---
title: Customer Intelligence
summary: Customer intelligence describes how people buy, which determines whether your marketing actually converts.
est_minutes: 20
sort: 2
---

Welcome to Module 2.2.

In the last module you committed to a specific customer segment. This module is where you stop guessing about that segment and start knowing them. Specifically: how they buy.

By the end of this module you will have three documented customer profiles based on real interviews, not assumptions, covering the five intelligence categories that determine whether your marketing actually converts.

**Why Demographics Don't Buy**

Most operators describe their target customer in demographic language. "Owner-operators, 35–55, $1M–$5M revenue, US-based service businesses."

That description is necessary but useless on its own. Demographics tell you who someone IS. They tell you nothing about how someone BUYS.

Two operators with identical demographics buy completely differently:

- One reads operator newsletters every morning, hires fractional executives, runs a tight P&L
- The other watches motivational content on YouTube, hasn't looked at their financials in 60 days, and buys from the loudest voice in their feed

Same demographics. Different buyers. You cannot market to both the same way.

What you need is buying-behavior intelligence: what triggers them, where they search, who they listen to, and what they actually decide on. That's what this module builds.

**The Three Phases**

Every buyer goes through three phases. Most operators only optimize for the third, but the first two are where the deal is won or lost.

**Phase 1 — Trigger.** Something happens that moves "this is fine" to "this is a problem worth solving."

Examples of real trigger events I've seen in operator data:

- The bank declines an SBA loan because the books are bad → CFO trigger
- A key employee quits unexpectedly → SOP/documentation trigger
- A competitor opens nearby → marketing trigger
- The founder gets sick or has a personal event that forces a 2-week absence → operational dependency trigger
- Year-end financials come back worse than expected → strategy trigger

If you market to people who haven't had a trigger event, you waste money. If you market to people the day after their trigger, you almost can't lose.

**Phase 2 — Search.**

Once triggered, the buyer looks. Where? Almost never where you assume.

Operators assume buyers search Google. Sometimes they do. Often they:

- Post a question in a private Slack or Facebook group
- DM three peers asking who they've used
- Search YouTube for the specific symptom (not the solution)
- Ask their accountant, lawyer, or another vendor for a referral
- Wait until a specific person they trust posts about something related

Your Customer Intelligence interviews uncover the actual search behavior. Stop assuming.

**Phase 3 — Decision.**

The shortlist becomes the choice. The criteria buyers say matter (in early calls) are often NOT the criteria they use.

What they say in discovery: "We need someone with deep expertise."
What they actually decide on: "Their proposal was clearer than the other two."

The decision criteria are buried under polite professional language. The interview script in the workbook is designed to surface them.

**The Five Intelligence Categories**

For your top segment, you'll build a Customer Intelligence File containing:

**1. Demographics** — the baseline. Industry, size, role, geography, tech stack, growth stage. Easy to get from existing data.

**2. Triggers** — the specific events that put them in active buying mode. Usually 3–5 per segment. These should be **named events**, not "frustration with current state."

Examples of well-formed triggers:

- "Lost their bookkeeper without warning"
- "Failed audit / IRS notice received"
- "Hit a revenue ceiling for two consecutive quarters"
- "First child of operator turned 16 — wake-up call about time"

**3. Search Behavior** — channels, sources, language, trusted people.

Capture per buyer: what was the first place you looked? What was the second? What did you type into Google (verbatim)? Who did you ask first? When did you start vs when did you actually buy?

The lag from search to buy in most B2B operator deals is 6–14 weeks. You need to be present across that entire window.

**4. Decision Criteria** — what they actually use to choose.

The interview script asks for the criteria in two ways:

- Direct: "What were the top 3 things that made you choose us?"
- Indirect: "Walk me through the moment you finalized your decision. What were you looking at?"

The indirect version produces real criteria. The direct version produces polite ones.

**5. Post-Purchase Reality** — what they expected vs what they got.

This category is usually skipped. It's the most important for retention. The gap between expectation and reality is where churn lives. Closing that gap is what makes a customer renew, refer, and grow lifetime value.

**The Interview Script**

You're going to run 3 customer intelligence interviews. 30 minutes each. Free coffee or $50 Visa gift card for their time.

The script is in your workbook. Ten questions, in this order. Don't reorder.

1. "Tell me the story of how you first realized you needed [what we sell]. What had been happening?"
*(Surfaces the trigger.)*

2. "When you started looking, what was the first thing you did?"
*(Surfaces the initial search behavior.)*

3. "Who else did you talk to or look at before us?"
*(Surfaces alternatives — including competitors and DIY/status-quo.)*

4. "If you could go back to that moment of starting to look — what would have made it easier to find someone like us?"
*(Surfaces channel gaps.)*

5. "When did you know we were the option you were going to pick? What specifically clicked?"
*(Surfaces decision criteria — real ones, not polite ones.)*

6. "What almost stopped you from saying yes?"
*(Surfaces real objections.)*

7. "If a friend asked you what we do, what would you say?"
*(Surfaces their compass / language.)*

8. "What expected to happen that didn't?"
*(Surfaces expectation/reality gap.)*

9. "What happened that you didn't expect — good or bad?"
*(Surfaces surprise factors.)*

10. "If you were us, what would you change about how you sell or serve?"
*(Surfaces operational improvement ideas. Customers tell the truth here when they trust you.)*

Record (with permission). Transcribe. Patterns appear after the 2nd interview, you'll start hearing the same trigger story, the same search pattern, the same decision moment. Three is enough to find the pattern; five gives you confidence.

**What To Look For In The Data**

Three patterns to identify:

**Pattern 1: Trigger language.**
You will hear customers describe the same trigger event in their own words. Capture the exact phrases. These become your ad copy, your subject lines, your headlines. Stop writing copy from your imagination. Use their actual language.

**Pattern 2: Channel pattern.**
You will see specific places they actually searched. Often surprising. If 3 of 3 customers say "I found a podcast guest appearance by [name] before I ever heard of you," that's a channel you should be pursuing.

**Pattern 3: Decision moment.**
A specific moment, usually mid-conversation, where they say "okay, this is the option." That moment has specific characteristics. Recreate them deliberately in every sales conversation.

**The Three Profiles**

Customer intelligence isn't one profile. It's three.

The reason: even within your unfair-advantage segment, there are variants. Three is the right number, fewer is too vague, more is unmanageable.

The way to choose your three:

1. **Profile A — The Highest LTV.** Your best long-term customer. Highest retention, highest spend, highest referral rate.
2. **Profile B — The Easiest Acquisition.** Faster close cycle, lower customer acquisition cost, easier to identify.
3. **Profile C — The Strategic Outlier.** The customer who isn't your highest LTV or easiest acquisition, but represents where the segment is heading. Your future best customer.

Each profile gets a full Intelligence File. Marketing operations, sales scripts, and onboarding sequences are then built for these three profiles, not for one generic "ideal customer."

**What To Do Right Now**

Three things:

1. **Open the workbook.** Complete Section A (existing data audit). 30 minutes.
2. **Send the interview invitation email** (template in workbook). Get 3 calls scheduled.
3. **Block 90 minutes of focused work** between interviews and the next 2 weeks to complete the rest.

Then build your three profiles in the Customer Intelligence Canvas tool. Take the quiz.

Customer intelligence is uncomfortable because it forces you to admit how little you actually know about your buyer. The discomfort IS the asset. The operator who knows their customer at this depth makes every other marketing decision easier.

I'll see you in Module 2.3 — Revenue Architecture — where we translate the intelligence you build here into pricing and packaging that actually fits the buyer you just documented.
