About the highest praise I can receive for my marketing efforts (other than the virtual ring of the PayPal cash register) is when I hear: “It felt like you were sitting on my shoulder when you wrote this–just for me” (and that’s a real comment I got, by the way).
I strive to “become my clients” and get inside their collective head. Successful marketing and selling is entering the conversation that’s already taking place in the mind of your prospect.
How do I do this?
Roleplaying.
When I was a much younger nerd, I played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons, which is a roleplaying game. D&D began as (and still is) a tabletop game played with paper and dice. Nowadays many people enjoy roleplaying in online games. In D&D, you create a character which you act out, as though playing a role–roleplaying.
So maybe I’d create a fighter named Smargaxx who was normally a hothead, except around women he would be painfully shy (the exact opposite of me, by the way 
). Playing D&D was really a form of collaborative storytelling or acting. You and your friends acted out your characters (it’s not any more embarrassing than karaoke). You ascribed motivations, history and behaviors to your character and you pretended to be him.
This is both obvious and profound. We can use this same idea in business: we can pretend to be our client. We can roleplay him.
Build Your Character
You can’t roleplay as your client unless you build a character, first. In marketing & advertising, the fancy-schmancy term for this is persona. Feel free to use that word if you don’t care for the geeked-out D&D metaphor. 
You’ll also find lots of info on the web about personas as they’re used in marketing and advertising.
The secret to nailing this part is to write. We need to take our mushy, vague thoughts, feelings and intuitions and make the live as a specific, concrete description of a person. Imagine the perfect client you want to work with and write out a description of your character. In D&D, you would have a list of attributes like strength, intelligence and charisma and you would have numbers for those. To roleplay as your perfect client, however, you need to be more word-focused.
Consider the following as fodder to build your character:
- Values
- Decision-making process
- How this person came to meet your qualifications for being the perfect client
- Turn-offs & turn-ons (in a business sense, of course!)
- Hopes & dreams
- Fears & frustrations
- Goals
- Daily activities
Roleplaying Problem Questions
Here are some questions you can ask yourself as you roleplay the imaginary perfect client:
- What’s the top thing that constantly frustrates me and holds me back from X? (X is whatever successful outcome you create for your clients)
- What are some problems that turned out to be a lot different from what I first thought they would?
- What did I think were my problems and how different from that were they in actuality?
- If I need to know more about X (where X is some vexing problem or potential opportunity), I’m gonna go to Google and type _________ in the search box.
- A friend calls me up and says, “You seem preoccupied. What’s wrong?” What do I tell her? She doesn’t run her own business or know much about what I do, so how do I describe my problem to her and why it matters?
- What matters to me as I scroll through tons of industry headlines in my feed reader or subject lines in my inbox? What jumps out at me?
- I once got burned by someone claiming X (where X was the solution to a problem I needed solved), and I don’t want that to ever happen again. Looking back in retrospect, what were the telltale signs of trouble I missed?
Slaying Sales Dragons
Your client has her own “dragons’ she needs to slay. Do you know what they are? If you engage in a little serious play–roleplay, that is–you’ll gain the kind of insight that allows you to create content marketing that really gets inside your clients’ heads. When they feel like you know them better than they know themselves, sales are practically guaranteed.
Create a character sheet or persona today for your ideal client and start imagining life through that person’s eyes in order to create compelling content marketing and even your next product or service.
It’s not that I’m entirely against role playing. It’s simply that that’s exactly what it is — playing. It’s fantasy. It’s not real. It might be helpful if you know something about your customers beforehand. It might even be fun, entertaining and perhaps useful, if you nail the message based on your preliminary assumptions having been right.
But this is no way to keep up with an ever changing client base. I have a preferred way founded on something much more reliable than imagination. Please check it out and tell me your thoughts on it, Michael. They’re welcome as are everyone else’s.
http://www.startingyourownbusinessovernight.com/why-a-business-plan-is-not-whats-fundamental-to-starting-your-business.html
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
” It might be helpful if you know something about your customers
beforehand.” <– exactly, except there's no “might” about it.
In no way am I suggesting this be done in a vacuum without any experience or
communion (to use your word from your post) with customers. If that's what
you're taking from my post then you misread or I didn't explain myself very
well (probably the latter). Talking with your clients is crucial, and I do
it all the time. Empathy and intuition count for a lot. Do what works for
you.
Michael
Personas definitely work. I once transcribed an interview with one of the guys who either came up with the concept, or who wrote the book on personas. I've forgotten his name, i'll go dig it out presently.
And so you know, I ended transcribing that interview being totally convinced that personas work.
Only it seems like a LOT of work.
Wouldn't it be quicker – if possible – to find someone who fits your target market very well and just interview them. And actually find out from them their needs, wants, objections, etc.
What are the advantages of using personas over a target profile?
Paul
Great question, Paul. It doesn't have to be that much work. You don't have
to write a novel, just a few paragraphs. People love to complicate stuff
because they feel like they're doing something. Personally I think a
full-blown persona such as what gets touted in “professional” materials is
overkill. Interviews with real people definitely help, and you can composite
them to help form your ideal client profile. But realize that the value of
this lies in the attempt to see things through your clients' eyes. To
pretend that you are them and imagine your thoughts, feelings and actions.
Some of us might be better at that than others, but we can all try it and
the worse you are at it the more you need to do it. Anything that gets you
there is good, I don't think there's a right or wrong way to do this.
That makes more sense now – the interview I was transcribing described a much more time intensive process than you just outlined. And that's where I was getting hung up on.
Another thing you can do that is very similar – and this is how I created my first three eBooks – is to imagine what information your younger persona needed that would have made a difference.
So I imagined what information would have really helped me improve faster as a bass player when I as 17 and 18 and 22 – and the answers formed the core topics of my first three eBooks. So that's another way of doing it too….
Paul
Ooh.. hey I like that, great idea! Thanks so much for sharing that.
That's totally cool. It worked really well for me. You can write a follow up post and give me proper attribution if you want…. or I'm always lookign to write guest posts, how about I write YOU one!!!!
(and I won't be offended if you say no!)
Paul
Are you shitting me? I'd be honored. All I ask is that you send me html in a
text file, as I'd rather just write one myself than screw around with trying
to make Word documents not look like ass in a WordPress post, LOL. I very
much look forward to it.
I shit you not! I'm honoured that you're honoured and….all that kind of stuff.
If it was an hour earlier I'd write it now – but I'm dog tired and gotta take the kids to school first thing….and friday is swimming day which means leaving earlier – YUK!
I'll keep you posted….and thanks. Seriously. It means a lot to me.
As a former RPr (I'm still a nerd), I ate this post up. Character development is a great skill to master for writers, but you've nailed it for marketers as well. Nicely done!
Figuring out who your perfect people are is only the first step…this post outlines what one must do next: get in their heads and nom their brains until you have an intimate understanding of their needs, desires and motivation.
“nom their brains” ? LOL. Braaaaiiinnnnssss….
omnomnomnom
[...] Getting Inside Their Heads [...]
You're not the first I read to relate Dungeons & Dragons to marketing and sales. Much like the other it's incredibly on point.
From one game nerd to another, well done.
Yeah do a Google search on “gamification” and you'll find there's some
amazing stuff being done in this area.