In this episode of Sequence Over Strategy, Michelle Warner unpacks the crucial concept of customer maturity and how it directly impacts your marketing success.
Is your business missing the mark by not speaking to customers at the right level of understanding? Are you losing customers because your messaging is either too advanced or too basic for where they are? In this episode of Sequence Over Strategy, Michelle Warner unpacks the crucial concept of customer maturity and how it directly impacts your marketing success. She dives into why understanding exactly what your customers know and care about is the key to designing offers that truly resonate. You'll learn what customer maturity is and what it means for you and your business. You will also hear about how aligning your marketing, messaging, and product strategy with your audience’s maturity level can bridge the gap between what you offer and what your customers actually need.
Check out the full episode at TheMichelleWarner.com
Hi, I'm Michelle Warner. I'm a business designer and strategist. In the 15 years that I've been doing this work, I have noticed the same trend everywhere. Business owners are falling into the trap of centering strategies first when what they need to be doing is centering sequence. Because the reality is the steps you take in your business and the order in which you take them is more important than how well you implement any single strategy. So on this show, my goal is to fix that by helping you find and trust your own sequence of actions, rather than blindly following someone else's strategy.
In every episode of this show, I answer a real question from a real entrepreneur struggling with a real challenge in their business. And in today's episode, we're going to do that a little differently. I'm going to pick up on and go deeper on something I touched on in the last episode. And I'm going to do that because in between now and then, I've had a number of people ask me to do exactly this, go deeper. And what concept are we talking about? I'm talking about the concept of customer maturity and what that means about your product mix and your marketing.
So if you didn't listen to the last episode, you may want to go back and do that. It was all about business alignment and how we can make sure our business models are working as efficiently as possible by making sure that our kind of big three components, our product mix, our customer niche, and our marketing mix are all working together. And one of the big things that matters there is whether you understand your customer's maturity level and whether you are in alignment with that maturity level.
And before I get into this, I'm just going to acknowledge that the term customer maturity could very likely be new to you. And if that is the case, it's all good. In fact, I'm pretty sure I made it up. So it probably is new to you, but it's anchored in other maturity models. You may have heard of market maturity. It's anchored in that same kind of idea. And it tends to fill in a lot of holes for people when I explain what I'm thinking about when I talk about customer maturity. So even if this is a new concept and a new term for you, stick around because I bet you're going to get something out of it.
In order to define customer maturity, I'm going to tell you a little story of something that I have going on right now. If you know me at all, you know that I talk a lot about the home renovations I'm making to an older home I bought about 18 months ago. And one of those renovations this summer was pulling out the driveway, if you could even call it that, and replacing it with a nice new concrete driveway. My house was built in 1921. Honestly, I kind of think the driveway had not been touched since then. It was made of a combination of brick and a little bit of cement. And it had still had like that grass patch in between so that your tires only actually went over the bricks and the cement, but everything in between that was still grass. Everything was potholed. It was a mess. Driveway had to come out.
I don't know if you have ever gone through this process before, but what I was left with afterwards was a beautiful new driveway that I'm thrilled about, but also a lot of empty now dirt space on either side of that. Because when they did the excavation, of course they had to excavate some of the grass that was on the edges of where the driveway was. So once the driveway was in, I had a lot of gaping holes on either side of it. What did I have to do? Well, I had to go buy way too much topsoil than I would care to remember, fill all that in and then grow grass.
And here's where we come to the story. I'm not a big fan of grass. I'm a huge fan of my gardens grass. I could care less about. I've never grown it before. And all of a sudden I had to grow a lot of grass in a short amount of time. I don't care about the details about growing grass. I just want somebody to tell me the bare basics. What do I have to do? How often do I have to water this thing? How quickly is it going to be out of my life? Like give me the easiest possible way to grow grass. That's it. I don't want to know what kind of grass. I mean, I kind of do, but I don't want to go into details of choosing different types of grass. I just don't care. I just want this problem out of my life in the easiest way humanly possible so that I can get back to my plans.
So what would we call that in terms of customer maturity? By the way, I am a low maturity customer when it comes to growing grass. I don't care. And so that's what customer maturity means is how A, how much does a person know about the thing that you're trying to sell them and B, how much do they care?
So let's talk about those two elements because they matter. When I think about customer maturity, I think about it on a scale of one to five. If you are a low maturity customer, you are level one. If you are the highest maturity of customer, you are a level five. And then levels two through four are somewhere in between and an increasing levels of maturity. A level one maturity customer is not someone who just doesn't have intelligence about the market, right? It is somebody like me who has to grow some grass, doesn't really care about the details and is never going to want to kind of ascend the ladders of maturity to understand the nuance in this. Like I know there are people out there who care a lot about all the details about different types of grass and how to keep a perfect lawn, et cetera, et cetera. I don't care about that. And so the fact that I am a low maturity customer when it comes to grass growing has nothing to do with my intelligence level. If I wanted to be an expert at grass growing, I could be. It also has nothing to do with my experience level necessarily. In this case, I was a beginner. I had not done it before, but guess what? Now I've been growing grass for six weeks and my desire to learn more has not increased.
So now that I am less of a beginner, I'm certainly not an expert, but I am less of a beginner. I have not gained any desire to ascend the levels of maturity and learn anything more, right? I just want to stay as a low maturity grass growing customer. And so when I am out there looking for information about grass growing, I want you to keep it simple. I want newbie information. Yes. But again, there's not a direct correlation between me being new at this and me being low maturity because now again, I've gained some experience, but when I still need additional information, maybe there was a bare patch that I needed to figure out how to fill, because why did the grass seed not work right there? I don't want you to explain more to me. I just want you to tell me how to fix a bare patch. I don't want to know why it exists. I don't want to know why it happened. Those would all be signs of kind of curiosity and me wanting to know more and going up the levels of maturity. I don't care. I just want you to solve my next problem that I've come into contact with, with this grass growing in the easiest way possible.
And so that's how you think about customer maturity. It is a combination of experience with the market or with the challenge, and then desire to know more about that thing. So there are going to be some people who start as beginners and very quickly desire to know more, right? This would be me if I had started this project and then became fascinated by the art of growing grass. And every question I had, I wanted to understand more and more about the science, understand more and more about the options, like get into the nitty gritty, the nuance of options. Then that would be a case of me entering as a low maturity customer and then slowly kind of ascending up the ladder so that I became a higher maturity customer who not only had new problems to solve, but wanted to solve those problems in a really nuanced way by understanding all of the things. Or you can enter as a new customer, a low maturity customer as I did, and then stay there. Again, as I encounter new things, I do not want to understand more about the process. I just want you to continue giving me simple solutions to the next challenge that I have.
And that's where customer maturity is an interesting question because it's not directly correlated with beginner versus advanced or beginner versus experienced. And I think we make a lot of mistakes when we think about or ask a question of how mature are my customers. We tend to think about how experienced are they and it's just not a direct correlation there. It can be that they are new and low maturity or it can be that they are new and curious and want to move up the ladder, if you will.
And why is this important and why am I telling you about the grass growing? It's because you as a business owner need to understand what maturity of customers you want to target. So not only do you want to understand your niche and in my example, the niche would be people growing grass. You also need to understand what maturity of customers within that niche are you looking to market to.
Here's another example that I use often, smartphones. Somewhere in this world, somebody is encountering a smartphone for the very first time today. That person by definition is going to be low maturity because they are new and so they're experiencing it for the first time. But that person is going to have one of two reactions. That person may just say, Oh cool, here's a smartphone. I'm going to start using it. Don't really care to know more. Or that person may say, Oh my gosh, this is amazing. I want to know everything about how this works. I want to know the ins and outs, the details, the specs. I want to know all of that. Both of those people have the same experience level with smartphones, but one of them has a high maturity level and one of them has a low maturity level. And that matters for your marketing mix.
So if you are selling a product or service, whether that is a piece of software or something else that is new to your customers, you need to understand if you are targeting people who are low maturity and who do not want to move up the ladder of maturity or if you are targeting high maturity customers who are more likely to be early adopters, who are more likely to care about the details, who are more likely to want to understand the nuances and all of that. And then you have to make sure that your product mix and your marketing mix align with that. So here's what that looks like.
If you are targeting low maturity customers, you want to make sure that your marketing is simple. You want to make sure that your product or service is easy to use and that it is a very straightforward, easy solution for the problem that your low maturity customers are trying to solve. And you also want to make sure that your product or service doesn’t require a lot of explanation, right? If you have a high maturity customer, they will want to dig into the details and understand more, so your product or service might be more complex and your marketing might be more nuanced and detailed.
The same thing goes for when you're creating a product mix. So if you have a product mix and you are trying to sell to low maturity customers, you may want to think about offering more basic, straightforward solutions that don’t require a lot of thought. Whereas if you’re selling to high maturity customers, you might have products that offer more depth and complexity. You might also offer more advanced products for people who want to go deeper and learn more about the details.
So when you think about the concept of customer maturity, I want you to think about where your customers fall on that scale. I want you to think about the products or services that you offer, and then I want you to think about how you align your marketing and your product mix to the customer maturity of the people you are targeting. And when you can do that, you will find that your business becomes more aligned, more efficient, and your strategies start to work better for you. Thanks for joining me today.