In this chapter, we identified a few different ways to leverage your market and customer research, including customer personas. While we encourage using the customer/market profile and journey map, we’ll focus more specifically on customer personas.

In this project, you’ll develop several different personas and then explore two more deeply. Even if your company already has an internal persona doc, start from scratch, following our structure, and see if you can come up with something different.

Part 1a

Open and save a copy of the Customer Personas project document.

If your company already has customers, go through a list of your top 100 customers and drill into who they are.

Consider:

• What job titles do your customers use?
• How old are they?
• How much do they spend?
• Did they experience any major life events recently?

Almost always, it's easier to convert people like your current customers; it's easier to understand their problems, and it's easier to use existing customers as case studies.

Based on your existing customer data, identify 3-5 personas.

If your company doesn’t already have customers, brainstorm 3-5 potential personas for your product.

Think about the major pain points your product solves and what groups of people would benefit most from it. Consider:

• Age
• Job title
• Budget
• Location

Whether or not you have existing customer data, write a paragraph describing each persona in the Customer Personas doc.

Get extremely specific about the persona you’re targeting. For example, instead of saying “Property managers”, say “Property managers at companies that have been on the market for more than 30 days (i.e., that they’re having trouble renting).”

Also, name each of your personas—this way, it’ll be easier to refer to different segments of your audience. It’s always better to go into more detail rather than less. We can always go back into a broader persona and remove details.

Part 1b

Write out your product's JTBD next to each persona. Then, rate the persona on urgency, agency, and ability.

In your document, arrange your best/highest-intent customers at the top based on urgency. In the next step, you’ll create a detailed customer persona profile for the top two.

Part 2

Open our customer persona template and save a copy to your computer.

Then, begin filling out the details for your top two personas. The file contains two slides, one for each persona.

Remember that the more detail, the better. Being hyper-specific about your customer personas will help you understand their potential objections and how to address them.