The Negative or Opposite Customer Avatar

Leave a Comment / Marketing / By Jeremy Haug

Often times we think about our ideal client and that’s awesome. However, we often find that we have a hard time describing our ideal customer, but can easily tell you who we don’t want to work with.

This is called a Negative Customer Avatar or an anti-var.

This is where you describe what kind of client you’re not trying to attract. 

It can help your marketing and sales teams to understand when they should not spend time with a prospect that your company should not be working with.

Marketing can work to exclude them from your targeting (if you feel that certain industries are not a good fit).

Some examples could include:

  • a certain age range (if you’re selling baby products for example).
  • A gender (if you’re selling gender-specific products)
  • Income range (if you’re selling a million-dollar product, your customer will need to make a certain amount of money) 
  • Location (if you’re local having out of state prospects doesn’t work)
  • Certain professions may not be a good fit for you
  • Businesses or Consumers depending on who your product or service targets
  • Someone who doesn’t have the problem you’re solving (someone with no employees probably doesn’t need an HR software).

While the above is not an exhaustive list it can be used to help define who you’re not looking for which makes it easier to define who you are looking for.

You don’t have to make this long or complicated but it can help your teams to see where they should spend less time (this is often more valuable than telling them where to spend more time).

Ideally, your customer service team is a part of this creation as they are the ones on the front lines working with customers so they should be aware of the traits that make clients hard to work with.

How to use the Negative Customer Avatar

Once created it’s good to let your team know this negative avatar.

Your marketing team will be able to clarify their message while your sales team can start to give examples of prospects that should be taken out of the pipeline.

This will often be a relief as these prospects were not really a fit anyways and it was like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.

If you haven’t yet created your customer avatar you’ll also be able to use this negative avatar to help you to define who you are going after.