Former American president Theodore Roosevelt was a famously charismatic and energetic figure, known for his ability to inspire and motivate others. A skilled communicator, he knew how to connect with people on a personal level.
He did this through active listening and a genuine interest in whoever he spoke to. He was also a gifted storyteller who used his anecdotes to make his ideas more relatable. These stories were brought to life through his commitment to public service, which helped Roosevelt earn their trust and respect. With a sense of humor and a zest for life, he built rapport with people from all walks of life.
Roosevelt once said, “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” It’s a lesson that founders and leaders of growing businesses would be wise to heed.
In a world of increasing noise and distraction, people demand to be spoken to in ways that matter uniquely to them. They want their needs, desires, and pain points to be intimately understood. This will vary by role: your champion wants one thing, their partner in purchasing wants another, and the finance chief who signs off may have a whole other agenda.
Establishing an array of customer personas, reflecting each of the distinct stakeholders who control or influence the relationship and buying decision, is the foundation of long-lasting relationships with your customers.
Key Questions To Create Customer Personas
Without a keen understanding of the stakeholders that will drive your business, and how they uniquely influence the sales process, you could suffer from numerous blind spots.
Your product and its solution may fail to align with your customers’ needs, causing potential customer dissatisfaction and churn. Your expensive marketing and sales efforts may end up reaching the wrong people. Your efforts to renew business and create loyal customers can be undermined, reducing your customer lifetime value (CLV). All of these results translate to a more complicated path to scaling your business effectively.
A founder or leader of a Seed stage company will often ask themselves a wide array of questions to identify the right customer personas:
| Demographics | Psychographics |
| What is their age? What is their gender? Where do they live? What is their education level? What is their income level? What is their job title? What industry do they work in? What is their relationship status? Do they have children? | What are their interests? What are their aspirations and goals? What are their values and priorities? What are their lifestyle choices? What are their media consumption habits? What are their social media habits? What causes are they passionate about? What are their opinions on current trends? How do they define success? |
| Needs | Pain points | Buying behavior |
| What are their goals? What are their pain points? What are their challenges? What solution do they need? | What are their frustrations? What are their obstacles? What are their fears? What are their objections? | How do they make purchase decisions? Where do they get their information? What factors influence their purchase decisions? What is their typical buying cycle? |
Creating Customer Personas For Social Impact
To identify the top customer personas for social impact, you need to consider the following factors:
The social problem that you can solve. Who are the people who are most affected by this problem? What are their needs and pain points? Consider the gender diversity problem in technology companies, for instance. Barely one-third of the workforce at large tech companies is represented by women – and despite their stated intent to rectify the problem years ago, these employers have barely moved the needle. The immediate stakeholder of this problem is the skilled female tech employee who has a comparable profile to her male counterpart, but finding barriers to progress. The impact, however, goes far beyond this group. People of color, underrepresented in the tech workforce, stand to gain from growing awareness of these disparities. Even outside the company, there is a broader societal impact; the World Economic Forum found that companies with gender diversity in leadership outperform their less diverse peers in myriad ways:
- 48% higher operating margin
- 42% higher return on sales
- 45% higher earnings per share
The impact that you want to have. What specific social impact goals do you have? Who are the people or organizations that are best positioned to help you achieve these goals? For example, the gender diversity problem looks very different applied to the entire workforce, versus leadership positions. McKinsey data found that, across industries, women make up 48% of all entry-level hires but only 38% of first-level managers. This trend, combined with the one discussed above, suggests that across industry sectors we have a leadership diversity problem, whereas in tech companies it is a workforce problem overall. Each would lend themselves to different customer personas.
The resources at hand. What are your budget, staffing, and other resources? What kind of customers can you realistically reach and serve?
The buyers of a program promoting gender diversity in a corporation would generally sit in the Human Resources department. There are many stakeholders who influence that decision, however. Executive leadership, investors and the board may have opinions about how it reflects company values. Clients may insist on working with partners who adhere to diversity standards. Let’s not forget the employees themselves, who invest their livelihoods in such initiatives, in the hope of developing skills and advancing their careers. These people are also part of the community at large, which demands that employers act as good corporate citizens. With unlimited resources, you would probably find a way to engage every one of these groups. Absent a blank check, however, it becomes important to prioritize these customer personas based on their potential to have a positive impact on your business – and your mission.
Our Approach To Creating Customer Personas
To develop the fictional representation of your ideal customer known as a customer persona, we start by gathering data from existing customers (referencing the questions above). This can be augmented with market research to provide more context on the people and organizations that are most affected by the social problem. Your first-party data sources (e.g. CRM, website traffic, social media analytics) are a good place to start.
Once the data is collected, we segment your data across demographic, psychographic, firmographic and behavioral lines, to group customers with similar needs and interests. Those that most closely align to your social impact goals become the priority. It is imperative that these profiles are shared across business functions (marketing, sales, customer success, product at minimum), so everyone is speaking a common language.
Solutions For Creating Customer Personas
Selling is becoming more complicated, with more knowledgeable buyers bringing more stakeholders to the table, each with their own motivations and requirements. Ignore any stakeholder’s needs and the whole deal is at risk.
Profile every customer type with influence on the purchase decision, and make sure every one of them is in your corner.
Our Process
- Extract rich customer profile data from CRM, support interactions, internal/external interviews, third party data sources
- Segment customer base into seed groups with distinct profiles & retrofit to past customer scenarios for beta testing
- Refine the seed groups and approach customers within each group for direct interviews, to finalize list of personas
- Populate each persona with available data incl. demographics, psychographics, motivators, common objections & tailored brand positioning
Deliverables
- Comprehensive resource encompassing all collected customer intelligence
- Reference document indicating all relevant information unique to each persona
- Visualization of each persona’s influence on buying decision & unique customer journey
Impact
- Improved understanding of customer needs & increased agility to build responsive products
- More meaningful engagement with stakeholders throughout the sales cycle
- Improved close rates and shorter sales cycles
- Increased efficiency of marketing programs throughout the sales funnel
Click for more information on how to create customer personas, or get in touch.
Other Revenue Growth Challenges For Seed Stage Companies
This discussion about how to create customer personas is one post in an 8-part series about revenue growth challenges for seed stage companies. See below for how to address other common revenue challenges:
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