Set the Right Targets With Your Customer Persona

More often than not, entrepreneurship is about the choices that you make. The success in entrepreneurship is often attributed to what you do not do than what you do. The exercise of creating a customer or buyer persona leads you to make a choice- the customers you want to serve and the ones you do not want to work with.

The persona is all about building a representation of what your ideal customer looks like, backed by your market research and data. Define all aspects including demographics, job type, salary, consumption habits, lifestyle, behaviour patterns and other such attributes. And the key again being judicious use of data that you have already collected to substantiate your persona. 

Building a customer persona helps you get clarity about who exactly you want to target and check if your leads/prospects have the potential to be long-term customers. It’s also a great tool that facilitates the alignment of resources and team effort towards customer success. So no more guesswork, only definitive answers.

The Checklist

While you can go as deep as you would like while defining your ideal customer, here are the few things you must definitely consider while attempting to make your persona:

1. Life (location, gender, age, family, etc.)
2. Profession and work (job type, what company, work experience, salary and remuneration, etc.)
3. Goals (Their top priority, any specific short-term or long-term aims)
4. Needs (Something that will lead to a no-brainer decision to buy from you)
5. Pains (Specific issues and problems that you can cater to)

Now, of course, it is unreasonable to say that an end user will have all the characteristics that you jotted down in your persona. Your future end users need not perfectly match the persona but can be a close match. The idea is to not shoot in the dark and have a focal point when it comes to creating products for a particular type of customer.

The Process

The first step should be to first think about your ideal customer with your team. Think of personifying as if you had only one customer to serve. Who would it be? How would you describe him/her? Based on who all you met, serviced or discussed it with, think about the pros and cons of making someone your persona. And of course, there is nothing called perfection. You may have to make changes to this in future—nothing to worry about.

The second step is including data from your market research and existing customers, as talked about earlier. If you have been serving customers already, just analyse your most successful ones. If you’re just starting out, look out for your primary market research and think about the customers who were most excited about your ideas. However, do differentiate between their intent to pay or just a show of interest.

Remember, it’s not necessary what you’re hearing from them will be entirely accurate, so feel free to cross-question and validate. Even if you have to go back to do the whole thing again, don’t hesitate. 

It also makes great sense to involve your team members in this exercise. They may contribute some ideas that the founders may not naturally think of. They are too involved with customers in some capacity and may give useful insights.

Once you have everything in place, have a quick discussion with your team, show them what you’ve come to and put the persona on a chart paper to ensure everyone is aligned to the same goals and targets the same type of customer.

Bottomline

The customer persona is not just a self-gratifying exercise and goes well beyond that. It leads you to better decision making in future because of the clarity you get. Decisions like what features should you include or skip, what should your pitch be and who should sell your product to, where you should meet your clients and many other questions can have quantifiable answers. You will be able to build a more concrete vision in your startup, one that is backed by data, not assumptions.