How leadership teams can use EOS to define their ideal customer and communicate a stronger brand promise.
When I work with leadership teams to implement EOS, my goal is to help them achieve what they want.
This is not always an easy task—and certainly one that requires work on two ends:
- What do we actually want?
- How do we get there?
Sometimes, ambition is greater than the organization’s capacity to achieve it. This may be due to limited financial resources, but more often it relates to gaps in knowledge, skills, or willingness. Fortunately, success usually depends on one essential factor: channeling the company’s human energy in the right direction.
One topic I regularly work on with leadership teams is a simple but powerful question: What is our marketing strategy?
This often comes as a surprise. In many cases, even the CMO responds with:
“Why are we discussing this here? Isn’t that the marketing team’s responsibility?”
But the reality is different.
Marketing strategy is not a departmental task.
It is a leadership responsibility.
What exactly is marketing strategy?
I recently asked ChatGPT for its shortest definition of marketing strategy. The answer was:
A clear plan for how a company reaches its target audience and motivates them to buy.
For me, strategy and plan are two different things. We could certainly debate whether this definition is accurate. However, I think we can all agree on one thing: every company needs a plan like this.
Such a plan should include practical details—sales channels, the frequency of social media activities, blog posts, trade fairs, and more. In other words, a plan answers the questions: who does what, when, and how often.
Why should we discuss this in detail at the leadership team level?
Frankly, I don’t want to.
But before we can create a plan that truly fits the company, we first need to answer two fundamental questions. These questions form the foundation of any effective plan:
- Who is our ideal client?
- What do we promise them?
That, for me, is strategy.
And strategy belongs in the leadership team.
Let’s take a closer look at these two questions.
1. Defining the ideal customer
Defining the ideal customer sounds easy, right?
Some customers are a perfect fit. Others make you wonder why you ever started working with them in the first place. So how do you clearly describe your ideal customer?
I suggest starting with three simple questions:
- Where
This describes the geographic location of your ideal customer. It may be global, limited to Europe, Switzerland, Zurich —or, if you’re a baker, perhaps within a five-minute walk of your shop.
- Who
Here, it’s important to distinguish between B2B (selling to companies) and B2C (selling to private individuals).
- For B2C: age, gender, marital status, income, lifestyle, and interests
- For B2B: industry, company size, organizational structure, decision-makers, and growth stage
- How
This is about mindset and motivation. What makes this person or company “tick”? What attitudes, expectations, and behaviors make them an ideal fit for you?
For example, an adventure travel company might describe its ideal customer like this:
Seeks adventure, is physically active, dislikes routine, and prefers excitement over comfort or luxury.
When you can clearly answer these three questions—where, who, and how—you move from vague assumptions to a concrete picture of the customer you truly want to serve.
When you bring these three dimensions together, you can create a clear, simple sentence that describes your ideal customer. For example, mine looks like this:
A company with 20 to 250 employees, based in Zurich or Barcelona, growth-oriented, respectful, open to new ideas, and willing to accept support.
Defining this “where, who, and how” is a leadership responsibility—not something that belongs only to sales and marketing.
In sales, almost every customer can seem like a good customer. But once a customer is on board, they must be served—ideally to their complete satisfaction. When there is no clear definition of who you want to serve, this quickly becomes difficult and often leads to frustration within the team.
We often say, “The customer is king.”
The problem is: it becomes very hard when everyone is king.
That’s why it’s better to be clear about who is allowed to be king.
And to make things a little more complex:
Sometimes, a company doesn’t have just one ideal customer, but two—or occasionally even three. Hopefully not four or more, because each additional customer type increases complexity in execution.
Here are a few examples:
- A real estate agent serves two ideal customers: buyers and sellers.
- A food producer serves the end consumer, who buys the product in the supermarket, and the supermarket itself.
- A restaurant, on the other hand, usually has just one ideal customer: the guest.
In these cases, it’s important to create a clear ideal customer profile for each customer type.
Later, we’ll look at how to actively use these profiles—so they don’t just sit in a drawer and gather dust.
The Promise to the Customer: USP
USP stands for Unique Selling Proposition.
Here, too, the leadership team needs to be fully aligned. If an over-motivated sales team promises every customer the moon, customer satisfaction will quickly decline—or company profits will suffer when all special requests have to be fulfilled at any cost.
As a leadership team, we therefore need to agree on one key question:
What can we realistically promise our potential customers—and reliably deliver?
Ideally, this promise should be based on three clearly differentiated elements that are relevant to your ideal customer. A USP does not mean that each of these elements is offered only by your company. Rather, it is the unique combination of the three that should set you apart.
For example, my own USPs are:
- EOS – trusted by more than 10,000 entrepreneurs worldwide
- I was an entrepreneur myself
- I combine fun with efficiency
If a company has more than one ideal customer profile, the three USPs should be defined separately for each profile.
For a food producer, this might look like this:
For the end consumer:
- Ultra-fresh – No preservatives – Support for regional farmers
For the supermarket:
- We take back unsold goods – Fast shelf placement – Agile and responsive to your needs
The key question is:
Have you clearly defined your company’s USPs?
From ideas to impact
What good is even the best strategy if it only exists on paper?
That’s why the rule of thumb is: less is more. It is better to have a few clearly defined strategies that are consistently implemented than to document everything and let it gather dust in a drawer.
A clearly defined ideal customer serves to not scatter marketing money indiscriminately, but to use it in a focused and effective way.
If we know where our ideal customer is, who they are, and what makes them tick, then we also know what we should do—and just as importantly, what we should not do.
In my example, this looks like:
Ideal customer:
A company with 20 to 250 employees in Zurich or Barcelona, growth-oriented, respectful, open to new ideas, and willing to accept support.
USP:
1. EOS 2. Entrepreneurial background 3. Fun combined with efficiency
For me, this means, among other things:
- I do not attend networking events focused on startups
- If a company has an “unfriendly” corporate culture, I know I can confidently say no
- I limit my advertising to my defined geographical area
- I do not waste time trying to convince large companies
By clearly defining these two elements—the ideal customer and the USP—we create a windowpane between the external world (sales and marketing) and the internal world (operations, logistics, and delivery).
This pane helps both sides work together more effectively and ensures that promises made externally can be reliably fulfilled internally.
Ongoing Review
At EOS, we hold a strategic planning meeting every quarter in which we align our vision using the VTO— including our marketing strategy. This helps us check whether our daily actions are truly aligned with where we want to go.
Every 90 days, I ask leadership teams questions such as:
- Is our description of the ideal customer still accurate?
- Are our sales and marketing materials aligned with it?
- Are we accepting customers who are not a good fit?
- Are we using our USP consistently across all channels, or are we making different promises at different times?
- Do we deliver what we promise?
- On a scale from 1 to 10, how would our customers rate us on our USP?
- What would we need to improve to reach a 10?
- Is it time to expand our geographic reach?
Regularly revisiting these questions keeps the strategy alive and ensures that it continues to guide real decisions—not just documents.
Why It Matters
Defining your ideal customer and your USP serves two key purposes: increasing your conversion rate and creating more satisfied customers.
Because:
- A higher conversion rate means a more profitable business
- Satisfied customers lead to higher lifetime value, happier employees, more referrals, lower marketing costs—and ultimately, greater profitability
If you’re still wondering whether it’s worth the effort, it is.
Let’s get started!
Need support along the way?
Feel free to get in touch with me.