#37: Tailor Your Customer Experience At Scale Using Personas 🚀

Customers don't want personalisation, they want tailored experiences.

This has been living rent-free in my mind since Yamini, CEO of HubSpot, unveiled the future of the customer experience at Inbound.

Gone are the days when emails with [first name] and [company] tokens on cookie-cutter templates, made customers feel special. 

Now people only notice it when you get it wrong.

The problem is that personalisation isn't solving for the fact that the information you are sharing just isn't valuable to the person reading it.

But there's a way to fix this problem.

Communicate to personas, instead of customers.

In this newsletter, I am going to show you how you can start collecting persona data and how to use it effectively to tailor your CS communication.

👩🏻 Collecting Persona Data

Historically, B2B SaaS companies have relied on sales and CS teams to collect persona data.

There are 2 issues with this approach:

1. you end up with incomplete data as your teams won't be able to map the users across the entire account
2. the data is quickly out of date, people get promoted, change jobs, leave companies etc.

The only way to do this effectively at scale is to build this in-product. 

Here's how:

• Map your known personas: Your marketing and product teams have probably done this already. If they have, use their work as a baseline to start. But, if you need to start from scratch, here is a free persona builder you can use to lead an exercise with your team. Start with 2-3 personas and build upon that. 
• Add persona selection into the sign-up process: When people create their accounts, ask them to self-select their persona, in-product.
• Integrate to the CRM: Make sure this persona information gets added to the contact in the CRM. This is the central system you use to communicate at scale.
• Pulse Survey In-Product Yearly: As people change jobs, it's important to regularly update this data. Think about a pop-up that will come in-product once a year that asks "Are you still a [enter persona]?". This will keep your data fresh.
• Allow Preference Updates: Within the account set-up, let people change their personas whenever they want or need to. You can also give people an "other" option if you want to collect information for future per

🎯 Mapping Each Persona's Jobs To Be Done

Users value information that will help build their careers or achieve their individual goals.

Knowing the personas is a good first step. But in order to truly tailor their experience, you need to understand what their responsibilities are.

I've written an entire edition of this newsletter on how to map Jobs To Be Done (JTBD).

What I am suggesting here is that you take this exercise to the next level by actually attaching these Jobs to personas. 

For example:

Let's say you are a CRM tool and one of your customer's key JTBD is to grow their revenue.

You might consider starting with 3 personas and one JTBD for each persona:

1. Marketing Mary -> Her job is to generate Marketing Qualified Leads
2. Sales Sam -> His job is to Close Deals
3. Rev-Ops Remy -> Her job is to Improve Rep Productivity

At the start, this will be basic, but over time you will have a few more personas and additional jobs for each of them.

Now that you have this deeper understanding of the persona, the world is your oyster,

You can:

• offer a tailored experience when they log into your product
• send emails that are relevant to their individual responsibilities within your product
• invite people to the events that are most valuable to them

📧 Tailoring Your Communication

Here are a few ideas on the types of tailored communication you could create:

• Activation: The first few experiences with your product often dictate whether a user adopts or drops out. But, most users don't receive a 1:1 onboarding experience. Instead of using a cookie-cutter email campaign, customise a flow to each persona and their goals. That will help them get up to speed and see progress faster. You'll improve TTV. 
• New Features: As you launch new features, they will be more relevant for some personas. And even when they are interesting for multiple personas, they are likely using them differently (ie. for a manager it means that they can have a better view on reporting, while an individual contributor benefits from having better information to prospect). Tailor your releases to speak directly to the use case that's relevant to your persona. You'll improve product adoption.
• Metrics of Success: Everyone is measured on their performance. If you understand what metrics are associated with the Jobs To Be Done for your personas, you can monitor those in the background and trigger engagements based on their performance. You'll improve overall customer outcomes.
• Events: When you run a webinar or an in-person event, there will be a target audience for those based on the topic you are discussing. Personas allow you to pick and choose who to invite so you can be laser-focused on the right audience. You'll improve event registration and attendance. 

The options are endless.

If you are interested in how persona data can help you improve your in-product experiences, check out this edition of the newsletter for inspiration.

TL'DR:

It's no longer enough to personalise your customer experience. You've got to tailor it.

1. Know your personas
2. Gather the data at scale, and keep it fresh
3. Map personas to Jobs To Be Done and metrics of success
4. Tailor your communication based on these and watch your main KPIs improve

See you next Friday!