People are always telling me about their “average customer.”

Here’s the problem with the “average customer.”

The “average customer” never buys anything.

And the reason “the average customer” because there is no such thing as the “average customer.”

Instead, there are dozens or thousands or millions of individuals. Even when you’re dealing with companies in a B2B scenario, you’re still dealing with people. Remember the old historical fact that nothing has ever been sold to a company.

Instead of spending more time trying to market to average customers, what if you asked the following question: “How can we make the experience better for the individual customer, and make it more likely that they’ll want to keep doing business with us?”

The first step in making any business more Evergreen is to stop thinking in terms of averages and start thinking about individuals and how your messaging relates to people. Or how your sales efforts relate to people. Or how your marketing collateral speaks, to people.

One of the core principles of Evergreen (and one that is surprisingly easy to forget) is to recognize that you are communicating with real people on a one-on-one basis.

This doesn’t mean that you have to have extended heart-to-heart conversations with every customer, nor does it mean that you can’t automate many of the regular and routine communications of your business. But it does imply that even your automated messages can take a more personal approach. The keywords here being “personal approach.

Now when you take this first step, something fascinating happens to all of your sales and marketing efforts. You start to feel a lot less like you’re addressing a sea of nameless, faceless drones who occasionally open their wallets to you.

And suddenly, they open their wallets more for you.

Go figure.