Sketch Your Customer's Story
Use this tool to stop chasing sales and start drawing loyal customers to you
Most creative entrepreneurs start selling too soon.
I get it. You're feeling the pressure. To pay bills, to turn your passion into income, to make it.
But your buyers have a story to tell that starts long before they meet you. And it keeps unfolding long after the sale.
That full story can teach you how to draw them to you, to keep them coming back, and to make them a fan for life.
Without having to chase them.
In this week’s Workshop, I’ll show you how to uncover that story.
And I’ll give you a powerful customer discovery tool that you can use today, complete with sample questions and space to sketch your insights.
The Arc Method™ Business Design
In the last issue of The Workshop, I introduced a business design method structured specifically for creative entrepreneurs. It ties every part of your business to what matters most to your customers, bending the arc of your customer’s story toward you because you improve their life in some way.
It also prevents you from building something just because “that’s what other people do.” You save time, money, and energy by focusing only on what matters to your customers.
Every customer story has five acts, borrowed from marketing and sales: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Retention, and Advocacy.
Understanding what happens in each act helps you shape the right experiences to meet customers where they are and draw them forward.
An Emotional Arc
We tend to treat purchases as transactional. Customers part with money in exchange for something that benefits them. But every sale is actually emotional. We all have a unique emotional tie to both sides of any transaction. To our parting with money and to the benefit we get on the other side.
The emotional nature of buying is especially important to creative businesses. Your creative work is emotional work that’s designed for emotional impact. And your buyer brings their own emotional history to every decision. How they relate to money, how they chase or avoid certain feelings, what it means to “invest” in someone’s creative work.
Understanding the emotional journey through all five acts of your customer’s story helps you design a business to have the exact emotional impact your customers seek at every moment.
The Arc Method™ Customer Discovery
So how do you understand that journey?
You ask.
Customer discovery is simply learning your customer’s story. What they’re doing, thinking, and feeling before and after the sale. In simple terms, it’s interviewing customers. Either past customers or future ones you hope to serve.
But here’s the catch: people are notoriously bad at describing what they want in interviews. That’s why strong interviews rely on open-ended questions that get people speaking their truth. By comparison, yes or no questions actually cause people to subconsciously deny their own reality. They’ll say what they think you want to hear. Just to keep you happy or to avoid conflict.
To help with that, I created a printable discovery guide built for creative entrepreneurs.
Click this image to download it:
This six-page guide includes:
A breakdown of the five acts in your customer’s story
What you’re trying to learn and design in each act
Five strong, bias-free interview questions per act
White space to sketch, doodle, or write what you hear
Capturing your insights visually is powerful because it becomes a tool you can test with future customers later. (We’ll get into that next week.)
This Week
If you’re tired of chasing sales, this is your invitation to pause.
Print the guide. Talk to 5 real people, either customers or people like them.
And sketch their stories.
You’ll be amazed at what you learn.
Next week in The Workshop, we’ll talk about refining what you learned.
And how to start shaping a business that attracts the right people at the right time.
Have thoughts, questions, or an “aha” moment?
Reply to this email or leave a comment. I read every message and love hearing how your creative business is unfolding. Your insight might even shape a future edition of The Workshop.
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I publish two posts a week to help creatives turn their talent into thriving, independent businesses:
The Workshop (Mondays): Tools and frameworks you can put to work
The Weekly Build (Fridays): Advice, mindset, confidence
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