A persona document sits in a shared drive with a stock photo and a made-up name. No salesperson has opened it in a year.
Why this keeps coming up
Every business runs into this eventually, and most figure it out the expensive way through a mistake instead of a plan. A persona document sits in a shared drive with a stock photo and a made-up name. No salesperson has opened it in a year.
The concrete approach
Step 1
Base every persona on real interview data from actual customers and lost deals, not internal assumptions about who the buyer probably is.Skipping this step, or doing a half version of it, tends to look a lot like filling personas with invented demographic detail that has no bearing on the sale: a shortcut that feels harmless in the moment and shows up as a real cost later.
Step 2
Write the persona around what they are trying to accomplish and what stands in their way, not demographic filler like age or hobbies.Skipping this step, or doing a half version of it, tends to look a lot like writing personas from assumption instead of real interview or call data: a shortcut that feels harmless in the moment and shows up as a real cost later.
Step 3
Include the specific objections this buyer type raises most often, pulled directly from sales call notes or CRM fields.Skipping this step, or doing a half version of it, tends to look a lot like making the document too long for anyone to actually reference during a live call: a shortcut that feels harmless in the moment and shows up as a real cost later.
Keep the document to one page per persona
Keep each document to one page per persona; anything longer gets skimmed once and forgotten.Skipping this step, or doing a half version of it, looks like never having sales validate or correct the personas; this shortcut feels harmless in the moment but shows up as a real cost later.
Step 5
Have sales review and correct the personas annually, since they talk to these buyers more often than marketing does.Skipping this step, or doing a half version of it, tends to look a lot like filling personas with invented demographic detail that has no bearing on the sale: a shortcut that feels harmless in the moment and shows up as a real cost later.
Where this goes wrong
- Filling personas with invented demographic detail that has no bearing on the sale.
- Writing personas from assumption instead of real interview or call data.
- Making the document too long for anyone to actually reference during a live call.
- Never having sales validate or correct the personas.
How to tell it is actually working
Bottom line
businesses that get this right treat it as a repeatable habit, not a one-time fire drill.
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