Draft Buyer Personas that Leap off the Page (4 Steps)

You can make buyer personas using research, surveys, and interviews. If you look through your contacts database, you may discover hidden trends in lead/customer behavior about how they like to find/consume content, so use form fields that account for key persona info when you create forms for use on your company’s website. For instance, if all your personas vary per the size of the company in question, include a question on your forms where you ask each lead for info on company size.

Think about the feedback you get from your sales team on the leads they most interact with.

Are they able to generalize about the different types of customers you serve best? It’s important to interview your customers where possible in order to figure out what they like about your product/service. When you have gone through the research process, you’re going to have plenty of raw data regarding many of your current/potential/ customers. So what do you do with all that good data? How can you hone it into something easy to understand in the context of all your gathered info?

Next, it’s time to apply your research to the identification of patterns and consistencies you were able to detect in answers from your interview questions. Develop a persona, and even one or two secondary ones with this acquired info. 

How do you do that? Let’s dig into exactly that question. Here’s how you build professional personas for your company’s marketing advantage.

#1 Get Demo Info and a Snappy Name/Title

This is a bit obvious, but in your questionnaires and customer surveys, ask demographic questions. (Remember, though, that not everyone is comfortable disclosing personal info of this kind.)

It may help to feature a few descriptive buzzwords, including some mannerisms of your persona that you intuited or noticed during your conversations.

This can make it easier for your team to isolate and identify which prospects/customers most closely resemble which persona.  For example, if you talk on the phone with customer Joe, he might be slightly irritable and say something like, “Money doesn’t grow on trees!” You might then craft a persona for a fictional version of Joe named “Sam the Money Saver.” (Of course, in real life, be sure to get more info from Joe before you start generalizing his attitude in this way)

#2 Figure Out What They Want (and What You Can Do About It)

This is where you’ll distill the information you learned from asking “why” during those interviews. What makes your persona tick? Whom would they like to be? And, most importantly, you’ll have to tie everything together by telling your teams what they can do to help this persona.

#3 Prep the Sales Team for Persona Conversations

Your persona profiles ought to feature a few genuine quotes from the interviews you did. The purpose of these quotes is to exemplify that which your persona is concerned about, their personality, and what they are looking for. So in the case of the example above with Sam the Money Saver, you could include the quote, “Money doesn’t grow on trees” to expand on this persona’s general attitude. Create a list of any problems this persona might raise (objections to sales, etc.) so that your sales team can address those issues during conversations with customers whom that persona represents.

#4 Learn to “Speak the Language”

Inform your teams on how to talk about your products/ services with your persona. Cover any vernacular you need to use as well as a sort of “elevator-pitch” dialogue that highlights your solution in such a way that it resonates with the persona who’s listening. This can help make sure your teams are all speaking the same language when conversing with customers and leads.