If a group of clients is financially worth targeting, and if they have their own pain points and goals, they deserve their own persona.
April 03, 2024
By Rachel Smith
Long before I knew what personas were, I worked at the cheetah exhibit of the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. I did public education—answered questions, showed off artifacts we kept in our Cheetah Conservation Station cart, and shared information about the specific cats in the yard that day.
One morning I was out at the exhibit. It was a nice day and the crowd in front of me kept growing larger. I would periodically take a few steps back in order to address the growing crowd, but each time I did, I tripped over a woman who stood very close and slightly behind me—like she was glued to my shoulder.
When I went back to the office, I relayed my odd encounter to the keepers who were there.
“Short woman with glasses and dark curly hair?” asked one of my coworkers.
“Yes. How did you know that?” I replied.
“Crazy cat lady. She hangs out at all the cat exhibits and tries to get chummy with staff. Then she tries to tell us why she thinks the ocelots are depressed and how she can help or some other such nonsense.” I stared at her in confusion and shock as she added, “There’s a crazy bear lady, too.”
Now that I know what personas are, I think it would have been helpful as an educator at the zoo to have some:
Amy and Andrew were the only people I was prepared for in my onboarding, but by the time I left, I could reach all of them except for Chloe. She was actually a perfect example of an “anti-persona.” My point is, if communication toward a specific goal—whether that goal be education or a sale—is part of your job, personas are hugely helpful.
I assumed that personas had been around in some form at least since the golden age of advertising in the 1960s, but I was wrong. They weren’t born out of marketing or sales departments at all. The first persona ever developed was created by software designer Alan Cooper in 1985. Her name was Kathy. Cooper was in the process of developing new software and decided that he needed to think like the people who would be using it in order to make it successful.
Buyer personas (unlike Cooper’s user personas) weren’t developed until nearly 10 years later by then OgilvyOne marketing guru Angus Jenkinson. Since that time, people have argued about the best way to bucket individuals into personas: personas based on goals and motivation vs. those focused on “jobs to be done;” qualitative personas vs. quantitative personas; traditional personas vs. data-driven personas.
Marketers and sales professionals can get surprisingly defensive on the subject of personas. “Are personas old school?” asked @kleks, a user on Reddit’s marketing channel. Hackles were raised. “Some of the greatest marketing thinking on persuasive communication is 100 years old, dude,” replied @Gandalam. Then there was some debate over what “old school” even meant. My favorite response was @mlerin’s passive-aggressive zinger: “Is throwing spaghetti at the wall new school?”
There’s a contingent of the marketing and sales world that argues that personas are dead. When they explain what could be used in their place, however, its sounds a lot like what I would still consider a persona.
Louis Greiner of the Everyone Hates Marketers podcast started thinking buyer personas should die after seeing a comparison of Prince Charles and Ozzy Osborne at a marketing conference. Underneath the photos of both men, it said: Born in 1948, two kids, grew up in England, like dogs, wealthy, and vacation in the Alps.
The point of the comparison, of course, was that buyer personas couldn’t possibly be useful if they lumped Prince Charles and Ozzy Osborne together. In response, I’d like to make two points. First, if you are a company selling an extremely expensive item that a dog would need in the Alps, this is a perfectly good persona. Second, different organizations require different categories of information for personas to be effective.
Greiner goes on to clarify that, Prince Osborne aside, personas can be helpful if they contain specific physiographic information. There are, however, those who don’t think personas have a place in modern-day marketing. Brandon Andersen explains that, during his time at content-intelligence provider Ceralytics, the company found that several of their customers were CEOs and COOs, but they didn’t have a persona for that position. They debated whether to develop one and decided instead to create a “faceless persona” not based on title but instead on pain points. Andersen doesn’t consider that to be a true persona. I do. Any document that reveals the characteristics of a group of people and helps your sales team communicate (or decide not to communicate) with that group is a persona in my book.
Some marketing strategists argue that we don’t need to create personas anymore because we now have all of the data at an individual level. We don’t have to put people into buckets anymore. Sure, once someone is your customer, you can learn exactly how they want to be communicated with and which messages are most effective. While they are still prospects, however, you have to make some assumptions. You need to get the information you are learning from customers to your sales team in a format that makes it usable. Whether you call it a faceless persona or a non-persona…it’s still a persona.
There are loads of articles on how to develop personas and suggested templates to use. That blog has already been written. Instead, we want to share some guidelines that will help make your buyer personas as useful as possible.
1. Be Flexible With Your Categories
Although we have a template at Maestro that I use when I start developing personas for clients, I only use it as a starting point. For some products and services, a customer’s academic background is important, but for others it’s not.
On a recent project, we identified an interesting trait that a group of prospects had in common—they were all grossly overqualified for their jobs. This information didn’t fit neatly into a category, but we were sure to include it anyway. It was vital to understanding why an individual in this group was frustrated that they were not being considered a key decision-maker.
2. Have as Many Personas as You Need, but No More
Adele Renella, CEO of Buyer Persona Institute, writes, “You will want more than one buyer persona only when they clarify the need for your team to invest in unique efforts to engage those audiences.” Don’t simply assume that because you sell to three different titles you need three different personas. Ask yourself whether approaching sales differently for each of those titles would actually win you more business. Only when the answer is yes does it warrant creating a separate persona.
3. Focus on What Really Matters
Your personas are there to help guide your selling and marketing. How does your product or service specifically impact this person? To answer that, you need to understand their pain points. What does success look like for them? What does their day-to-day look like, and how can you make it better? How are they making decisions? If you’re selling strollers, then it’s important to know that Paul has three kids. If you’re selling SaaS, we don’t really care that Paul has three kids. (No offense, Paul.)
4. View Your Personas as Living Documents
Personas capture people at a moment in time. As the economy changes, as politics change, and as trends change, your personas should change, as well. If your sales team suddenly starts hearing mention of a recently enacted privacy regulation every time they talk to CTOs, that’s worth adding to the corresponding persona. Make note of your buyers’ common phrases and add those to your personas so you are speaking to prospects in their own language. Revisit your personas every year and make necessary changes. If they don’t evolve, they stop being useful.
I think UX Researcher Christin Roman explained personas best when she said, “At the end of the day, a persona is just a way to encapsulate all of the research that you’ve done. The goal is to make the data easier to digest, more memorable, and, hopefully, actionable.”
If I had been given zoo-visitor personas, I would have known right away how to deal with Josh, the 13-year-old boy whose friends had dared him to talk to me. Show him an enlarged photograph of deformed cheetah sperm (a result of their genetic bottleneck and subsequent inbreeding). He will immediately turn red, walk away, and let you continue doing your job. But always beware of the crazy cat lady.
Whether you’re looking for personas, workshops, or coaching, you can reach us at mastery@maestrogroup.co.
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