Personas
Define who you serve best, then make those personas drive your reporting, segmentation and content.
Personas describe the three to five kinds of customers your business serves best, including what they're trying to get done, what's getting in their way and what makes them ready to buy. Every decision in the rest of the roadmap routes back to the question of which persona it's for, so this is where everything starts.
Most teams already have personas in some form, usually a slide deck or a doc from a workshop a few years ago. The problem is rarely the persona itself. It's that nobody uses it once the doc is saved, so content, campaigns and sales conversations drift back toward whoever happens to be in front of you.
Useful personas are tied to your offers and show up in your CRM, your reporting and your segmentation. When you can pull a list of contacts by persona and see which ones turn into your best customers, the personas stop being a branding exercise and start shaping real decisions.
Signs you need this
- You can't name the three to five kinds of customers you serve best
- Your personas live in a doc nobody opens
- You have an offer with no clear buyer, or a buyer with no clear offer
- The people actually buying from you have changed
- Your personas haven't been looked at in over a year
End results
- Three to five personas based on your real best customers
- A clear picture of each persona's role, pain points, goals, buying triggers, channels and objections
- Each persona matched to the offer that fits them best
- A short list of who you're not trying to attract
- A persona property in your CRM, with lists and a report you can use right away
Common questions
What's the difference between a persona and an ICP?
An ideal customer profile describes the type of company that's a good fit, like industry, size and budget, while a persona describes the people inside those companies who research, influence and make the purchase. Most B2B businesses need both, because the company has to be a fit and the person has to care.
How many personas should we have?
Usually three to five, because once you go past that they get too similar to change any decisions. If two personas would get the same content and the same sales conversation, combine them.
Where should persona information come from?
Start with your best current customers and look at what they bought, how they found you and what they asked before buying. Sales calls, support tickets, reviews and short customer interviews will tell you more than guesses from a workshop.
How do we track personas in our CRM?
Create a persona property on contacts and set it based on what people buy, which forms they fill out or what they tell your team. Manual tagging after a sales conversation is fine at low volume, and you can automate more of it as patterns get clearer.
How often should personas be updated?
Review them at least once a year, and sooner if your offers change, you enter a new market or the people buying from you start to look different. A quick check against your last six months of new customers is usually enough to tell.
