White Paper: The Development and Application of Personas

Gretchen Hover, Managing Partner January 2017

Abstract

Today, customers’ complex business environments require a more sophisticated approach to really understanding their needs, how they make decisions and key influencers in their buying processes. Customer engagement is no longer solely the role of sales and marketing departments. Impersonal, one-size-fits-all methods and tactics for communicating with customers and prospects are becoming less viable and increasingly unsuccessful. In fact, marketing to, selling to and nurturing client relationships with the buyers and users happens within the context of their organizational ecosystem and is centered on the buyer’s and user’s unmet needs and desired experiences. Personas help businesses evolve insights into a holistic picture of a customer’s greatest unmet needs, identify the nuances of their organizational ecosystem and exemplifies what they value and how they measure it. Well-developed personas generate critical customer insights–or “Ahas!”–and can provide a company with the means for specific and meaningful customer interactions. This level of customer understanding can be invaluable for competitive positioning, lead generation, selling, product development, customer service and beyond. When implemented correctly, personas can inform the enterprise on how best to engage and nurture a customer relationship before, during and after the completion of the sale.

What are Customer Personas?

Customer personas are a fictional depiction of a specific role in a customer or prospective organization. They are an amalgamation of 3 to 6 one-on-one interviews, that, when taken together, illustrate and document their roles and responsibilities, their unmet needs, their motivations and ultimately, their behavior. Good personas explain what a customer does as well as why they do it. Personas will also help identify drivers and barriers to desired behavioral change such as “increase current level of product usage among existing customers” or “get customers to increase product spend with new value-added services.” This is meaningful in messaging, marketing channel selection, account planning and relationship management.

An Imbue Partners persona program provides four tangible deliverables: 1. The visceral understanding of responsibilities, pain points, motivations and

measurement of a specific role in an organization 2. Data-driven insights regarding a customer’s behavior relative to buying or

using your offering and what drives it or hinders it 3. A clear picture of the ecosystem within a persona works (e.g., workflows,

interdependencies, relationships, etc.) 4. The ability to map deeper customer insights to all commercial activities

(marketing, sales, product development and customer service.)

Highlights

Well-developed personas generate critical insights–or an “Aha!”–and arm a business with a deeper understanding of the buying and usage journey highlighting vital interactions along the way.

Proper persona development requires executive sponsorship, a dedicated team and an enterprise lens to deliver real impact.

Historically, personas were limited to sales and marketing groups. Forward-thinking businesses are now including product and customer service teams at a minimum.

Personas are composites developed through primary research. It is a mistake to use secondary research or summaries of past experiences with similar clients.

Persona development is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Personas can be developed in phases and prioritized to meet the most urgent business needs while managing budgets and timeframes.

Methodology Imbue Partners bases its methodology for persona development on three core capabilities:

Aligning clients’ key activities and resources to their strategic business imperatives

Mastering the buying process and customer engagement modeling

Conducting exceptional in-depth interviews (IDI) Our step-wise approach to designing and building an enterprise-wide persona program can be described in the following table:

Design the Plan

Build the Game Plan

a. Identify the executive sponsor(s) b. Define how key strategic imperatives will be

supported with new customer insights c. Select a cross-functional core team and

important stakeholders

Define Key Personas

Define Where to Play

a. Determine the markets and segments to focus on

b. Map the customer buying and usage process; identify key decision makers and influencers

c. Select personas to be developed in Phase 1 of the program

Conduct Interviews

Conduct Research

a. Recruit interviewees and set up calls b. Conduct the IDIs c. Synthesize all interviews for one

role/customer type

Develop Insights

Develop Insights

a. Synthesize findings across all interviews b. Develop the Persona based on new,

compelling insights c. Write a supporting narrative to bring the

persona to life

Communicate and Train

Disseminate and Train

a. Share the new personas to everyone in the company

b. Train functional teams on how to utilize the personas to improve customer engagement and all commercial activities

The aforementioned methodology produces the following, which Imbue Partners uses in its work.

Developing Personas in Context of Defending the Base or Growing in a Market.

Recommended Tools Four perspectives comprise customer personas:

1. Context and environment in which they work: Where do they work? How do they work? On whom do they rely for making key decisions?

2. Their desired experience: What is most important to them when using the product? Are they willing to compromise on some features over others?

3. Their known and hidden motivations: Is there a “favorite” product currently in use? Do they need to save time? Is budget an issue? Is access to support important? Are there personal/emotional implications?

4. Current buying/usage behavior: Where do they buy? When do they buy? How do they pay? How long is the buying process?

The customer persona culminates in a story, which accurately and vividly personifies the target audience/segment. The story creates a connection to, empathy with and memory of the customer.

Persona development culminates in a detailed customer narrative.

Imbue uses four tools in this process: the Buying Process, Decision Maker/Influencer/User Map, Personas and a Communication Plan.

1. The Buying Process: Mapping the buying process helps the organization how customers make purchasing decisions. It informs the remaining steps in the persona development process by providing detail on customer buying behavior, such as where and when they buy and how they implement and use the purchase.

Mapping the buying and usage process.

2. Decision Maker/Influencer/User Mapping: This tool is particularly good for analyzing and communicating priority relationships and the health of those relationships. This adds organizational and political context for building personas.

3. Personas: Imbue Partners’ persona development tool is both a framework for collecting customer information as well as a process to creating a customer narrative. A set of guiding questions drives each component of the persona. It allows discipline in the analysis but also step back and think about a day in the life of the customer.

Imbue Sample persona.

4. Communication Plan: The quality of a persona is measured by the role it plays in strengthening

customer engagement. A simple, actionable communication plan that tracks rollout includes training, distribution of materials, owners and timeframes.

Conclusion Understanding customers and their needs has become an increasingly complex endeavor. Developing personas brings a deeper, more meaningful understanding of the customer lifecycle, and in effect, the product lifecycle by creating a feedback loop that allows for not only understanding a client, but also understanding how to improve a product to improve future customer experiences. Implementing personas helps businesses to develop empathy—an understanding of specific client behaviors—and allows organizations to target their marketing, sales and operational initiatives during all phases of customer contact. For more information, contact Gretchen Hover: ghover@imbuepartners.com.