Breaking Down the Buyer Persona
The one-page document that turns you into a customer mind-reader
The Cheat Sheet
What sets elite salespeople and marketers apart?
They’re really good at figuring out what hurts.
Great salespeople and great marketers are experts at hunting for pain, and then, once they find it, thoughtfully connecting that pain to something their product can do. Once you establish that connection, closing someone is nothing more than providing a little proof: Proof that your product can deliver on its promise, and proof that the economics make sense.
That’s it. And it all starts with pain.
On paper, this pain thing doesn’t seem that hard. We all know that understanding the customer is important, and customer research isn’t a complicated process. You talk to some people from your ICP, figure out what they do all day and what sucks about their job, write it down, summarize it, pull out the themes, and use what you’ve learned to find more customers and talk to them in a way that captures their attention.
Simple, right?
Simple, yes.
Easy? Definitely not.
Doing this well is really hard.
And the biggest reason it’s hard (at least in my world) is that there’s never just one kind of customer.
You see, my portfolio companies sell expensive stuff. B2B software can cost anywhere from four-to-seven figures. That’s a high-consideration purchase. And that means there’s always more than one person involved in the buying process. Everyone on that buying committee has different jobs, sources of pain, and pieces of what we’re selling that they care about - and others that aren’t relevant to them. Speaking the language of each person involved is key to creating a quick connection, building trust, and building conviction for them that, yes, buying this thing is a good idea - for them and their business.
What makes this harder is that you’re looking at the buyer’s business from the outside-in. You can never know exactly what they’re going through, or what’s hurting for them. You have to guess. So you better have a general sense, even before you meet these people, what’s going on for each of them, what’s on their to-do list, what their typical flavor of pain is, and what they’re going to care about when you show them what you can do. As I’ve written before, there is no one sales pitch. You need to get good at not only recognizing what kind of person you’re talking to, but also what’s relevant to them and (more importantly) what isn’t.
Here’s my point: To sell or market effectively, you need to get good at guessing correctly.
And when you’re trying to guess correctly, it really helps to have a cheat sheet.
That’s what a buyer persona document is: A customer cheat sheet. It gives you a clear inventory of the types of people who buy, use, and matter to your product, and then serves you up the context you need to stay relevant with them. It’s your cheat sheet for your never-ending commercial pop quiz. It’s there to help you build instant credibility with your buyer, speed up the process of finding and confirming their pain, and get to the part of the sales process where all you need to do is show them what they care about and prove you can deliver.
So how do you build a good buyer persona document?
What Makes A Good Buyer Persona
The way I see it, good buyer’s persona document answers three questions:
Who are the different people involved in buying your product?
What matters to them?
What DOESN’T matter to them?
That’s it.
Those are pretty simple questions. But the more specifically you can answer them - and the more you ensure that your answers are discovered, not decided - the better off your sales and marketing team will be.
Here’s an example persona document for a fictitious software company that sells to finance teams, borrowing from the same template that I use with my portfolio companies.
You’ll notice a few things here:
I start with a simple day-in-the-life description. This is the information you need to pass what I call “the cocktail party test.” As in, could you show up at a cocktail party with one of these people and make small talk about their work for 15-20 minutes? This doesn’t make you an expert. But it does mean you’ve done the work to mentally videotape what they do all day at work and break down the types of stuff they’re doing. You’d be surprised how much easier it is build rapport when you have this basic context laid out. Lots of companies don’t - and burn themselves when they rush into their pitch instead of figuring out where the sticking points are in the prospect’s workday.
I use emotive language to describe their pain-points. People don't buy things just for business benefits like more revenue or less waste; they need motivation. And nothing motivates like personal, emotive pain. Real pain isn't just a simple inconvenience. Real pain ruins your day. Real pain is when you come home, flop on the couch, pour yourself a drink, and complain to your spouse or roommate or dog about the deeply-wounding injustice you experienced on the job that day. Real pain is personal, emotional, and acute. It hurts. And until you've nailed down what hurts - using emotive words like concerned, anxious, uncertain, stressed, or exhausted - for each of your personas, you haven't gone far enough.
I take a stance on the parts of the product that matter and don’t matter to them. Selling or marketing a product isn’t about shock-and-awe. You don’t need to wow the prospect - you just need to give them proof: That some piece of what I’ve built is exactly what you need to solve the couple of pain-points that matter most to you. With that in mind, I like to include a couple of stance-taking columns in my persona documents. These give you a simple list of what parts of your product matter to this person, and what parts are less relevant, and keeps your pitch (and, once you get there, your demo) tighter and more compelling. Another step that lots of companies skip.
I find a relevant customer story that will resonate with them. A case study that resonates with a nervous CFO who’s trying to keep their board-of-directors happy might not be the same case study you use with a Treasurer who’s trying to automate their cash-flow forecasting and get out of excel. Ideally, you have a relevant-but-short customer story for each persona that hits on how you solved the pain-point that matters most for them. Keep in mind these don’t need to be long. You might only need 1-2 sentences to explain who you worked with, what they were dealing with, and how you helped them get around it. But doing the work to dig these stories up and match them with the people that matter most in your buying process is a key step in enabling your sales team and making your marketing more relevant. Don’t skip it.
By the way, if you’d like to use my template, you can download it for free using the button below.
What This Is All For
The customer code-switching a good buyer persona enables can be very, very powerful.
As Brian Geery’s How to Demonstrate Software so People Buy It, puts it:
“If you communicate with everyone the same way, you are not doing your job as a salesperson. You need to be a chameleon. It’s the salesperson’s job to communicate in the prospect’s preferred style… and to be alert for changes in that style over time.”
This might be obvious, but personas aren’t just for the sales team. Webinars, white papers, and other marketing efforts should all be constructed with a clear target in mind: a specific persona and a specific source of pain. One-size fits all content doesn’t work. Trying to appeal to too many pain-points dilutes your message and loses the power that comes when you really nail something that’s ruining a potential customer’s day right now.
You have to know who you’re aiming for. Otherwise, you’re sure to miss.
My biggest piece of persona advice might be this: Don’t wait. The information you need to build a clear picture of who you sell to and what they care about is right there in front of you. It’s distributed amongst your team, just waiting to be tapped. Gather a few people that market, sell, and build your product. Put the persona grid on a screen. Then talk through it, box-by-box. Go deep. Focus on the pain. And summarize the end-result clearly.
This work of knowing your customer never really ends. As you listen more, learn more, and sell more, your buyer personas can (and probably should) change. But here’s what won’t change: The need to create deep, trusting connections with the people who your business serves. So, again, don’t wait. And remember: Customers are just people, and people all want the same thing. To be understood.
At its core, nailing a buyer persona document is all about distilling your team’s knowledge onto a single page designed to elicit the response every seller and every marketer is going for:
“You guys get it.”