What is your process for developing buyer personas for a new product launch?

Start with talking to customers to understand how they buy and their decision-making process. If we are working on a quick-turn launch, qualitative research via focus groups is a quick way to get a framework in place and validate product-market fit. With longer timelines, quantitative research can bring depth to user segmentation and buying timelines, and also the competitive landscape.

Additionally, it is ideal when user personas are part of the product development process. Then expanding to buyers is about understanding who in an organization is a user vs influencer vs buyer.

To ensure a successful product launch, it is important to create buyer personas that are tailored to your target audience. Here is a high level process for building these personas:

1. Research and analysis:

   • Conduct a market analysis to understand the industry landscape, trends, and potential customer segments.

   • Engage directly with potential buyers or existing clients through surveys and interviews to uncover pain points, motivations, and needs.

   • Gather insights from sales and customer support teams regarding common challenges, objections, and preferences.

2. Define audience:

   • Identify demographic information such as job roles, company size, and industry.

   • Determine psychographic information such as goals, challenges, values, and objections.

   • Analyze behavioral traits such as the buying process, decision-makers involved, preferred communication channels, and product usage patterns.

3. Draft personas:

   • Create a detailed profile for each persona, giving them a name and even a picture to humanize them.

   • Craft a story that explains a typical day, key challenges faced, and how your product can offer a solution.

4. Validate and refine:

   • Engage with sales and product teams to ensure that the personas resonate and align with their understanding.

   • Use A/B testing to target specific personas with different messaging or campaigns and analyze the effectiveness.

5. Ongoing evaluation:

   • Review and update your personas regularly, especially as markets change and your product develops.

   • Gather feedback from sales, customer success, and users on a regular basis in order to improve and refine personas.

cross promoting the playbook for work my team ran on this at a previous company! https://sharebird.com/h/product-marketing/playbooks/how-docusign-increased-their-developer-marketing-conversion-rates-by-50

Hey PMM tribe - We all know launching a new product without buyer personas is like throwing a party without knowing who’s on the guest list! You can always hire a research agency to do this for you (if you have deep pockets!) but here is a scrappy guide to building personas yourself to get the job done in this new “era of efficiency”!

Step 1: Research, Research, Research: Start with comprehensive research to understand your market. Dive into demographic data, customer surveys, and industry reports to gather insights.

Step 2: Customer Interviews and Surveys: Talk to real people! Conduct interviews and surveys with your current and potential customers to gather qualitative data on their preferences, pain points, and behaviors.

Step 3: Segment Your Audience: Based on your research, segment your audience into distinct groups with shared characteristics. This helps in creating targeted and relevant personas.

Step 4: Create Detailed Persona Profiles: Develop detailed profiles for each persona, including demographics, goals, challenges, motivations, and preferred communication channels. Give them names, backstories, pains & frustrations - make them real to make them more relatable.

Step 5: Validate and Refine: Validate your personas with additional research and feedback from your sales and customer success teams. Refine them based on new insights to ensure accuracy.

Step 6: Align Your Team: Share your personas with your cross-functional stakeholders & team to ensure everyone is aligned and understands who they’re targeting. This ensures consistency in messaging and strategy across all departments.

Step 7: Integrate into Your Marketing Strategy: Use your personas to guide your storytelling, marketing strategies, content creation, product development, and sales tactics. Tailor your messaging to address the specific needs and preferences of each persona. As they say, "Right message, right channel, right time".

In summary, creating buyer personas is both an art and a science. It involves understanding your audience so thoroughly that you can craft products and messages that resonate perfectly. Master your personas, and your brand's story will unfold like a blockbuster hit 🎬✨

When preparing for a launch, I start by creating personas because it allows me to effectively represent and advocate for the customer's voice. By understanding who the customers are, their challenges, and what motivates their buying decisions, you'll craft a more impactful product launch, deliver relevant messages, and develop strategies that effectively drive demand and adoption. As I've transitioned between companies and industries, I've had to quickly familiarize myself with different personas. Here's the approach I've found helpful:

1. Do the research: Product marketers should be the SME and know your customers deeply. To do this, begin by collecting both qualitative and quantitative data through market research, surveys, analysis of existing customer data, and direct customer interviews. Allocate enough time to this work - it is the foundation of all your efforts as a product marketer. I can't stress enough two points here. The first is talking to customers - do the interviews, join sales or support calls. Hearing from customers first hand will help you get to them deeply. The second is time allocation. Product marketers are stretched thin. Block the time to focus on customer research - and not just for launches.

2. Categorize and segment: Analyze the data collected from your research. Identify common characteristics and differences across personas. Take note of industry type, company size, role within the company, and business maturity.

3. Create Persona documents: Whether you use slides or documents, create easy-to-consume persona documentation. Include:

   • Demographics or firmographics such as industry, company size, and location.

   • Psychographics such as goals, challenges, values, and fears.

   • Behavioral traits such as buying behaviors, preferred communication channels, and product/service usage.

   • Role-specific concerns focusing on decision-making authority, influence within the company, and specific outcomes they are accountable for.

4. Validate and Refine: Share the draft personas with stakeholders in sales, marketing, customer service, and product management to gather feedback and make necessary adjustments. Validate persona profiles with real clients when possible, and analyst inquiries can also help confirm accuracy.

5. Educate and enable: Ensure the organization understands the personas. This is crucial for alignment across teams in building, marketing/selling to, and supporting the personas.

I make it a point to review personas at least every half year. Typically, they don't require a complete overhaul, but needs, challenges, and opportunities do change as companies grow, market conditions shift, or technical advances (Gen AI, anyone?) disrupt how organizations think about their business.

I'd argue you should know the buyer persona early in the process - likely at product discovery. This should be an exercise done with Product Management (PM) at the onset of understanding the problem that the product is intending to solve. At that poin, in partnership with PM you should undestand the problem the product is intending to solve and who has it. From there, your job as a PMM is to dig in and understand who would be involved in the purchase. Is your target persona also the decision maker? If no, then who would be? 

If this is a known persona to your business, I often go to Sales for insights then validate with customer interviews.

If this is a totally new persona to your business, I go directly to those in industry to gather more insights on the overall cusotmer journey.