Personas in action
Ok, you’ve got your personas. Now let’s look at how these can be used effectively across the organization.
It hurts our hearts a little when we help companies define personas and then later learn that no one is using them. That’s because we know that these companies are leaving valuable sales and marketing opportunities on the table by ignoring their customers’ needs. Please don’t let this happen at your company. Instead, be the champion of explaining why personas are so important and how everyone can benefit from them.
Organize individual sessions with your sales, marketing and product teams down the road to share each persona and let people ask questions about them. This will ensure everyone understands who your target personas are and they’ll be empowered to think about how they can better sell, design, build or market to them.
Here are some tactical ways to apply personas to your sales and marketing efforts:
Create sales collateral designed specifically for your personas
Track sales based on your personas
Create buyer maps to help new sales development reps get up to speed based on buyer and user personas
Craft copy on your website and on key landing pages that speaks to the heart of the buyer
Craft targeted ads and ad channels based on your personas
Design your website navigation by mapping your personas and their customer journey to buyer flows
Personas in Action at Envoy
When Envoy asked us to lead a personas workshop in late 2018, it had been a few years (and rounds of funding) since they had gathered together a group of cross-functional people to define their users. We led their persona workshop with folks from marketing, product, sales, customer success and engineering to create a set of buyer and user personas that were rolled out to the entire company.
Envoy was at a point in their company history where they were expanding their target users and needed to understand and differentiate who was buying the product and who was using it. By bringing this group together, they were able to spot the gaps in their assumptions and also see that there was some misalignment in who they were targeting simply because they had not all gathered in a room together to have this discussions.
Once we had the proto-personas defined, we set out to talk to customers to validate whether the team was correct. Coincidentally, we were also hired at this time to make their first set of customer story films. We combined these two efforts by reaching out to a list of customers provided by sales to see if they would be up for speaking to us about Envoy. We used our time with them to ask the persona validation questions. Then we made the ask for social proof. Would they be willing to participate in a written case study or video with us? Or at the very least, provide a testimonial?
We found this to be an incredibly effective tactic for killing two birds with one stone because customers are generally very willing to give feedback for a product they love. They also often like to do testimonials but sometimes even just responding to that request via email gets put off for higher priority items. We found it was easier to make that ask when we had already developed a bit of a rapport after having a conversation about why they loved Envoy.
These are the posters we made to hang around their office so the personas would be easily accessible to anyone in the company. We were especially delighted to visit Envoy a few months later and see their persona deck on rotation around the office screens. This a great example of putting these personas front and center so everyone in the company can become aligned on who the customers are, what they care about, and why they love the product you are building.
