Remember the last time you walked into a meeting and everyone was sure we knew our persona and our ICP, aka ideal customer profile?
When was the last time you updated your persona or refreshed it to match the current market trends and customer expectations?
I remember joining a team where I was told the IT persona was the same, and it was last created five years ago.
A lot has happened in the market in the past 5+ years, including micro and macro changes, so how can our persona and their challenges and painpoints remain the same?
Let’s uncover the value of personas and segmentation.
Q1. We all want to understand our customers and be the voice of the customer. Where do we start?
Segmentation, ICP, Buyer persona, and User persona are all swimlanes we navigate when we are learning to understand our target audience.
Each one will get us closer to being the voice of the market and the voice of the customer. First, we need to understand the context and market category we are in. This shapes the mindset and who our ideal customer is - from segment - SMB, mid-market to enterprise, to industry use cases - retail, healthcare, financial services, etc.
Q2. 2 questions that you could ask in a persona interview to make it meaningful.
Whether we have 5minutes at a conference or 20 min in a customer interview, my two go-to persona questions are:
What keeps you up at night? Helps to understand what is top of mind and where are the priorities for the business.
What would the customer want or need today versus five years from now?
Know who our customer is—start from the market and craft our persona and ICP.
In B2B, look across the buyer and customer journey from buyer persona to user persona as a team.
Q3. How do we blend persona into our positioning and messaging? Share examples.
Every buyer persona navigates the steps in a buyer journey, and we can connect the dots and weave the thread to help prospects discover, learn, try, buy, and finally advocate. The top-of-funnel to bottom-of-funnel content will ensure that we are educating our audience with the right information at the right time - from blogs to assets, webinars, and customer success stories.
Q4. Persona is a team or group initiative that collaborates across product marketing, product management, and user experience teams.
How do we connect the dots for the end-to-end customer journey? And not have user and buyer personas as silos.
Perfect question for solving the perfect problem and finding the right solution.
Start with the stakeholders: Make sure you are in agreement about the approach and purpose of how the buyer personas will benefit the teams.
Purpose: Is this a buyer persona refresh? Or are we creating a new buyer persona that we have never spoken to before?
Value: Are these buyer personas going to be the common language across all future conversations? How can we streamline the efforts to bring inside sales to marketing campaigns to account executives walking the talk?
2. Include sales, product and marketing leaders in the buyer persona initiative with internal stakeholder interviews. It’s not a PMM effort but a company-wide initiative. Inform and educate all teams across the company — even services, engineering, and operations.
Q5. How do we bring all internal stakeholders, mainly sales, to understand the value of personas and use them in conversations?
If there is an existing or new sales methodology rollout, tie the buyer persona to that initiative to bring synergy across sales, product, and marketing efforts. E.g., MEDDPICC — the champion and economic buyer are key elements in the buyer persona. (Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Paper Process, Indication of Pain, Champion, Competition)
3 personas to define new audience segments in the Enterprise.
1. Decision Maker (Economic Buyer)
2. Business Initiative Lead (Champion)
3. Practitioner/Influencer (User)
Q6. 2024 & The Future: What does the future of Personas look like for Product Marketing?
Product marketing is in continuous evolution, and how and why we do it has shifted. It's no longer just about content or a campaign. It's much more strategic to actually think about going to market and launching products and solutions to new personas and target segments.
Product marketing is the linchpin, bringing alignment and cross-functional collaboration across product, sales, and marketing. We are the voice of the customer and the voice of the market. Understanding our customer pain points, having a pulse on the competition, and riding the market trends are what positions us within an organization. Now, how and why we do what we do and when and where we can show our value changes the game.
Crafting or refreshing your personas can be time-consuming and require a lot of input, customer interviews, and feedback across teams. Adoption is key, so bring stakeholders, teams, and people into the process.
Have fun and be creative with your persona. Here is an example of how the product/solution made the customer feel became the crux of the Persona.
It's an exciting place to be able to bring product marketing value to meet the business needs. Being able to adapt to the shifts in the industry, business, and teams is a skill to be learned. It's an amazing journey to be on, to ride the wave, and to crash with the waves. Embrace the fun and enjoy the ride.
Join us on PMM Talks with an awesome panel to uncover the value of Personas.