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Skills from A Smart Bear

Find Your Carol

Selling to Carol: Why targeting an ICP brings 10x more customers than you expected

Six skills, run in sequence, that turn an honest look at who you are into a precise definition of your ideal customer — the one whose love transforms your marketing, sales, pricing, and product. Adapted from Selling to Carol: Why targeting an ICP brings 10x more customers than you expected.

What this is about

A tiny fraction of your customers generate a wildly outsized share of your profit — at WP Engine, 5% of customers produced 40% of it. The book calls the composite of those perfect customers Carol, and makes a counterintuitive claim with two chapters of proof behind it: focusing all your marketing, positioning, and product development on Carol alone doesn't shrink your market — it wins the ten-times-larger ring of buyers who share her trade-offs, and the hundred-times-larger ring who weigh them and pick you anyway. Subaru targeted lesbians in 1994 and became the fastest-growing car company of the following decade — mostly selling to people who weren't gay, because clear trade-offs confidently stated win everyone who leans your way.

But Carol can't be conjured from wishes. She is derived, step by step, from an honest accounting of who you actually are: your real strengths and real weaknesses, refined into the keystones that compel a purchase, the deal-breakers that forbid one, and the inciting events that turn a someday-buyer into a today-buyer. This workshop — from Carol Loves You for You and Speaking Carol Into Existence, Chapters 2 and 3 of Hidden Multipliers — runs that derivation as six skills, each producing a file the next one consumes, so the work compounds instead of evaporating after a whiteboard session.

How to run it

  1. Get the raw facts on the record. Observations walks you (or processes your team's write-storm) through twelve unsparing question categories — what customers praise, what they leave over, what you claim but aren't, what you envy — producing OBSERVATIONS.md: vivid, specific raw material, deliberately unjudged.
  2. Distill and classify. Strengths & Weaknesses converts observations into the deep-truth attributes underneath, kills the generic ones with the Opposite Test, and classifies each as strength, weakness, or deliberately both — STRENGTHS-WEAKNESSES.md.
  3. Refine strengths into keystones. Keystones asks of each strength: whose circumstances require an extreme version of this? A strength that names no real market segment is table stakes, not a keystone — KEYSTONES.md.
  4. Refine weaknesses into deal-breakers. Deal-Breakers maps who is disqualified no matter how much they like you — your anti-market — and uses those exclusions to sharpen each keystone market's description — DEALBREAKERS.md, plus honed KEYSTONES.md.
  5. Find the inciting events. Inciting Events identifies what moves a perfect-fit customer from "priority seven" to "buying today" — harvested from your customer interviews when you have them, worked backward from the keystones when you don't — INCITING-EVENTS.md.
  6. Define Carol. Define Carol synthesizes everything into CAROL.md: the crisp, behavioral definition of your ideal customer — attributes first, because that's the point — with reference sections on keystones, deal-breakers, and inciting events for the positioning, marketing, and product work that starts from it.

The output feeds everything downstream: positioning speaks Carol's language, marketing buys her attention, sales qualifies against her markers, and product builds what thrills her. And if you then want to test what you've written down, the Customer Interviews is the companion workshop — its first goal question is "What does Carol look like?", and its findings report feeds directly back into these files.

The steps

This workshop runs several skills in sequence, and some rely on others (like asb-rude-qa) — install the whole set before you begin: run npx skills add asmartbear/asb-skills, or ↓ download all skills as one ZIP. More install options →

  1. Observations

    Extracts the unvarnished facts about your company.

    Your company or product — plus your team's write-storm notes, if you ran one, or just yourself and an honest hour. An OBSERVATIONS.md of numbered, vivid, specific observations (O1, O2, …) organized by the twelve question categories — deliberately unevaluated.

    asb-carol-observations

  2. Strengths & Weaknesses

    Turns raw observations into classified attributes.

    Your OBSERVATIONS.md of raw facts (O1, O2, …) — or a pile of observations you're ready to distill. A STRENGTHS-WEAKNESSES.md: distilled attributes classified as strengths (S1, S2, …) and weaknesses (W1, W2, …), each citing the observations behind it.

    asb-carol-strengths

  3. Keystones

    Finds the customers your strengths compel.

    Your STRENGTHS-WEAKNESSES.md (S1, S2, …) from the classification step — or a strengths list you can defend. A KEYSTONES.md: keystones (K1, K2, …) mapped to strengths, each with the real-world market segments that typify it — or the honest finding that your product isn't compelling yet.

    asb-carol-keystones

  4. Deal-Breakers

    Maps your anti-market and sharpens your targets.

    Your STRENGTHS-WEAKNESSES.md (the W-side) and your KEYSTONES.md from the previous steps. A DEALBREAKERS.md (D1, D2, … with anti-market segments) — plus your KEYSTONES.md honed: each segment description sharpened with the qualifiers the deal-breakers force.

    asb-carol-dealbreakers

  5. Inciting Events

    Finds the moments that trigger the purchase.

    Your honed KEYSTONES.md — plus customer-interview findings, if you have them. An INCITING-EVENTS.md: trigger events (E1, E2, …) coupled to keystones, each marked observed or hypothesized, with notes on how to find prospects in that condition.

    asb-carol-inciting-events

  6. Define Carol

    Synthesizes everything into your Carol.

    Your four working files: STRENGTHS-WEAKNESSES.md, honed KEYSTONES.md, DEALBREAKERS.md, and INCITING-EVENTS.md. A CAROL.md: the definition first — behavioral and attitudinal markers, not demographics — with reference sections on keystones, deal-breakers, and inciting events for the positioning, marketing, and product work that starts from it.

    asb-carol-define