Understanding your personas is a crucial element of any successful RevOps strategy.
Personas are semi-fictional and represent the decision-makers who will ultimately purchase your product or service.
To help you grasp the concept and its real-life application, I've written this latest #RevOpsLife article to walk you through an engaging example of creating a comprehensive persona that can make a significant impact on your RevOps approach.
In this example, we are going to identify a company called TechSolutions360 Inc., which offers a range of SaaS products, including a project management tool, a CRM, and an HR platform.
What's clear here is that different teams and individuals will likely be involved in the decision-making process for each of the products.
Getting started can always be the hardest aspect, so to bring your personas to life, you'll want to combine your internal team's perspectives with real interviews with actual clients who have experienced your product or service.
So speak with all your teams, C Suite, marketing, sales, customer success, finance and operations teams, gain their input to the framework of questions in this document and start to build an internal profile.
With that understood, shortlist key accounts, both new customers and ones that have been with you for longer periods of time.
Interviewing your real-life customers will validate your internal viewpoints and also give you invaluable feedback.
Imagine you are creating a persona for your project management tool, which is targeted at startup companies.
Meet Entrepreneur Eddie, the persona who represents the startup founder in need of a project management solution.
Here's a step-by-step guide on creating Eddie's persona, which can also serve as a template for client interviews:
1: Name: Entrepreneur Eddie
2: Job Title: Founder & CEO, Product: Project Management Tool, Quote: "Let's move mountains together!"
3: Profile: Age 35, married, two children, lives in San Francisco, MBA graduate, annual income of $120,000.
4: Personality: Extrovert (4/5), thinking (3/5), intuition (4/5), judging (3/5).
5: Professional Bio: Founder and CEO of StartupX, managing a team of 15, has been in the role for three years, a decision-maker for technology purchases.
6: Personal Goals:
Year 1: Achieve $2M in annual revenue.
Year 2: Expand the team to 20 employees.
Year 3: Raise a Series A funding round.
7: Motivations: Growth and success, logic-based communications, social status.
8: Key Responsibilities: Setting company vision, fundraising, managing the executive team, overseeing product development, and maintaining company culture.
9: Information Sources: TechCrunch, Medium, LinkedIn, local startup meetups, and industry conferences.
10: Social Media: Active on LinkedIn, Twitter, and occasionally Facebook.
11: Top Challenge: Managing multiple projects simultaneously. Your project management tool offers centralized planning, tracking, and reporting features that help Eddie keep his team on track and organized.
12: Pain Point: Lack of visibility into project progress. The real-time dashboard and reporting features of your tool provide Eddie with the insights he needs to make informed decisions.
13: Deeper Questions and Answers:
What keeps him awake at night?: Ensuring his team stays on track and meets deadlines.
Biggest unseen danger?: Burnout due to disorganized workflows.
What's the greatest opportunity?: Streamlining processes to scale faster.
What is the cost to Eddie of not having your product?: Loss of efficiency, missed deadlines, and reduced team morale.
14: Transformation Analysis:
Before: Scattered project data, stressed and overwhelmed, long working hours, struggling startup founder.
After: Centralized project management, confident and motivated, better work-life balance, successful entrepreneur.
There is a tonne of other ways to bring out and identify your persona - go as deep as you can, after all everything you will do will be based on this semi-fictional persona, your messaging, product development, marketing and sales enablement campaigns, the biggest takeaway I need to state is don’t skip it, don’t short cut and DO THE WORK!!! It will pay dividends over and over x10.
I'm often asked how many clients I should interview.
The reality is it’s not always about quantity, it’s more about quality and choosing the right people to interview, with the quality of the client that is matched to the service line correctly, if this is achieved then you could interview as little as three or four clients per service line.
If you are global with a different culture in different regions ensure you take this into consideration and gain insights from all client locations/cultures.,
Creating personas like Entrepreneur Eddie enables you to better understand your target audience's needs, motivations, and pain points.
It helps you to tailor your RevOps approach to resonate with your prospects and drive results.
Need help? Let our team help you identify and create your RevOps GamePlan, book a consultation with us, and let's elevate your RevOps strategy to new heights.