Personas are archetypes of potential users or customers. Personas have needs, desires, habits, and values. In B2B service design personas have roles, organizations, bosses, and customers of their own. We've used personas successfully in developing and improving services with our consulting clients.
Sometimes our personas are fictional, sometimes real characters. To create personas we collect information from our client's own staff, from customer interviews, surveys, and research reports. We give our personas faces by using portraits of people that "look right" for the profile.
Here are some of the questions that we use for defining a persona's profile:
- What is her role in the organization?
- What does she do, daily?
- Who are her customers (internal or external)?
- What does she want to accomplish?
- What does the management expect from her?
- What does she value?
- Who are in her team?
- What or who influences her?
Once we have a picture of the character we can ask the following questions:
- What would make her job easier?
- What tangible benefits would she get from our client's offering?
You can use personas in marketing and sales as well. Organizations don't buy, people do. Define decision maker and influencer personas and use them to improve your sales process.
