 Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week's Product School webinar. Thanks for joining us today. Just in case you didn't know, Product School teaches product management, coding, data analytics, digital marketing, UX design, and product leadership courses online and our 16 campuses worldwide. On top of that, every week we offer some amazing local product management events and host online webinars, live streams, and ask me anything sessions. Head over to productschool.com after this webinar to check them out. Hi, everyone. My name is Rihanna Zimmerman, and I am a senior product marketing manager. Today, I'm going to talk to you about buyer personas. I'm going to teach you how you can build your own set of buyer personas for your product and also how you can use them to drive customer centricity in your organization. Here's a few things you can expect to learn in this webinar. First, how to build out a set of buyer personas tailored to your product. Second, what kinds of questions you should ask to get the best information for your personas from your customer interviewees. And finally, how you can use personas to increase cross-team alignment and keep customer centricity the goal. Now, let's get into it. Hap Gemini recently released a study. They asked businesses if they thought that they were customer centric. 75% said yes. This is a pretty massive number. However, only 30% of consumers agreed that these businesses were customer centric. It's as important as ever to become customer centric. There's a lot of competition for these businesses and customers' expectations are ever increasing. So this is where buyer personas can help your business truly become more customer centric. One of the challenges buyer personas can help solve is a disconnection from customers' desires. As we saw in the Hap Gemini study, many businesses think that they're customer centric, but they're actually disconnected from their customers. Second, many businesses have a broken feedback loop. Some teams are able to correspond with customers, but that doesn't always mean that this information is fed back into the product strategy. Another challenge that buyer personas can help solve is silos between teams. We'll get more into that later. Let's talk about how these buyer personas can actually be used. First, they can ensure that your teams are keeping your customer at the center of your strategy with real feedback from customers. Second, they can help you facilitate a direct feedback loop with customers through opportunities like one-to-one interviews and surveys. Finally, they can help you create synergy among your teams. Buyer personas are a valuable resource, and once they're properly implemented into your organization, you'll be truly aligned with the rest of the company around what your customers want and needs are and how that should affect your product strategy. So you're interested in building buyer personas for your product. Where should you start? You should aim to create a list of two to five personas that you would like to build. The number of personas that you should build really will depend on the complexity of your product and sales cycle. There's a few different factors that go into these personas, including seniority, the team that the personas are on, the responsibilities of the persona, and the persona's role in decision-making. You may have a mix of personas that represent different areas of each of these factors. However, your most important persona will likely be your most senior persona, as this is the person that has the most buying power. Let's say that you are a product marketer for a marketing automation software, and you'd like to create a list of personas. Here's a sample approach. First, you have the chief marketing officer, as this is the person that owns the marketing technology budget. This is the person that your commercial teams need to influence the most and the one that your product teams also need to impress. And you have your director of digital marketing, who may be second in command to your CMO. Then you might have your marketing manager. This is likely the practitioner or the person that's actually going to be using the technology. And finally, you might have someone from another team, like IT. Even though IT might not be using the software, you might find that they are involved in the decision-making process, and so you may want to create a persona. Once you've nailed down your list of personas and validated with someone from your commercial team to make sure that you're thinking of the right people, you'll want to formulate a list of questions that you'll use in the interview and research gathering process. The questions should be based upon the specific demographic information, such as name, age, job related, such as what kinds of responsibilities does this person have, success related, such as how do you measure your success, decision-making questions, such as what kind of sources do you use to learn about new technology, and product related, such as which vendors do you use to currently do your marketing automation. Remember that you should be seen as objective as possible, though you are in a way representing your company. You should be a seemingly neutral party, so you can gather research. So when you're formulating your questions, you shouldn't have influences from your specific product, or you shouldn't refer to other vendors as competitors. Here's a list of sample questions that you might want to ask. We have the demographic information on top, and we have information about the person's title and company. Then there's questions about the person's specific role, such as how long they have been in it, which team they report into, and their responsibilities. Then we'll find out about their key challenges, how they measure their success, and then some decision-making questions, such as how do you learn more about the industry, and do you make the decisions around purchasing new technology. Finally, we have the product-related questions. Once you're happy with your set of questions, it's a good idea to share these with contacts in advance so that they can be fully prepared. So now let's talk about who you should interview at this stage. Existing customers or prospective clients can make great interview subjects, as they are likely the target that you are trying to reach. However, remember that you might want to be sensitive about these relationships. If you have relationships with these clients or someone that you know within your organization does, these are key. These are great gateways for you to have open conversation. You also want to find somebody that has 30 minutes to spare to speak with you. Let's talk about how to conduct these interviews effectively. When you're reaching out to this person or early on in the conversation, you should make it clear that you're not trying to sell them anything. You're talking to them as marketer to marketer or peer to peer. Ask questions if you do not understand or if you'd like more information. It may take the contact a couple of questions to warm up. So don't be afraid to ask them for more detail so you can get as much information as possible. Pay very close attention to the specific language that they use to describe their role and make note of it. If you hear a certain phrase repeatedly in the interviews, this is definitely something that you should write down as you should be creating a product and positioning that shows that you speak the language of your customers. You can conduct the interview either face to face or by video call. A phone call is okay too. But the personal aspect of having face to face communication may make the contact more comfortable. You should interview three to five people per persona. You shouldn't base your persona on just one person as they may share information that is only specific to them. It's important to validate and use the proper sample size to make sure it accurately represents that person's role. After you've interviewed three to five people and you have all of your data, now you'll build out the final persona. You should compile the information into a document. It may be one to two pages and you should be sure to capture all of the same information and criteria in each of the different personas. So if you decide that you want to show the name, age, key responsibilities and measures of success in your persona, they should be consistent across the board. You should highlight information that has either come up often in your interviews or something that you think can greatly influence the way your organization understands your buyers. Now that you have your final personas, here's how you can actually start using them. You can build product messaging that caters to these personas' unique roles, challenges and traits. So you may have positioning that's tailored to your CMO persona and other messaging that's tailored to your marketing manager. This should be one of your first steps if you're launching a product, as this is a great way to ensure that you're truly keeping your customers' needs at the center. You should also share these personas with relevant departments. Use your discretion to determine who will care most about this information and also ask them for feedback. Think of your personas as living, breathing documents. They will evolve over time, so you should be open to hearing from those who are experts on your customer to validate if your personas accurately represent your customers. Finally, here is where you can truly drive customer centricity. Map out the decision-making journey for each persona based on the information you've gathered. Then you can activate different teams to create personalized experiences for each persona. Whether it's on your website, through content, or through the product itself, you can ensure, using these personas, that these things speak to that specific persona. So after you've truly activated these personas in your organization, what can you expect? First, your product and positioning should truly resonate with your customer. This means a few things. First, your sales teams will be able to close more deals. And second, your customer will be happy using your product and they'll keep coming back for more. Next, you'll no longer need to do guesswork to understand your customer's needs. You'll know that your personas have influenced your product and your positioning. And you'll know that their voice is truly captured in these personas that you've built. Finally, your teams will leverage your personas as a source of truth. Once you've been able to roll out the personas and leverage them in your organization, your organization will have trust in the fact that you understand your buyers and you know who you're selling to. Thank you so much for tuning in to our webinar on buyer personas. If you have any questions about personas, please feel free to reach out to me. Thank you and hope to see you again.