Customer Research

Buyer Personas should be formatted to be easily digestable and convey key insights that help teams in your org operate more effectively. The ideal format can vary by situation, organization, insights communicated, and even business model. For example, demographic info about age and gender might be helpful in B2C but is probably counterproductive noice for B2B selling. I personally use a single summary slide with 5 supporting slides. Then I linked these slide to a google doc with categorized customer quotes that equip our team with deeper insights when appropriate. I've also contemplated des...more

  Once you’ve interviewed and/ or surveyed your customers, prospects, and churned customers - it’s time to put the personas into a digestible format. I recommend Google slides (or PPT, if that’s your jam) and hosting them on a central resource so all teams can use them. For example, at last night’s PMM meetup, Shyna Zhang, Director of Enterprise Strategy at Marketo, talked about how they whiteboarded the personas in a common space for product and engineering to always be able to reference, making it part of their daily decision making process.   The personas should include: * A brief s...more

The best structure and format may not, in fact, be a "persona" at all. You have to ask the question: What should each internal stakeholder be using the persona to accomplish, and what does that look like? Not everyone across the organization knows what to do when handed a buyer persona profile (regardless of format) and that needs to be taken into account. Rather, consider what a "next step" might look like that would be readily understood, and immediately useful to, each constituency.  If we're talking about economic buyer personas being distributed to sales teams, I find that a busi...more

This is a great question. A couple of tips -  The #1 way of making sure that personas will be adopted and used as a resource across functions is to make sure you're including variables that these particular functions care about. So Finance for example, will care about something like Average Revenue or Average Ticket Size. Brand will care about "Key attitudes and motivators". Customer Success will care about "How do they ask for help". Sales will care about "How do they make decisions". Align your descriptions with what they care about.  2/ Use actual customer examples as a way to brin...more