Produce a one-page profile and two personas, which you will use to build every list in this course.
Put your notes from lessons 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3 onto one page, then test that page against ten real names. Right now you probably have three piles from lesson 1.1, a couple of personas from lesson 1.2 and a list of triggers from lesson 1.3. Notes kept in three separate places do not get used, so you need one page you can glance at and act on, and every list you build for the rest of the course starts from it.
Say you have forty minutes to build a call list on a busy Tuesday afternoon. You won't open three files. You'll read one page in under a minute and start searching. Building the page takes about twenty-five minutes, and it has three bands: traits on top, two personas in the middle, and triggers and warning signs at the bottom.
Start with the traits. Go back to the sorting you did in lesson 1.1 and compare the clone pile (the good fits you want more of) with the avoid pile. Look for what the clone pile had that the avoid pile lacked, checking size, sector, life stage and recent changes first.
Each trait must be an outside-visible trait, meaning you can check it without meeting the prospect, using a company website, a LinkedIn page, a job ad, or a walk past the shopfront. "Values good bookkeeping" does not count, because you cannot see it until you are sitting across from the person.
Aim for four to six traits. With fewer than four, the profile is too loose to tell you who to skip. With more than six, almost nobody you search for will match all of them.
Mei, a bookkeeper in Singapore (an invented example), ended up with five traits. Her clients are food and beverage businesses in Singapore with two to five outlets. The founder still runs the business day to day. The business already uses a cloud accounting tool, but nobody in-house knows it well. There are no full-time finance staff. The business is growing, with a new outlet opened or planned in the last twelve months.
Darren, an adviser (also an invented example), works with households, so his traits are about life stage and work. His clients are aged roughly 27 to 35 and married or about to be. Their first child is on the way or under two. They are salaried and have a few years in their career. Mei and Darren follow the same steps and end up with very different pages, because she works with food and beverage businesses and he works with households.
Bring in the two personas from lesson 1.2 and cut each one to three lines: the role, the problem in the persona's own words, and their main fear. Keep the full half-page versions in your notes, since the page only needs enough to jog your memory before a call.
Put the problem in quotation marks, because it uses phrases real clients said. In module 4 these phrases are the starting point for your email first lines.
Mei's first persona is the founder. The problem is "I never know if we actually made money this month", and the fear is paying for help that still leaves the founder doing the work. Her second persona is the co-founder or partner who signs off the money. The problem is "Why do we need another monthly cost?", and the fear is a contract that is hard to leave.
At the bottom of the page, list five trigger events. A trigger event is a visible change that suggests a prospect may need you, and each one goes on the page with the place you would see it. Mei's five triggers are:
a new outlet (seen on social media or in lease news) a job ad for an accounts executive (on job portals) the founder posting about a funding round or a bank loan a bad month of reviews mentioning wrong change or missing orders a co-founder leaving
Darren's triggers include a wedding, a pregnancy announcement, key collection for a first home, and a new job.
Next, list three warning signs of poor fit, mostly taken from your avoid pile. A warning sign does not mean you turn the business away. It means you do not go looking for that kind of client, and you ask harder questions before you commit time to one. Mei's three warning signs are a single stall whose main question is price, a business that wants year-end accounts done in a week with no records kept, and an owner who says the last three bookkeepers were all useless. One of Darren's warning signs is friends who would buy only as a favour, which is the pattern that lapsed in his first year.
A profile that matches nobody will never fill a call list, so test it. Write down ten real people or companies who fit every trait, and next to each one note the trigger or trait that put them on the list. Mei listed ten actual cafe groups, with notes like "opened a fourth outlet in March" or "hiring an accounts executive". Darren listed ten people from his contacts, his alumni group or LinkedIn, with notes like "first child born last month".
If you get stuck, for example at four names, the profile is too narrow for your market. Widen one trait and try again. Mei could change "two to five outlets" to "two to eight". Darren could widen the age range or include couples planning a child. Change only one trait per round, so you know which trait was holding you back.
If names come too easily, for example fifty in ten minutes (also illustrative), check whether each trait is doing any work. A trait that every business in Singapore shares does not narrow the list at all, so it is not helping you decide who belongs on it.
The page you finish now is version one. You will revise it after module 2, which shows which sources produce people who fit, and again after module 7, which shows who actually buys. The activity below asks you to build the page and your list of ten names now, so the next module has something to work from.
Fill in the one-page profile template. Then list ten real names that fit it, and next to each write the trigger or trait that put it on the list.
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