What's Your Point? Key Prospect Insights and Personas.

WHAT CAN PERSONAS TEACH US?

Having created many, many personas over the years, we have seen what goes into making them more or less valuable. There are three kinds of learning that emerge from persona work.

1. What you didn’t know you didn’t know. This is the most powerful source of insights. It emerges from our open-ended exploration of how your prospects go about solving the problem for which your product is the solution.
2. Correction of what you thought incorrectly. This could be to change an idea or to reset the importance of a perception. For example, you may have thought that having a particular need was a defining characteristic of your prospect, only to uncover that their personal beliefs about how to address that need are far more important.
3. Confirmation of what you know. While this seems to have little benefit, it actually does help to hear – in their own words – how prospects think about their situation and your potential solution. In particular, we help you focus on what is most important among the myriad things you know about your prospect. And perhaps most importantly, it identifies a positive point of connection among various internal groups who share a common understanding of who you are working together to serve.

SO, WHAT’S YOUR POINT?

All personas describe the person they profile. But a description can have infinite facets. The same person who is a “soccer mom” can also be a senior financial officer or a health food fanatic... it depends on what aspects of their person your persona references.

Some personas go in the wrong direction by including interesting aspects of their personality (for example, that a financial officer who is also a health food fanatic) that are nonetheless irrelevant and distracting. We believe it is a best practice for personas to be focused rather than scattered, and take you to a point, not just to a person. We call this point the Key Prospect Insight. It is the key truth that holds the power to connect your prospect with your product or service.

Identifying the Key Prospect Insight is the core reason we create personas -- to uncover how they might be engaged with a client’s offering, not to “dress up” a profile with colorful descriptions of the meals and movies they like.

What insights have you gained from honing in on personas?

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