Most companies have personas defined as part of their go-to-market strategy. Few companies actually make good use of them. Too often personas are given to reps as a reference without the coaching needed to use the information in their day to day job.
The book Atomic Habits popularized the concept of 1% better everyday. Coaching your reps on using personas day-to-day is one of the ways front line managers can help your team become more customer centric each day. The result: more wins, more renewals, and a more personalized customer experience!
What is a Persona
A persona is a generalization of the specific roles of your ideal customer that you engage with. Persona documentation helps you define and understand the unique needs and perspectives of these roles so that you can speak directly to them as they evaluate (and then adopt) your product.
A standard persona profile typically includes: Name, an Image, Job Title(s), Bio, Goals, Challenges, Priorities.
Here are some common problems with most persona templates:
- One size fits all: Everyone uses the same general template; which doesn’t make sense. A SaaS company and a clothing brand will want to know very different things about their personas.
- Now and future are conflated: In most cases you are mixing your ideal customer’s current state and future state into one which can be confusing. Separating the two helps your team understand where your product can make a difference for the customer.
- Lacking Tactical Insights: Sometimes the most useful piece of information is something simple but actionable. An example of this is including the persona’s product relationship in your template, ie. will they be using your product in a user, manager, admin, analytics, or billing capacity. This is a very simple call out that can fundamentally shift how you would speak with the persona.
For these reasons, we’ve created a SaaS specific persona template for front line managers to use with their teams to help incorporate personas insights into their day-to-day.
If you don’t have personas already documented or are struggling to get your team to implement the ones you currently have, click here to download our SaaS Persona Template.
Why Persona Implementation Fails
- No training around how to understand or apply this information is conducted
- The team does not reference or use them
- Too fictitious or generic – not based on real -life experience and don’t include specific
- Not updated / reviewed regularly to adjust to market changes. Macro market shifts can mean that your previously successful GTM is no longer producing results. If that is the case you likely need a larger strategy refinement to evolve to meet current market conditions.
Practical Persona Implementation Advice
Let’s start with some basic implementation advice for both Sales and CS:
- Provide training: Introduce the personas to your team by conducting a training session. The purpose of this training session is to ensure everyone has a foundational knowledge and knows how to use it. Other departments such as sales enablement or marketing can often help with these training sessions and reneforce over time.
- Connect the Dots: As the saying goes, show don’t tell. Help your reps connect the dots on how to use personas by demonstrating to them how they can transform persona knowledge into personalized messaging. A great way to do this is to host a team writing session. Coach your team on crafting messaging tailored to the personas specific needs.
- Map Use Cases: Map common use cases to personas and highlight the impact that they could expect to achieve. Coach reps on thinking through how they should best position your solution with this lens. This will prevent generic or irrelevant talk tracks and pitches.
- Storytelling : Create persona specific stories and train reps on how to deliver these stories effectively as part of their engagement.
- Keep your Personas Up to date: Change is constant – this is true even for personas. Your product evolves, buying habits change, and markets shift. Hopefully, you are also constantly learning more about your customers and their needs as well. For these reasons and more, what was tried and true may no longer be the case. As a result it is important to review your persona semi-annually and update them either annually or if there is a macro market shift.
Here is how the Sales team can get more from your personas:
- Understand the Problems: Understanding the problems the persona is facing can help your reps approach their conversations more strategically. With common pain points in mind they can ask better questions, personalize messaging that resonates, and focus on the things that matter most to that customer. Have the team do role playing so they can practice with each other so everyone can get feedback on what messaging is strong and what still needs some tweaking.
- Ask Better Discovery Questions: One place personas can make a big difference is in the discovery process. By identifying the persona you are trying to engage early on, reps can be smarter and more strategic in the questions they ask. Work with your reps to draft discovery questions based on persona insights. Also, when you conduct call reviews, reference back to persona insights in your feedback.
- Write better subject lines: Email is still one of the most powerful tools for sales and marketing. The single most important sentence in any email is the subject line. Even the most perfect pitch will fall on deaf ears if your customers don’t open your emails. What makes crafting powerful subject lines hard is they have to be short and persuasive. By using personas priorities to inform your subject lines you can increase your email open rate and engagement.
Some specific ways persona can help customer success teams:
- Onboarding: With a deep understanding of a persona’s pain points and challenges CSMs can better stay ahead of blockers that would otherwise derail an onboarding. Managers can help to identify the common blockers and map them back to specific personas. Then with this knowledge your team can avoid blockers proactively and/or build solutions to specific blockers. This knowledge can equip them with the ability to anticipate client needs.
- Expansion: CSMs can also leverage persona insights in order to identify additional value adds the customer may be unaware of and interested in. Have your team discuss how a persona’s goals, pain points, and priorities may align with other or new product features. Coach them on how to turn these opportunities into upsells.
- EBRs: Personas can help CSMs ensure executive engagement and successful EBRs. By understanding how success is felt and measured by your different personas your team can personalize their emails, questions, talk tracks, and presentations to their audience. Doing so will help your customers truly understand the value your product offers and increase renewals. Work with your team to brainstorm how your personas are connected and how each persona can help introduce you to other key decision makers to ensure accounts are multi threaded.
Team Workshops
To help you introduce your personas to your team and train them on how to use them day to day we recommend running workshops with you and your team.
This shouldn’t be a one and done workshop. There should be ongoing coaching and sharing amongst team members about what they applied, how and what worked and what didn’t. This will help to equip your team to engage with personas in a way that is buyer and customer centric and personalized. Through deep understanding of each persona, reps will have the ability to connect with prospects/customers on a rational and emotional level, leading to increased wins.
By leveraging persona profiles not only are you enabling your reps to perform better as individuals but you will improve the overall efficiency of your team. With the knowledge of each ICP so deeply engrained within the team over time they’ll be able to prep for calls faster and won’t be reinventing the wheel with every engagement. Through pattern recognition across each persona reps will also be able to apply their knowledge in repeatable predictable ways.
Use this tool to your advantage and you’ll be amazed at the improvement you see in your reps, how responsive your prospects and clients will be to personalized engagement and how much credibility your reps will build.
Need help in running these workshops? Reach out and we can assist.
