Do you really know who you’re selling to? How to build personas and why it matters
We've worked with dozens of founders who insist they "know" who their target audience is, but it's only after we've guided them through this persona process that they see how much information, understanding, and empathy has yet to be fleshed out.
When you recommend a movie to a friend, you tend to personalize it, right? If you know they’re interested in story, maybe you talk about how well they develop characters. Or, if they’re more drawn to the visual aspect of a movie, you might talk about the special effects.
Over your relationship, you’ve gotten to know their likes and dislikes. All that information is really valuable when you make a recommendation to them. It’s probably why personal recommendations still hold the most weight to a potential buyer.
In business, we don’t have the luxury of getting to know each and every potential customer personally. Though I’m sure we’d all love the opportunity, there simply aren’t enough hours in the day. What we can do is create groups of buyer types. Once you know the different groups you’re selling to, you can assign each a specific persona.
Personas are archetypal or fictional representations of real users of your product or service. Even if you haven't launched yet (and therefore, don't have real users), you no doubt have target users in mind. Defining these early - as in, before you spend any real marketing dollars - will help you make better-informed product, marketing and sales decisions down the road.
Why personas are important
Personas provide humanizing context. Who is this person? What kind of emotional experiences does he or she care about? What matters both personally and professionally?
We like to think of personas as a secret weapon to crafting great brand and product positioning and messaging. Having clearly defined personas is key to helping you keep your customers’ needs firmly in mind so you can better tailor your positioning and messaging.
Creating personas for your product helps you gain empathy towards your users, understand who they are, and see things from their point of view—all of which is necessary for creating a successful go-to-market launch or product launch.
All too often, products are launched without ever taking the time to actually define the target customer. We've worked with dozens of founders who insist they "know" who their target audience is, but it's only after we've guided them through this persona process that they see how much information, understanding, and empathy has yet to be fleshed out.
Down the road, when you're hiring your team, personas will help provide a shared language for everyone in your company to make better-informed product, marketing, sales, and design decisions. Personas are also incredibly useful for getting everyone on the same page when it comes to understanding who you are building your product for.
Building your personas
There are two phases to developing personas. The first phase is to develop proto-personas. This is where you define the users that you think are out there. They’re called proto-personas because although you’ll use real data to build assumptions about these users, you have yet to confirm whether your assumptions are correct.
When building your persona you need to focus on a few key things. First, you want to define what they’re motivation for buying is. For example, are they trying to streamline a process? Or are they looking for expanded functionality they don’t currently have?
Next, you should define what their pain points are. Basically, you need to know where they’re struggling so you’re able to clearly articulate how you’re going to help relieve their struggle. Last, it's good to have an understanding of what their day-to-day work life is like.
Once you’ve documented who these users are and built a full profile of them, you’ll move on to validating your personas. During this second phase, you’ll interview real customers who fit your proto-persona profiles and ask them strategic questions to confirm or update your assumptions.
Here’s what a complete persona profile looks like:
“Knowing who you’re selling to is nearly as important as knowing what you’re selling.”
Validating your personas
You’ve defined your users. Now it’s time to talk to your users and validate whether your assumptions are correct. While defining the personas is a key first step, we need to follow through in this process by actually talking to our users and confirming we didn’t make too much up.
If you're early stage enough, chances are you’re filling the CRO role in addition to being the founder/CEO. This means you already know who you should talk with to see whether your persona assumptions are correct.
When you were first exploring your company idea, you probably reached out to a wide range of potential customers in your network and beyond to see if your product assumptions were correct.
We recommend including some of these same people in your persona validation outreach because they are likely already familiar with your product, even if they don’t currently use it. Then also include any real customers you have, even if you’re unsure whether they fit the persona profiles.
Ideally, you’ll reach out to 20 people to schedule calls, with the goal of having conversations with at least 10 of them.
Getting to work
Knowing who you’re selling to is nearly as important as knowing what you’re selling. When you have a clear understanding of who your audience is, you’re better able to communicate your offering’s value and will be able to win more customers.
Take your time, be deliberate, and be earnest in your efforts to discover who your customer really is. Remember that as you grow and change, your personas may too. Stay curious, stay focused, and you’ll stay on the path to success.
If you’re interested in learning even more about persona building, running a persona workshop, and creating persona assets, consider becoming a member of the Founder’s Marketing Playbook.
