BUILD YOUR PERSONAS, KNOW YOUR TARGET

The path through positioning, features optimization

6 min readNov 13, 2015

When I get hired by L’Atelier BNP Paribas as Business manager and start-up mentor for their brand new start-up accelerator, I participated at the first workshop about Business Modeling. One of the tools used by the consulting firm leading the workshop was “Personas” templates. So start-ups CEOs drew their personas and … and that’s all. They never went back to it.
Later, I discovered that most of them had no precise idea of who were their customers or at least did not make choices between segments.

That’s why I began to look deeper into the “Personas topic” to convince them of their utility.

I will try here to describe a pragmatic approach to draw personas. You can use it to improve your positioning.

WHY DO YOU NEED THEM ?

Personas are fictional characters that represent your ideal customer, they are the foundations of your startup. How could you run your business without knowing who will buy your product?

The two most interesting things with Personas are that it will allow you to analyse the pain points and goals that drive the customer’s decision to purchase and then target the right customers, in particular high value ones.

Once you have deep understanding of your targets, the goal is to align value with price and be able to prioritize your features roadmap.

By running ITWs, tests and surveys or collecting feedbacks, you will get to know your target better and better. That knowledge is precious for your start-up because it will allow you to push the right message (value proposition) to the right target, define what feature worth to be developed for your MVP or what price is optimal regarding a particular target.

HOW TO BUILD YOUR OWN BUYERS PERSONAS ?

1. Conceptualize 5 to 10 personas

This first step is the easiest part. A that point you should have met a wide bunch of prospects and you should have a first idea of a segmentation.

Based on this experience, by brainstorming with your team, you should also be able to build 5 to 10 Personas. Personas are stereotype of customers (job, title, company size, what they care about your product).

You will find below a template of Persona’s identity card. Remember it’s an example and you will have to adapt it considering your particular market and topic.

The point is to know them inside and out. Every data you collect will have to be linked to a Persona. If not, your analysis would be wrong, so be sure you don’t skim over this step, and make sure the entire company knows who the buyer Personas are.

2. Collect data for each of your personas

Now that you have your Personas, you need to collect data to deeper understand how they perceive value in your product.
To achieve this goal, you will run surveys and ask them the proper way.

About data collection and analysis
- DON’T ask them to rate the proposition from 1 to 10
- DO ask them which proposition they value more and which they value least
- Segment your target by Persona
- Use conjoint analysis instead of traditional one

QUANTIFIED VALUE PROPOSITION : THE RIGHT MESSAGE TO THE RIGHT TARGET

Define the propositions by sitting down with let’s say 10 prospects and customers (Five each). Set 30 min interviews with each of them individually and ask open ended questions about their use of the product, what they like in it, and most important the impact of the product’s use on him, his department, his company , his end user/customer.
In the end of the day, you should be able to formalize 3 to 10 value propositions that you’ll need to quantify.

Run a survey but ask the right way. Once you have yours possible value propositions, you could do 10 A/B testing by implementing ten different landing pages but you probably don’t have enough trafic to have significant results. Instead, run a simple survey but to have significant results (even on a small sample of contacts), you need to care about how you’re asking.

Generally, people will naturally ask to rate the different propositions from 1 to 10. And you can see below what the result will look like. I would not be very confident by choosing the third proposition, would you?

To avoid mischoices, I recommend to use conjoint analysis. Force your targets to make choice by selecting the best proposition (+1) and the worse one (-1). Now you can draw the graphic below and be very confident with the proposition 3 as the best value proposition for this segment.

Segment the responses. After having launched the survey, you will find the results super helpful but you will have to validate your segmentation. You have for sure more than 1 single persona (if you think you have just one, think again ! ), the value proposition they have chosen is probably different from one to another. And a good way to represent it is a graph comparing preferences of each Persona :

If the survey show that each Persona make the same choice, try to segment the results by demographics, current plan (if you have already launched your start-up), prospect vs customer, … you will find interesting differences allowing you to improve your personas definition.

FEATURE VALUE : HOW TO PRIORITIZE YOUR ROADMAP

Use the same method that we have seen to quantify value propositions. Ask your personas to choose a most preferred feature, and a least preferred feature. Then, iterate until you have the top 3 features by persona.

PRICING

For each persona, you can define an optimal price for your product. The method to get to it is described in another article.

PRICING SET-UP FOR START-UPS

How to set the right price for your service/product

medium.com

ACQUISITION COSTS

As your personas are very different, you probably don’t target them through the same channels to sell, don’t use the same media to communicate, etc…
Now that you know pretty well your personas, you should try to calculate the customer acquisition costs for each one. The formula is pretty simple but you need to have an idea of the way you will target your future customers.