The "One-Customer" Rule
On sales motions, product development, book-writing, and company-building
I’m back! Happy 2023!
Since I last wrote, I have:
Gotten married
Moved from co-founder to an advisor role at my startup
Written a book (more to come…)
While I’ve been quiet here, I’ve been active on LinkedIn. Definitely add me there if we’re not already connected!
This week, you’ll learn The “One-Customer” Rule which has made writing, product development, and company-building much more intuitive for me.
(Shoutout to Cam Crowder for naming the One-Customer Rule!)
If you missed this kind of writing, please share with others who’d benefit from it!
The “One-Customer” Rule
Thesis: To serve many people, design for one person. When you design for many people, you serve nobody.
Just about every startup I speak with has the same challenge: How do we generate repeatable sales?
They have happy customers, but can’t create a real sales process. Each deal feels different, and they’re often serving many different kinds of customers. As a result, they’re not sure how to scale their sales motion or even create messaging that resonates with their prospective customers.
Ultimately, they wind up with generic, abstract, corporate-sounding marketing and sales content that occasionally kinda works. But they rely on their sales reps being total gymnasts in sales conversations. They contort themselves to find the right “pain point” and describe the product in an effective way. It’s exhausting.
There are three failure modes that lead founders down this path:
“Product-first” thinking: Startups start with their product and work backwards to the customer. This causes them to speak different languages than their customers, and go spearfishing for pain points in sales conversations.
“Sell-broad” thinking: Startups try to create messaging that resonates across multiple customer types, which as a result resonates with nobody.
“Persona” thinking: Instead of focusing on a single perfect-fit buyer, startups create some abstract representation of a buyer. There’s some weird law of nature that says, “when you focus on an abstract persona, you design for yourself.” As a result, even if startups are focused on one customer persona, they still find a way to resonate with nobody.
Instead, follow the One-Customer Rule: Design your sales motion around one perfect-fit buyer. A real person, not a persona. You design a wildly effective offer that she actually wants to buy, which means your product gets bought rather than sold. You then figure out how to get that offer in front of other people who are just like her.
Over time, three things will happen:
You’ll find ways to automate parts of your sales process to scale more effectively. This means your sales team can focus on bigger, better things than doing the same demo six times a day.
You’ll have to update and refine your sales motion as the original offer you designed gets less effective. This is normal.
You will find other perfect-fit buyers who look very different. And you’ll design another sales motion around them. Don’t create the “average sales motion that attempts to be equally appealing to both perfect-fit buyers but actually appeals to nobody.”
What’s especially interesting to me is that the One-Customer Rule has helped me outside of sales:
When writing my book, I’ve written much better and faster when I focus on writing for one specific perfect-fit reader.
When developing new software products, I realized that I was able to cut through the noise and build new products effectively by focusing on one specific buyer.
When thinking about company-building, I realized that putting the One-Customer Rule influenced how I believed our product team should be structured (among other teams), and led me to the idea of the Buyer-First Company / the Buyer-Shaped Company. I haven’t settled on a name there, but the main point is that you can design a leaner, more effective, and less bureaucratic company when you design around the buyer… one that looks and acts very different than the Work-First company that’s designed more traditionally, like a factory.
Would love your feedback on the One-Customer Rule and the Buyer-First Company!