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.

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.