How do you test and validate your strategy using stakeholder personas?

My experience is business-to-business scenarios, and I have found personas that are focused on titles, for example VP of Finance, are not helpful because different people are in these roles. Therefore, instead of title-based personas I develop skills and characteristic based archetypes. These profiles tend to be more helpful to define a group of people who are likely to act a certain way in a given situation. While neither approach can ever be perfect, because people are individuals with various combination of characteristics, the process of developing profiles enables you to think from an outside-in perspective about your product or service offerings.

From a startup perspective, stakeholder personas are essential tools that help founders and entrepreneurs understand and connect with the various individuals or groups that have an interest in their business. Creating stakeholder personas can be challenging, because quite often one doesn't know which groups of people will be a good fit for their businesses. For instance, a startup might try to create a stakeholder persona for potential customers, outlining their preferences and criteria, only to end up selling to a completely different group of customers.

Audience Segmentation and Target Profiles (from a recent proposal). Why this Matters. Provides insights into [company] audiences, informing on messaging that will guide creative development and media strategies. Deliverables. Audience Segmentation & Target Profiles. In a two-phased process, we will analyze [company] opportunity records (closed won/close lost) database and enhance with 3rd party data to segment the data and identify unique personas and cues that impact sales. These profiles will provide insights into messaging that will guide creative development and media strategies. Specific outputs include: Phase I: Define number of clusters and dispersions across the customer database. Phase II: Create personas for each segment.

The question is invalid, but that’s AI for you. You don’t validate strategy with personas. That’s not to say that they have no value in exploring experience. But, when you create a strategy you MUST explore its consequences and implications or it has not value. Running personas through the stakeholder experience dictated by that strategy is important. But it illustrates it. It does not validate it.

Involving stakeholders throughout the process ensures that your strategy remains customer-centric and aligned with their needs. By continuously testing, validating, and refining your strategy using stakeholder personas, you can increase the chances of success and create positive experiences for all involved parties. To test and validate a strategy using stakeholder personas, you can follow these steps: 1. Identify and define your stakeholder personas 2. Map your strategy to the personas 3. Gather feedback from stakeholders. 4. Analyze and interpret the feedback 5. Iterate and refine your strategy 6. Test your refined strategy 7. Measure and evaluate success

Your best bet is interviewing the personas to see what problems they want you to solve. So often, I've seen folks map out personas based on assumptions. Use their words to identify the problem; then, you can act out real scenarios. I've done this in my start-up; it is a completely different take on the insights.

Persona development is an ongoing process. Starting from hypotheses, every research touchpoint is an opportunity to learn more about the people you're trying to connect with. Testing positioning, ads, packaging? - leave time and space to find out more about the who. Continue to go deeper and then refine, always questioning your original assumptions. There's always another side of them to get to know. You know, cuz, they're people first.

Definitely take some time to chat with both internal allies and blockers to review and poke at your strategy. Understanding internal stakeholders map and personas with their equities is critical. New strategies face institutional inertia against change. Identifying personas that have interest, alignment or motivation to get behind the initiative will propel you forward and stress test and refine the strategy with them to accelerate it forward.

To effectively test a strategy using stakeholder personas, it's crucial to capture authentic insights. One of the most reliable ways is through observation. By taking behavior data of stakeholders as they engage your service or product without any intervention (i.e. hands-off approach), you can get valuable information about their genuine behaviors, preferences, and pain points. Conversely, interviewing stakeholders offers a more direct method of gathering feedback. However, it's critical to craft questions that are neutral and unbiased, ensuring stakeholders aren't inadvertently steered towards providing the answers you might anticipate or desire. When done correctly, interviews can add insights that complement observational data.

Stakeholder personas are fictional profiles representing different user types. To test a strategy, align it with these personas' needs, goals, and pain points. Assess how well the strategy addresses each persona's concerns. Adjust the plan based on feedback to ensure it meets various stakeholder requirements effectively.

At Verspay we have ramped up our engagement with our clients over the last 12 months to ensure stronger alignment with stakeholders. Although our leading company value is customer obsession, it wasn't until we put this testing and validation into action that our teams and clients started seeing the results. For us it's all about introducing Voice of the Customer into all aspects of our business, from product development to service delivery. We gather and test our strategy by working directly with our clients and market. In addition to informal product surveys, we conduct focus discussions with individuals, host small user groups, and solicit insights from formal executive advisory boards to ensure strong alignment with our future plans.

The best way to leverage stakeholder persona is to run an end-to-end discovery process with them. I'd start by putting the suitable filters into the Sales Navigator, identify the right people, engage with them on multiple channels (inmails, emails) and request time to run your thoughts by them. During the discovery/interview process, keeping the questions unbiased and open so that they can give your thoughts freely is a critical element too

Our finished target profiles identify values, needs, motivational drivers, pain points, and barriers to consumption. The target profiles help us understand user needs, but they also help creatives develop more persuasive marketing materials. We use this as part of a Messaging Architecture. The Messaging Architecture establishes the blueprint for future communication within [company] owned platforms and in external communications. This Architecture also includes a Creative Brief that provides creative teams with a start point for ideation.

In today's environment, you must be agile in addressing gaps, or you may lose your value proposition. Transparency is essential as you move through different iterations of the delivery of a service or product. What works today isn't guaranteed to work tomorrow.

It's incredibly important to be 'customer led' in this day and age. Consumers are more educated today than ever and ensuring that you have deep empathy with your customers will ensure that you are actually delivering value and solving their problems.

By empathizing with stakeholders and understanding their preferences, we can refine our approach to meet their expectations effectively. Demonstrating our commitment to continuous improvement strengthens relationships, fostering a more resilient and customer-centric strategy that drives positive business outcomes.

In my experience “stakeholder personas” has mostly been considered as an individual persona. However, in complex sales processes, especially in B2B but not exclusively, the stakeholder personas should be “grouped” into the “stakeholder buying committee.” Rarely is a decision made within one role. It usually takes a committee buy-in to ultimately make a purchase. Consider the following “personas” as part of the committee: - Initiator - User - Influencer - Gatekeeper - Decision maker/s - Financial buyer - Technical buyer - Sponsor/s Getting a Yes from one person is not a Yes on behalf of the organization. The only exception in my experience is small businesses where one person might wear many hats.

Engage in diverse scenarios, seeking feedback from peers and experts. Attend workshops and study real-world case studies for inspiration. Embrace a growth mindset, embracing failures as learning opportunities, and refine methodologies iteratively. This commitment to self-improvement will enhance your strategic acumen and deepen your understanding of stakeholders, fostering more successful and empathetic strategies.

Categorizing or mapping personas on a grid can help prioritizing them. Based on your opportunity areas, service line and customer type, you can determine where you will focus. A simple customer persona mapping that works for me is the mapping of users, buyers and influencers. Users interact with the offer, buyers decide to buy the offer, and influencers provide there opinion to other to help them make a decision. Especially in more complex business relationships with a network at the side of the customer this mapping can organically grow to targeted audience decisions in product development, implementation and adoption.

Testing and validating a strategy with stakeholder personas is crucial for several reasons. Firstly, it ensures that the strategy aligns with the diverse needs, preferences, and goals of different user groups. This minimizes the risk of developing a one-size-fits-all approach that might not resonate with specific stakeholders. Secondly, persona-based testing helps uncover potential gaps or shortcomings in the strategy, enabling timely adjustments before implementation. This proactive approach enhances the strategy's overall effectiveness. Moreover, validating with personas fosters empathy and understanding of stakeholders, promoting stronger engagement and buy-in.

Strategies based on assumptions are inherently problematic. However, in the absence of actionable data about stakeholder clusters, sometimes there is no choice but to take a guess based on a common sense approach to user profiling and then test your hypothesis with a small group of prospects. My point: experimentation can be a method used to gain the insight that enables the development of useful archetypes. In my experience, it's essential to turn research into action as soon as possible to avoid being stuck in a state of analysis paralysis.

I will have to use an analogy to drive home a point. In the early days of IT you had this waterfall methodology of software development, and in recent times we have the Agille method of SW development. Strategy is good to set broad direction and also to say what you won't do. But in many cases of success, it about rapid experimentation, failing fast and course correcting before you meet with steady state success. And then you look back and reconstruct your journey and tweak it some more and present that as the strategy you adopted. In a world where a week = month, month = quarter and a Quarter = one year, there may be little luxury for any grand strategy. I am not against strategizing and strategy. #PadiHaiwithKG

The article is really quite good. IMHO understanding “Stakeholders” is essential in any business venture for success and can’t be a one off, once a year strategy development task, but rather a continuous process backed up by data analysis.

Look at doing a Customer Value Proposition mapping exercise against each persona. This is about bringing each persona up and asking yourself "How does my product/service deliver value to create gains or alleviate pains for this persona"

Stakeholder personas methodology will be more and more important especially for sustainable products and service because it requires an enlargement of stakeholders area. When we work on Sustainable solutions the integration of enlarged stakeholders pain and needs and the validation step with test and survey on field could be a real differentiating position of your solution.