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Five tips for building personas that work

Hi, I’m James. Thanks for checking out Building Momentum: a newsletter to help startup founders and marketers accelerate SaaS growth through product marketing.

“I’m just starting some messaging framework / customer survey and research projects at work so these sessions and assignments (and all of your examples!) have been a GPS essentially – helping me to find the best route forward and navigate the roadblocks too!”

That’s a real quote from one of the students in our course, WTF is Go-To-Market?. We’re planning our second intake for later this year. Find out more and register your interest here.

I’ve written before about how buyer personas are discovered, not created – go read that post now if you haven’t already!

Here are five quick tips to help you build strong personas that are used by your teams.

Don’t name personas (but name them if you need to)

It’s not really best practice to name your personas anymore. No more ‘Marketing Mary’ or ‘Superstar Simon’.

Instead try to name your personas based on a key identifier: something to do with the value they desire, their goals, or their common jobs.

For example:

  • Busy Business Owner
  • Holistic Head of HR
  • ROI-Obsessed Marketer

But in reality you might still need to name your personas to help your wider team to build empathy, as well as creating a shortcut to a shared understanding.

Make personas come alive

Trying to learn about the personas used in a business can be really boring. Walls of text, columns in a spreadsheet, and a dodgy stock photo that still has the watermark overlay on it.

Could you make your personas ‘real’ and provide more texture for those getting up-to-speed?

Perhaps you could:

  • Record your research call and create a compilation video, organized into key themes
  • Interview your sales reps and share a video of them walking through their experiences with that persona
  • Pull together a scrapbook-style resource of quotes, social media profiles, recommended content, and more that allows readers to explore a persona in more depth

Think about the format

Don’t make sales reps and marketing folk read through huge docs to get the gist of a persona.

Think about their use-case for accessing persona information, and build specific formats that give them what they need.

You could try:

  • A long-form doc for a deep-dive understanding
  • A battlecard with top points to hit on calls
  • An easy-to-skim PDF with screenshots and images and content snippets to build empathy

If you’ve already created the base content, don’t let that insight go to waste: multiply your efforts by repurposing quickly into formats your teams will use.

Build a feedback loop

Ideally, you’ll know about every prospect your sales reps come across that doesn’t fit into one of your personas – but not many teams are set up to monitor this.

If you don’t, you’ll soon wonder why your sales teams are losing to specific segments or why your metrics are dropping.

Get ahead of the curve:

  • Ask reps to categorise the main persona in your CRM from a dropdown field – with an ‘Other’ option for those that don’t fit
  • If that’s too much effort, use your ICP and demographic/firmographic indicators to auto-populate a field, and set up dashboards to monitor anomalies
  • Set up a feedback line, whether in Slack or in the CRM.

Your work understanding personas helps marketing to reach the right people, and sales reps to pitch the best way. Publicising this process will help you gain more supportive buy-in and engagement when they know it’s going to help them.

Refresh personas regularly

Don’t just create personas and let them sit there for six months or longer. We’re in tech; things move quickly.

What was true yesterday, might not be true today.

Ensure your persona stay fresh:

  • Keep tabs on effectiveness through qualitative feedback from teams, and quantitative (e.g. dashboards)
  • Use all interviews you do (whether win-loss, customer interviews, market research) to help assess whether personas are still up-to-date and relevant
  • Carry out desk research every so often: what do your target personas say on social media, what do their LinkedIn profiles say about their job, and what skills/responsibilities/challenges are they looking to hire for in their job ads?

Personas are foundational – don’t waste them

They can’t be treated as a one-and-done exercise. They need strengthening, testing, and evaluation to ensure they still fulfil their purpose.

Go back to your personas today: what’s no longer valid? Start the conversation, and kickstart the next stage of growth in your business.

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