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Create a Buyer Persona and Journey

Make it easier to market, sell, and achieve product-market fit with deeper buyer understanding.

Client Challenge

  • Contacts fail to convert to leads because messaging fails to resonate with buyers.
  • Products fail to reach targets given shallow understanding of buyer needs.
  • Sellers' emails go unopened and attempts at discovery fail due to no understanding of buyer challenges, pain points, and needs.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • Marketing leaders in possession of well-researched and up-to-date buyer personas and journeys dramatically improve product market fit, lead gen, and sales results.
  • Success starts with product, marketing, and sales alignment on targeted personas.
  • Speed to deploy is enabled via initial buyer persona attribute discovery internally.
  • However, ultimate success requires buyer interviews, especially for the buyer journey.
  • Leading marketers update journey maps every six months as disruptive events such as COVID-19 and new media and tech platform advancements require continual innovation.

Impact and Result

  • Reduce time and treasure wasted chasing the wrong prospects.
  • Improve product-market fit.
  • Increase open and click-through rates in your lead gen engine.
  • Perform more effective sales discovery and increase eventual win rates.

Research & Tools

Start here – read the Executive Brief

Our Executive Brief summarizes the challenges faced when buyer persona and journeys are ill-defined. It describes the attributes of, and the benefits that accrue from, a well-defined persona and journey and the key steps to take to achieve success.

Name Actions
Create a Buyer Persona and Journey – Executive Brief
Create a Buyer Persona and Journey – Phases 1-3

1. Drive an aligned initial draft of buyer persona

Define and align your team on target persona, outline steps to capture and document a robust buyer persona and journey, and capture current team buyer knowledge.

Name Actions
Buyer Persona Creation Template
Buyer Persona and Journey Interview Guide and Data Capture Tool

2. Interview buyers and validate persona and journey

Hold initial buyer interviews, test initial results, and continue with interviews.

Name Actions

3. Prepare communications and educate stakeholders

Consolidate interview findings, present to product, marketing, and sales teams. Work with them to apply to product design, marketing launch/campaigning, and sales and customer success enablement.

Name Actions
Buyer Persona and Journey Summary Template

Onsite Workshop: Create a Buyer Persona and Journey

Onsite workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost onsite delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

Do-It-Yourself Implementation

The slides in this Best Practice Blueprint will walk you step-by-step through every phase of your project with supporting tools and templates ready for you to use.

Project Accelerator Workshop

You can also use this Best Practice Blueprint to facilitate your own project accelerator workshop within your organization using the workshop slides and facilitation instructions provided in the Appendix.

Module 1: Align Team, Identify Persona, and Document Current Knowledge

The Purpose

  • Organize, drive alignment on target persona, and capture initial views.

Key Benefits Achieved

  • Steering committee and project team roles and responsibilities clarified.
  • Product, marketing, and sales aligned on target persona.
  • Build initial team understanding of persona.

Activities Outputs
1.1 Outline a vision for buyer persona and journey creation and identify stakeholders.
  • Documented steering committee and working team
1.2 Identify buyer persona choices and settle on an initial target.
  • Executive Brief on personas and journey
  • Personas and initial targets
1.3 Document team knowledge about buyer persona (and journey where possible).
  • Documented team knowledge

Module 2: Validate Initial Work and Identify Buyer Interviewees

The Purpose

  • Build list of buyer interviewees, finalize interview guide, and validate current findings with analyst input.

Key Benefits Achieved

  • Interview efficiently using 75-question interview guide.
  • Gain analyst help in persona validation, reducing workload.

Activities Outputs
2.1 Share initial insights with covering industry analyst.
  • Analyst-validated initial findings
2.2 Hear from industry analyst their perspectives on the buyer persona attributes.
2.3 Reconcile differences; update “current understanding.”
2.4 Identify interviewee types by segment, region, etc.
  • Target interviewee types

Module 3: Schedule and Hold Buyer Interviews

The Purpose

  • Validate current persona hypothesis and flush out those attributes only derived from interviews.

Key Benefits Achieved

  • Get to a critical mass of persona and journey understanding quickly.

Activities Outputs
3.1 Identify actual list of 15-20 interviewees.
  • List of interviewees; calls scheduled
3.2 Hold interviews and use interview guides over the course of weeks.
3.3 Hold review session after initial 3-4 interviews to make adjustments.
  • Initial review – “are you going in the right direction?”
3.4 Complete interviews.
  • Completed interviews

Module 4: Summarize Findings and Provide Actionable Guidance to Colleagues

The Purpose

  • Summarize persona and journey attributes and provide activation guidance to team.

Key Benefits Achieved

  • Understanding of product market fit requirements, messaging, and marketing, and sales asset content.

Activities Outputs
4.1 Summarize findings.
  • Complete findings
4.2 Create action items for supporting team, e.g. messaging, touch points, media spend, assets.
  • Action items for team members
4.3 Convene steering committee/executives and working team for final review.
  • Plan for activation
4.4 Schedule meetings with colleagues to action results.

Module 5: Measure Impact and Results

The Purpose

  • Measure results, adjust, and improve.

Key Benefits Achieved

  • Activation of outcomes; measured results.

Activities Outputs
5.1 Review final copy, assets, launch/campaign plans, etc.
  • Activation review
5.2 Develop/review implementation plan.
5.3 Reconvene team to review results.
  • List of suggested next steps