Persona grata

I am a true believe in creating buyer personas to help you get to know and understand (if not love) your prospects and customers. Twenty years ago, I wrote (and pretty much adopted) my first persona, a money manager whose professional life was made immeasurably easier, better, and more profitable by having access to real-time data. (These were the days before twelve year olds had access to real-time stock market data, as I learned the other day when my sister told me that my niece was using her iTouch to let her mom know how her company’s stock was faring.) I like - and use - buyer personas.

In fact, I am presently working on a persona for one of my clients. While I know that there is some sentiment - with good reason - regarding someone inside the company owning the persona, for this company, I don’t think it’s all that critical. For one thing, most of the folks in the company seem to have a pretty darned good idea about the buyer persona already. (We even know his tee-shirt size.) For another, I have been working with this company for over a year and, at this point, am pretty much an adjunct of the marketing department.

So these days, I’m into persona.

Thus I was surprised to find myself surprised when a light bulb went off in my head when I was thinking through the problems facing a prospect of mine.

As I was grappling with the “what should they do” dilemma - so I’d have it on the tip of my tongue if they actually decided to hire me (or, rather, find the money to pay me) - the word persona flashed 500 watt in my brain.

Here’s the situation:

The company is a start up with a very complex product offering that takes care of all nodes in a lllloooonnnnggg workflow process. When I look at their web site, I don’t know where to look. Information - TMI! TMI! - comes screaming out at me. And if I’m calling TMI - product/tech/info junkie that I am - there is TMI.

At the same time, there is TLI, as in Too Little Information. Or, rather, TLI at the right level of granularity for the buyer persona who’s interested in the entire workflow suite. In other words, the persona who’s interested in the overall, full workflow product is bombarded with way too much product detail, and precious little about the big picture - and the big picture benefits. Good luck to them trying to figure out the forest for the trees.

Meanwhile, the buyer personae who are only interested in a node in the process - who could absolutely be served by a piece of the overall product suite -  will have a hard time finding what they want, given all the clutter and detail. For them, it’s too much forest, not enough of the tree they’re interested in.

Creating buyer personas for their product set would greatly help this company’s prospects figure out what the company has to offer. As it stands now, the information in their collateral, their web site, their promotional pieces, are pretty much a turn off.

Persona, for them, would definitely be grata.

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