How to Build the Perfect Target Avatar for Your Service Business

Knowing exactly who your best customers are can revolutionize how you market, sell, and deliver your services. For companies in the commercial services industry—whether you’re focused on HVAC, electrical, roofing, janitorial, or landscaping—the secret to creating a successful sales strategy lies in defining a buyer persona.

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer profile (ICP) that helps you understand key demographics, pain points, goals, and challenges. This allows you to target your sales and marketing efforts toward prospects who are most likely to convert and become valuable customers.

Here are the five key steps to building the perfect customer avatar for your business.

Start with the Basics: Define Key Demographics

Start by outlining the key demographic details of your ideal customer. Demographics are characteristics that make a potential customer perfect for your business.

For commercial HVAC businesses, an example of this would be a facilities manager at an owner-occupied manufacturing plant. For service businesses, defining these details is critical to creating an ideal customer profile template.

Reflect on customer data from your existing customers to inform these demographics. This will help you understand their behavior, preferences, and how they make purchasing decisions.

Key factors to building this profile include:

• Industry: Which sectors do you work best with? Healthcare, manufacturing, real estate, education, or industrial markets?
• Building details: What type of buildings do you specialize in? Large multi-unit complexes, small commercial offices, or hospitals? Do the properties your target customers occupy tend to have many tenants or just one? Does it matter when the building was built? How large (or small) are the facilities?
• Job Title: Which decision-maker typically purchases your products and services? Is it a facility manager, director of operations, tenant, or property owner?
• Company Size: Do your ideal customers tend to be small to medium-sized companies or large enterprises?
• Revenue: What is the revenue range of your most valuable customers? This will help you identify which companies can afford your products and services.
• Location: Are you focusing on a particular region, or is your target audience national or international?

Remember these specific traits to help you focus on potential customers who really align with your business goals and are likely to bring the most value.

By the end of this article, if you’ve followed the steps, you’ll have a complete customer profile! If you open a note app on your device or have a pen and paper handy, go ahead and jot down the key traits of your ideal customers as we go along.

Identify Their Pain Points

A deep understanding of your target customer’s pain points will help you create the perfect sales cycle. But crafting a successful sales strategy takes a bit of work.

If you’ve been in business for a while, using existing customer feedback can help you build a better sales process. For example, take a look at your CRM. Do your salespeople often lose deals at a specific stage in the sales cycle? Why have they lost the deal? Is it price? Timing? or something else?

Customer feedback can reveal the challenges your future customers face and how your services can solve them. Gathering these insights from existing customers will confirm your assumptions and provide useful insights about what your ideal customer values.

This data can inform every stage of your sales cycle and help you tailor sales messaging, ads, email outreach, prospecting and lead generation, and even help you overcome objections to closing a deal!

Common challenges to consider include:

• Operational inefficiencies: Is the facility manager struggling with unreliable HVAC or electrical systems?
• Old or outdated systems: Does the building have outdated heating, cooling, or electrical systems that need to be replaced?
• High maintenance and repair costs: Is the building manager constantly overspending on repairs and maintenance for their commercial properties?
• Compliance issues: Are there specific regulations or codes that your services can help ensure compliance with?
• Budget constraints: Are they looking for cost-effective solutions without sacrificing quality?
• Regulatory concerns: Do they need help meeting safety or compliance standards?

By identifying these issues, you can adjust your sales outreach and marketing strategy to present your services as the solution that directly addresses their needs.

But just writing down these challenges isn’t enough—ask yourself: How can I tackle these issues in a way that’s painless for potential customers?

Do you have any testimonials or case studies to back that up? These will become valuable selling points as you tailor your sales approach to each pain point.

Understand Their Goals and Objectives

After you dig deeply into their challenges, try to understand what your ideal buyer profile is trying to achieve. Aligning their goals and objectives with your own helps create a stronger connection and increases customer lifetime value.

Ask yourself:

1. Are they aiming to reduce operational costs by adopting energy-efficient solutions?
2. Are they looking to extend the life of their infrastructure with preventative maintenance?
3. Do they prioritize sustainability and compliance?

These may seem like the same things as their pain points, but they’re very different. The goals and objectives portion of your ICP will help you decide how to deliver your products and services to them. For example, if a facilities manager is looking for a painless sales process and you deliver a “10-step consultative approach,” you’ll probably lose the customer to someone who can deliver a proposal on the first or second touch.

Understanding your buyer personas’ goals allows you to tailor your “offerings” to their buying style, improving your sales cycle and helping you create data-driven customer profiles that target the right market segments.

Map Out Their Decision-Making Process

The decision-making process in commercial services is often more complex than in consumer-facing industries, involving several decision-makers, budget approvals, contracts, and other details. Mapping out how your ideal customers make decisions will improve your chances of closing deals faster.

This step requires a bit of subjectivity (unless you have it stored in a CRM)- but it can help you build a bullet-proof closing process. Here are important factors to consider:

• Key decision-makers: Does the job title matter? Is the decision made solely by a facility manager, or are higher-level executives like COOs and owners involved?
• Budget timelines: Do your ideal customer profiles make purchasing decisions monthly, quarterly, or annually?
• Evaluation criteria: Are they more concerned with price, reliability, or efficiency when selecting a vendor?

This is where you’ll begin to organize the steps and triggers in each sales cycle stage. For example, if a facility manager needs to get budget approval from higher-ups, you’ll want to add an extra layer of communication at that stage.

By understanding these elements, you can position your sales reps to communicate the right message at the right time, streamlining the sales process and optimizing your sales teams’ efforts.

Tailor Your Messaging and Approach

Now we put it all together. With all of this information “in hand,” you can customize your marketing and sales strategy which begins with a personalization.

Tailoring your messaging to the personalized needs of your target customers ensures that your marketing and sales teams are addressing the right target audience with a clear, focused message.

Here’s how to adjust your current approach:

• Address their pain points: Craft marketing content that speaks directly to the common challenges your potential customers face. For example, if price is the biggest obstacle to closing deals, try several soft closes where you ask about price in your sales cycle.
• Demonstrate benefits: Focus on the outcomes, such as cost savings, improved efficiency, or compliance solutions, rather than just selling the features of your products and services. Remember, people buy from people – which means every purchase is an emotional then logical decision. If you can align your buying process with their natural purchasing style, you’ll win more deals.
• Simplify the decision-making process: Make it easy for your ideal customers to see why your services are the best fit. Don’t hide the benefits; share them! Talk about how easy it is to make a purchase and then make it easy.

Tailoring your approach to their needs instead of some arbitrary process ensures that your marketing team and sales reps are delivering the right message to the right customer segments, increasing the likelihood of converting leads into loyal customers.

After more than a decade in sales, I can tell you the biggest mistake people make in creating a powerful sales process is creating too many obstacles to the sale. Over-qualification, extensive meetings before inking a deal, and multiple steps to achieve simple objectives burn-out prospects and turn them off to your offerings. Make it simple for them to buy!

Completing your Target Avatar Template

Now, let’s put it all together and actually create the perfect target avatar for your business:

Target Avatar Example for an HVAC Company:

1. Avatar Name: “Office Owner Owen”
2. Industry: Small, owner-occupied office buildings
3. Building Type: 7,000 – 10,000 square feet of office spaces
4. Job Title: Property Owner
5. Company Size: 5-50 employees
6. Revenue Range: $5M – $8M annually
7. Location: Local to metro or suburban areas

Pain Points:

• Outdated HVAC systems causing high maintenance costs
• Inconsistent indoor air quality
• Rising energy costs due to inefficient heating and cooling systems

Goals:

• Reduce energy costs by upgrading to energy-efficient HVAC units
• Improve tenant comfort and satisfaction with better air quality
• Minimize system downtime to avoid disrupting office operations

Decision-Making Process:

• The owner makes decisions with input from the property manager
• Annual budget reviews for maintenance and capital upgrades
• Prioritizes reliability and cost over premium services

Messaging:

• “Cut your energy costs by up to 30% with our high-efficiency HVAC systems.”
• “Ensure staff comfort with reliable, energy-efficient heating and cooling solutions.”
• “Fast, hassle-free installation with minimal downtime for your office.”

Utilizing Your Target Avatar

With your target avatar clearly defined, it’s time to put this valuable tool to work across your marketing and sales strategies. Here’s how you can leverage your target avatar to drive business growth:

Refine Your Content Strategy

Create blog posts, social media content, and other marketing materials that directly address the specific challenges and needs outlined in your target avatar. For instance, you could share success stories about how previous clients improved indoor air quality or reduced energy costs with your solutions. This not only builds trust but also positions your brand as a problem solver.

Enhance Customer Interactions

Train your sales team to connect with the target avatar. By understanding their goals and concerns, your sales reps can have more personalized conversations that resonate with the client’s needs, leading to stronger relationships and higher conversion rates. Tailored communication shows that you truly understand what matters to them.

Audit Your Product Offerings

Ensure that your services align with the target avatar’s specific pain points. Consider bundling solutions, like an all-inclusive HVAC maintenance and upgrade package, designed to address the exact issues they face. This customization enhances your value proposition and makes your offering more compelling.

Customize Promotional Campaigns

Tailor your marketing campaigns to fit the profile of your target avatar. Use messaging, imagery, and distribution channels that appeal to property owners in small office spaces. By speaking their language and using platforms they frequent, you’ll see a higher level of engagement and better conversion rates.

By embedding your target avatar into your business strategy, you’ll not only streamline your marketing and sales efforts but also create a more agile, responsive approach. This ensures you’re meeting your customers’ evolving needs, strengthening your market position, and fostering long-term growth.

Conclusion

Building a customer avatar is a powerful tool for businesses in commercial services. The insights you gain from this process will not only lead to higher conversion rates and stronger customer relationships but also position your business for sustainable, long-term growth.

If you’re ready to take the next step and use a platform designed specifically for commercial services sales to find and close deals with your ideal customers, Schedule a demo of Convex and see how we can help your team find qualified leads based on your target avatar in minutes.