Who is an End-User?
Golden Statement:
If you don’t serve the customer, you will become a push sales business and you will be replaced very soon.
It means that if you don’t serve your customer you will end up being a sales business only. The word “customer” is divided into the following 2 parts:
- End-user
- Decision-making unit (DMU)
End user profile example:
1. Who is an end-user?
An end-user is a person who actually pays money for your product/ service and consumes it.
- For example, if you are a soap-making company, the end-user is the person who went to market pays money and buys the shop. If a housewife goes shopping, pays money on the counter, and buys the shop, she is your end-user.
- In simple words, the end-user is the person who transacts by paying money.
2. Who is the Decision-making unit?
The Decision-making unit is one that influences the end user. It has three parts namely champion primary economic buyer & influencers/ purchasing department. If your customer is B2B or B2C in both cases following 3 people will constitute a decision-making unit:
Champion: Champion is the person who might buy your product without paying his own money. It can be in a B2B or B2C case.
- He will speak influencing words about your product.
- He will suggest others to buy your product and he will improve word of mouth for you.
- In other words, he is your champion or advocate.
Primary Economic Buyers: He is the person who might be paying but will not use your product.
- For example, a housewife might pay for the soap that is used by her maid for washing clothes.
- Here, the maid is the actual user of this product but the end-user was the housewife who went shopping and bought it.
- In addition to this, it might be there that you have given the money to your wife to buy the soap. Here you are the primary economic buyer because you are spending money out of your pocket.
Influencers/Purchasing department: influencers are those persons who influence your purchase decision making. For example, you want to buy a laptop or a desktop.
- You will be influenced by tech influencers who know technology.
- These people know about technology based on their deep research. They will influence your decision making.
- You will consider their opinion about any product and they will influence you by taking your mind from one point to another point.
- The purchasing department in B2B cases ensures to buy the maximum amount of any quality product through minimum payment. They have sharp negotiation skills.
Therefore, you should know two points of information about your customers:
- Who is the end-user?
- Who is the decision-making unit?
What is an end user profile:
Why to create an end-user profile?
Following two points give an explanation about the importance of creating an end-user profile:
1. Variety in End-users: Suppose you narrow down your beachhead market and reached your end-users in your beachhead market. Now there can be a possibility of variety in your end-users. This can be explained as follows:
- Suppose, 10 users are using products A, 10 are using B, 10 are using C & 10 are using D. This is a beachhead market of a total of 40 people for you and these 40 people are your customers.
- Now, if your product is similar to any 1 product either A, B, C, or D, you cannot serve all of these users because every variety is different.
- You can pitch only one category whose product is matched by you. You will pitch that customer only. Therefore, it is very important to do profiling of end-users.
Golden statement:
“As a startup, your goal is to serve as many homogeneous similar sets of people as possible within the end-user base.”
This means as a startup you will be successful when you identify your homogeneous end-users from any market segment.
For example, you can identify your 10 end users out of the total market of 40-50 people in a market segment. Therefore, these end-users must be homogeneous.
2. End-user defines your sales strategy: If you know your end-users, you will be able to make a perfect sales strategy otherwise you will never make it. It is important in both the cases B2B & B2C.
This can be explained with the following examples:
- Patanjali is a B2C FMCG company. They know exactly about their perfect end-users which are Tier2 & Tier 3 i.e. Small & growing cities.
- Now the question is why should Patanjali open large stores in metropolitan cities such as Delhi, Mumbai. They should go to Tier 2& Tier 3 cities.
- Due to this reason, nowadays Patanjali product is lesser available in big stores. Patanjali have started investing in their own stores. They are opening their stores in villages and small cities.
- ZOHO is a B2B company that had clarity about its end-user which was a small business owner.
- Therefore, initially, they did not run behind large enterprise accounts.
- Initially, for a few years, ZOHO targeted small entrepreneurs and gave their software to create maximum value for them.
End user profile template:
11 Points Template for End-User
Following is the template of 11 questions that you have to answer. As you answer the following 11 questions, your end-user profile will be ready without any confusion:
- What is their gender?
- What is their age range?
- What is their income range?
- It will be difficult to find the exact income of any user, but you should consider the range of his income.
- What is their geographic location?
- What motivates them?
- What is his motivation?
- What inspires him?
- What are his aspirations?
- What do they fear most?
- You have heard about FOMO (Fear of missing out) from Dr. Vivek Bindra. This fear is common to all and you should fear of your customer.
- Who is their hero?
- Who is their aspirational hero?
- Where do they go for vacation?
- What newspapers/websites/TV shows do they watch?
- What is the general reason behind buying that product?
- Savings: Is your product is better than the product he is using at present?
- Image: Is he feeling good after using your product? For example, if one wears Rolex instead of Titan, it will build an image.
- Peer pressure: For example, everyone around you is wearing an Apple watch and you get excited to wear that watch. Are you buying an Apple watch out of peer pressure?
- What makes them special & identifiable?
- You should know the story of your customers.
- You should know what makes your customers uniquely identifiable?
Massive Action Plan
- Make your end-user profile in light of 11 points.
- Go back to the 2nd video in which the beachhead market was discussed.
- Check how many end users exist in your beachhead market.