How I approach buyer segmentation (Persona)
Part 3 - Building a business to help start-ups and businesses to grow
In my previous post (here), I used my process to break down my target customers into buyers and users to better understand their needs, challenges, and current alternatives. In short, what makes them tick.
To recap, I had defined my buyers with:
Primary Characteristics:
Own a product within a company with stalled or limited growth
Owns a company whose product has stalled or limited growth
Examples:
CEO of a start-up with 50 people
CPO with an ARR of $5-$10M
COO of a start-up that’s between series A and B round
In my Continuous Growth System, the buyers are the center of everything that radiates from and is connected to. This makes sense since they pay the bills. However, what is a buyer?
Simplifying the process, I define buyers as anyone who makes the primary money decision needed to pay for your product. This could be someone who makes the final budget approval to make the purchase, like the CIO or Marketing Director, or someone who pulls out the credit card at the register, like a mom or teenager at a night out.
After collecting my notes from my conversation with CEOs and Product Leads, I focused on what keeps them up at night and why, what is their ideal outcome, and what challenges they feel stands in their way, along with what they have tried in the past and why it didn’t or worked not as well for them.
In the spirit of simplifying the process and having just enough information to make the next decision I need to make, I focus on the following:
Their Ideal Outcome
Their Problems
Any adoption or retention Traps
Along with alternatives
Ideal Outcome will help me to describe what they want to achieve and put everything else in context.
Problems help me to ideate what solutions I should provide to help them achieve their goals.
Traps (adoption or retention) help me to understand what would make them not buy or renew a solution.
Alternatives will tell me what competitors I should consider and what will create differentiation vs. just a "copycat” value.
These four simple pieces of information will give me the information I need for the next step: Competitive Analysis. The Alternatives tell me who I should research, and Ideal Outcome, Problems, and Traps give me context to understand each alternative’s strengths and weaknesses better.
Here is the simple buyer personas that I came up with.
Greg, the Growth Minded Company Leader
Ideal Outcome (I want..): Ensure the product delivers maximum ROI.
Problems (But…):
The products aren’t delivering outcomes.
The products aren’t differentiated on the market.
The teams are focused on building and not how to market or sell them.
The product strategy isn’t clear or aligned with the rest of the company.
Unable to see how different product investments are contributing to the ROI.
Traps (I don’t want to…):
Wasting money, not delivering clear results.
The training takes too long and takes them away from doing the work.
Waiting for weeks or months before seeing any tangible results.
Alternatives (I could use…):
Traditional consulting companies or consultants.
Product Management and Business Books.
Product management tools (Product Board, Aha!, Rally-One).
Product dev tools (Jira, Azure DevOps, Trello, Asana, etc.).
Folk knowledge (what I hear from friends and peers).
Helen, the Harrassed Product Leader
Ideal Outcome (I want..): Hitting all my KPIs.
Problems (But…):
Other execs in the company are not familiar with good customer-centric or product-led growth concepts or practices.
Frictions with other teams (due to their own KPI).
Elevated into product leadership due to past success, but lack cohesive and 360 product management process.
Frameworks provided by previous consultants are too complicated to execute with the team at hand.
Traps (I don’t want to…):
Wasting money on impractical advice.
Have the team offline for too long for training with release deadlines to meet.
Waiting for weeks or months before seeing any tangible results.
Alternatives (I could use…):
Traditional consulting companies or consultants.
Books.
Product management tools (Product Board, Aha!, Rally-One).
Product dev tools (Jira, Azure DevOps, Trello, Asana, etc.).
Folk knowledge (what I hear from friends and peers).
I ranked the Problems, Traps, and Alternatives based on how painful and impactful the problems and traps are and how useful and common the alternatives are. This ranking will help me when I start brainstorming on the solution and prioritize what I should provide first, second, and later.
Now, with a broad understanding of what my potential buyers want, need, and don’t want, along with a list of competitors to consider, I only need to look at the alternatives to see what makes them desirable and how they work, so I can come up with a strategy and the type of solution I should create.
But before I do that, I need to think about my users as well. So on to building user personas!
If your growth is stalled or you want to grow even faster. Contact me at john.wu@simplifying.work to learn more about my Continuous Growth System.