool called Buzzsumo. Use Buzzsumo to dig into what that audience is most interested in learning about. This will help you understand your potential customers main struggles.

• Step 1: Type the root name of the online magazine you found earlier
  
• Step 2: Check out the list of articles that people have shared the most.
  
• Step 3: Save the links to the top articles and read them to figure out what your audience is most interested in and sharing the most.
  
• Step 4: Take special note of the problems facing your audience.
  
• Step 5: Take special note how this online magazine is monetizing these articles.
  

Once you get through that process you should have been able to answer all the questions above. You may not feel like you nailed it, but just going through this process is enough to get close and get started.

Now that we have that down, we have to start figuring out how you and your business relate to your audience.

Part 2: Your Core

How do You Relate to Your Audience?

Once you answer all the questions from part 1 you should have a good idea of who you’re talking to. You should also understand what motivates them.

The next step is to make sure that your story lines up and positions you as the “expert authority”. This sets you up as the ideal candidate to solve their problem. This is what we call Brand Story Telling.

Many business owners overlook the power of their personal story. Your personal story is important because it’s how you relate to your customer on a human level. Your story gives your business a mission and purpose. Without it you just look like a company who is out to take someone’s money.

Just like in part 1, we have a list of questions that you need to answer to dial in your story. These questions reveal how you relate to the problem you’re solving, and how you relate to your potential customers.

The Questions we Need to Ask Ourselves:

Who Were You Before You Were an Expert? (establish humanity)

1. What struggles did you have before you became the expert?
2. What goals were you trying to achieve before?
3. What obstacles were in your way of achieving this goal?

The point of the questions above is to make sure that people know that you were once a normal person, just like them. This sets them up to believe that they can get the same results as you. This is where we start to bond with our potential customer.

Who are You Now that You’ve solved the Problem? (expert positioning)

1. What specific goal did you achieve?
2. How did you achieve that goal?
3. What resources helped you achieve that goal?
   (family, friends, mentor, tools, financial)
4. Why are you giving or selling this solution to others?
   (what do you get out of the deal?)

The point of these questions is to show your potential customer that you are human, but you know something that they don’t. This is important because it sets you apart as an expert who can help them become an expert as well (and solve their problem).

Some Great Examples of Personal Stories used to Sell:

Smart business owners and marketers understand that a good personal story is a great way to bond with their potential customers.

Neil Patel (Quick Sprout)

Neil Patel is a marketer who runs several online software companies and is a content marketing advocate. He built his companies on the back of blog post just like this one. His personal story is on his Quicksprout Blog. It’s short, concise, and tells a powerful story of how he got into marketing and business.

Neil sells tools for online marketers and business owners. His story works to establish his humanity while still positioning him as the expert that he is.

You can see Neil’s Personal Bio and story here. Notice how he tells the story to establish a bond with his audience.

Brian Clark (Copyblogger)

Brian Clark is another avid content marketer who sells his products on the back of great free information over at his blog, Copyblogger. Brian also relies on telling a great “story of struggle” to position himself as an expert.

You can see Brian’s personal bio and story here. Notice again how crafted the bio is and how it answers the questions that we ask in part 2.

Now that we’ve bonded with our potential customer by crafting our personal story, it’s time to tell your product’s story.

Part 3: Product Core

How Does Your Product Fit Your Audience?

So far we’ve talked about how to figure out who your target audience is (part 1) and how to tie in how you relate to them with your personal story (part 2). Now we need to start connecting your product or service to both of those parts. This is going to help a potential customer make the decision to buy from you.

Once again, we have several questions that we need to answer that will help us.

The Questions we Need to Ask Ourselves:

1. How does the product uniquely solve your audience’s problems? (answer in 2 sentences max.)
2. How is your product better than the alternatives?
3. List the Key Features and Benefits of your Product.
4. How has your product already helped others? (testimonials)
5. What will it cost your potential customer if they don’t use your solution?
   (time, money, health, etc.)

The questions above give you an immediate pitch that you can use to showcase why your product is the solution that your potential customers should be paying attention to.

Let’s Dig a Little Deeper into Each of the Above Questions:

1. How does the product uniquely solve your audience’s problems?

A good friend of mine, E Brian Rose, shared this formula with me a few weeks back. I think that it’s the perfect way to tell the world how your product uniquely solves their problems (in a few sentences).

Example Answer Using the Formula Above:

For Stay at Home Mom’s who want to make more money from home, my “Stay at Home Mommy Money Secrets” is a Book that will lay out the steps to making an extra $2000 per month by blogging about things they already know. Unlike other people who teach blogging, we show how to turn the boring parts of your day into money making blog content that readers will eat up.

To help answer that first question you might want to dig into the following questions a bit deeper.

2) How is your product better than the alternatives?

This is what makes your product special and can be referred to as a “Unique Selling Proposition”.

The trick is to explain what makes your product different without speaking about your competitors negatively (or speaking their name at all).

Example Answer:

Unlike other people who teach blogging, we show how to turn the boring parts of your day into money making blog content that readers will eat up.

3) List the Key Features and Benefits of your Product.

The first time you have to think about how to write features and benefits for your product it’s pretty easy to get lost. After you follow the process below, it gets a lot easier.

Just use the following formula:

My Product is FEATURE and that is good for my target prospect because BENEFIT.

Example Answer:

My “Stay at Home Mommy Money Secrets” Book lays out how to make an extra $2000 per month and that’s good because Stay at Home Mom’s can make a lot of extra income without having to sacrifice any time away from their family.

4) How has your product already helped others?

I can’t say enough about how powerful a testimonial is. It’s the quickest way to gain social proof for you product and brand and make a lot more sales. There are a lot of great theories on how to get a great testimonial. A great testimonial comes down to making sure you ask customers who have gotten great results from your product (or past products).

Once you have a customer who is getting great results, you just need to ask them the right questions.

The Video Below walks you through the exact questions we ask when we identify a customer who has gotten great results from us.

5) What will it cost your potential customer if they don’t use your solution?

The last thing you need to focus on is what will happen to a customer if they don’t use your solution (your product). This is as simple as listing out 3-5 consequences that a customer faces if they use another solution to their problem.

Example Answer:

If a customer doesn’t buy “Stay at Home Mommy Money Secrets” they may get the same results as what we get our customers. The problem is that on average it takes 20 times as long to get the same results with other solutions, and you may have to alter your current lifestyle. This means more time away from your family.

How to Put it All Together and Use it.

We just went over exactly how to get inside your customers head and use that information to help sell your product or service to them. We walked through how to establish the three cores to do this and covered each of them in depth.

Now that you know how to dig in and do real customer research to grow your sales, all you need to do now is put that knowledge into action. To help with that, my team put together a downloadable worksheet that you can fill out every time you need to get inside your customers head.

Click The Image Below to Download it and get Started.

Got Questions about the Above Post? Ask Them Below