A Buyer Personas workshop should offer you the creative and distraction-free space to produce ideal customer profiles, as well as outlining how your business can target them successfully.
It’s ultimately about creating a working environment that’s suitable for team members - who may not usually come together - to work collaboratively and feel at ease sharing ‘big picture’ ideas and addressing any ‘uncomfortable’ issues and feedback.
For most members of staff, it’s not easy to speak up for fear of judgement or retribution when it comes to workplace grievances or passing on the negative feedback of customers that they’ve ‘caught wind of’.
However, it’s important your team feels able to do this safely and constructively, particularly customer service staff. These individuals are real gold dust in a buyer personas workshop - they get the feedback first hand, but often aren’t used to sitting with senior management, so need to be put at ease.
As a senior manager or business owner, you should prepare all of your desired attendees for the session, encouraging a ‘safe environment for speaking up with no risk of negative consequences’. You must spend time reinforcing why this is a crucial session that could have wide-reaching positive results for customers, the staff themselves and your company’s wider reputation and business success.
The Goal of a Buyer Personas Workshop
The ultimate goal is to define your target customer/s. It may be that they don’t yet exist as actual customers, but by identifying who they are your sales and marketing teams can adapt their processes to start reaching out to such customers.
Some of the key factors in identifying a buyer persona include:
- Who they are
- What they do
- Why they need to talk to you
- How you solve their issue
- How they communicate
- What would put them off you as a solution provider
We may also recognise the importance of identifying an anti-persona - a potential customer that may, for example:
- Not appreciate the value of what you do/offer
- Have a long sales cycle for little ROI
What Do We Do in a Buyer Personas Workshop?
All workshops differ based on the provider, but Thrive delivers a bespoke workshop that can be broken down for attendees into:
- An overview of inbound marketing and buyer personas
- A review of existing personas and how they work in your business (if applicable)
- Confirmation of the key elements of your ‘ideal’ and ‘anti-’ personas/customers to discover the identifying attributes that will shape your buyer persona strategy
- The development of existing, or creating new, personas using best practices
