Personas don't have to be complicated

(Use my straightforward approach instead)

Meet Sara.

Sara is a Marketing Manager who has three kids, a goldfish, and a fondness for sushi. In her spare time she goes for long walks or reads classic literature in her favourite cafe. Her favourite colour is purple. Her least favourite word is moist. She’s 5 foot 6 inches.

Sara sounds lovely, right?

But how any of this is supposed to help you sell to her?

The only vaguely useful thing in that description is her job title.

And yet, this is what most people come up with when they create their customer personas. What should be a strategic exercise in determining your target buyers becomes more like an exercise in creative writing.

Marketers often stuff personas full of information, under the false assumption that more information equals more useful. But smart strategists know that often the opposite is true: more you focus on what’s important, the stronger your strategy.

These character-building exercises make people feel like they’re doing something useful. But this kind of character-work is only useful for screenwriters, novelists, and DnD players. (Oh yeah, Sara is secretly a powerful wizard.)

Anyway, to summarise: most personas I see are a waste of time and effort. They focus on all the wrong things. They don’t help. In fact, they probably hinder your marketing efforts. They turn what should be a clear person to target into a complete and utter mystery.

Which is pretty annoying because your persona is probably the most important piece of your narrative puzzle.

I need a hero

I'm holding out for a hero 'til the end of the night. He’s gotta be —

Ahem.

One of the seven building blocks of my Narrative Canvas is The Hero. This hero sits at the centre of your story. And, as I always take great pains to point out, the hero isn’t you or your product or your startup.

The Hero is always your target customer.

And that means when I work with clients and take them through the canvas, one of the first jobs we have is figuring out who that hero is. Who are the target customers they’re trying to attract?

And this is where one of two problems happens.

Either a) They have literally no idea who their ideal customer is and spread themselves way too thin.

Or b) They have an intricately detailed persona like the one I made for Sara, packed full of utterly useless information.

The first one happens because founders don’t want to limit their market by niching down. And I totally get that. But what these founders don’t realise is that niching isn’t simply picking a vertical and hoping you find traction.

You can focus in on a specific persona without limiting your market too much.

But this post is about the second problem: the overcomplicated persona.

In some ways this is more dangerous because it feels like you’ve done your positioning work. But it’s a false persona. Because it doesn’t help you market or sell.

Which is why I like to keep my persona work nice and simple.

My nice and simple persona formula

As far as I’m concerned, to craft the kind of narrative that resonates with your target market, you need to know two things. Well, technically three but I’ll get to that.

Those two things are:

• The organisation you’re targeting

• The champion at that organisation

Let’s look at each in turn…

The organisation you’re targeting

If you’re selling a B2B product, then you’re selling a product to some kind of business. That’s the organisation you’re targeting. And it’s the starting point of your persona.

So, how do you narrow that down?

Well, I always say that a good test of whether you’ve got a good description of your target organisation is this: "Can you buy or generate a list of those organisations?”

If the answer is yes, then great, you’re sorted. If the answer is no, then you need to rethink.

Here are some criteria you can use to focus your target organisation:

• Location

• Industry

• Revenue

• No. of employees

• Funding stage

• Age

Each of these can help narrow down your focus, but also are still tangible enough that you could use them as filters on a list of accounts.

On the other hand, here are some criteria you can’t use:

• Ambitious

• Innovative

• Growing

And yes, I’ve seen these used as persona descriptions. The reason they don’t work is because they’re subjective. The aim is to filter down. And it’s very unlikely you’ll find an organisation who doesn’t think they’re ambitious.

The other question here is how focused you should go.

Well, my answer is as focused as you feel comfortable going.

Maybe that’s a cop out but I don’t believe in just forcing people to niche down if they don’t want to. Because you’ll end up not sticking to it.

So you have to feel it out.

Once you’ve got your organisation, it’s time to consider —

The champion at that organisation

Firstly, what do I mean by “champion”?

For me, the champion is the individual who’s pushing to buy your product. They’re the person who most acutely feels the pains that your product is designed to alleviate. They’re the one facing the problem your product solves.

This is sometimes also the decision-maker. If you’re targeting a founder or department head with their own budget, then they probably get final say. But in some cases that champion will need to get sign-off from their boss.

A common mistake I see startups make is believing their positioning and messaging should be applicable to both the champion and decision-maker. This is wrong. It leads to confusing, vague marketing that ends up resonating with neither of them.

Instead, you should be focusing your marketing on your champion. Because if they’re not on board, then the decision-maker will never even have a decision to make.

Market for your champion. Then help that champion sell you in to the decision-maker.

Determining this champion is relatively straightforward. You’ll probably know which department is going to get the most value from your product. And so you just need to figure out the job role of the champion.

If you’re selling an email marketing platform, then you’re probably selling to marketing. And therefore your champion should be Head of Marketing / CMO / Marketing Manager - depending on the type of org you’re targeting.

Bringing them both together

Now that you’ve got your target org and the champion within that org, all you have to do is combine them.

Champion + Organisation = Persona

Some examples:

• CMO at UK Tech Startups

• Head of Social at European Businesses

• Chief Treat Taster at Dog Food Brands

You get the idea.

Oh, and one more thing…

You remember how I hinted that there was a third thing you needed to consider?

Well, now it’s time to introduce that into the mix.

What is it?

It’s a problem.

A big hairy problem that this persona is facing. And that your product solves for them.

When I said earlier that you niching doesn’t necessarily mean just picking one vertical and sticking to that smaller market?

Well this is why.

Because if you can solve a particular problem, that problem might need solving across multiple markets. In which case by focusing your narrative, positioning, messaging, and marketing around that one core problem your product solves, you’re able to own that problem, and the entire market that needs it solving.

Figuring out what that problem is can be tough. It’s why consultants like me exist. And it’s the kind of thing I could write a whole post about. So I won’t go into all the details here.

But what I will say is that it starts by talking to your newly-found persona about the kinds of problems they’re facing. And then it’s on you to come up with the solution.

But once you find it, you actually have a third persona puzzle piece.

So our revised formula looks more like this:

PERSONA = [CHAMPION] at [ORGANISATION] who is struggling to solve this [PROBLEM].

See how this is infinitely more useful than the one we had for Sara at the start?

With this new persona, you’re able to narrow your focus and target a specific person at a specific type of organisation. And, with the problem piece in place, you’re able to craft a narrative that wins that persona over.

You get a persona that works on both a rational and emotional level.

You get the hero of your story.

Job done.

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Well would you look at that. Another post over. It goes without saying but thanks so much for reading. I hope you found it useful. Any questions you know where to find me. Oh, and please do share with anyone you think would get some value from it.

Until next time,
Joe