How to develop your startup's buyer personas and journey maps
How to develop your startup's buyer personas and journey maps
The second step in finding your startup's best-fit customers is developing your buyer personas and journey maps. Here's a step-by-step guide and templates to help you do it.
The key to winning in a startup is understanding and focusing 100% of your effort on your best-fit customers (and only your best-fit customers).
For B2B companies, there are two main tools to help you better understand and align your entire go-to-market team on who your best-fit customers are:
Ideal customer profile (ICP): The company attributes of your best-fit customers.
Buyer personas: The people who participate in the sales process at your ICP companies.
In the first post in this series, I shared how to develop your startup's ideal customer profile (ICP). Check it out in case you missed it.
In this post, I'll discuss how to develop your startup's buyer personas and journey maps. Get your copy of my Buyer Journey Map Template for this post.
Step 1: Define personas for each best-fit company
Find each person who participated in the buying process
After you have identified the ten or so companies that are your best-fit customers, the next step is understanding the people at those companies who participated in the buying process in one way or another.
Look through your CRM or sales notes and make a list of the primary people involved in the buying process for each of your ICP companies. Then, collect basic information about each person, including:
Full name
Job title
LinkedIn profile URL
Assign a buying committee role for each person
Next, we want to assign the buying committee role(s) for each person you identified.
Many sales frameworks exist to help you identify all the different buying committee roles, including gatekeepers, champions, decision-makers, technical buyers, economic buyers, influencers, blockers, etc.
But if you're not selling to Fortune 100 companies (most startups aren't), most of this is overkill for a startup with limited resources.
Instead, I've found it helpful to assign one of three buying committee roles to each persona:
Champion: The main person you work with through the sales process. Often the primary user of the product/service after purchasing also.
Executive: The most senior person involved in the sales process. Often the budget owner for the purchase of your product/service.
Influencers: Anyone else involved in the sales process that influences the purchase decision. (A colleague, another executive, etc.)
Review each person you identified for each ICP company and add your best guess of their buying committee role to their information.
Note: There can often be more than one influencer, but usually, there is only one champion you're working with through the sales process.
The champion for each company will be the people we reach to interview in the next step.
Step 2: Conduct buyer journey interviews
Schedule 30-minute interviews with each champion
Now that we have a list of our best-fit customer companies and the people who participated in the buying process for each, the next step is to understand the journey these people took before purchasing your product/service.
I like to use the "jobs-to-be-done" framework to organize and think about these buyer journeys. The premise of this framework, created by former Harvard professor Clayton Christensen, is that every customer "hires" your product/service to do something for them.
Through the interviews, we'll try to discover what "job" these customers "hired" our product/service to do, as well as the steps, context, challenges, worries, and outcomes they took before purchasing our offering.
To get started, reach out to set up 30-minute interviews with each champion persona we just identified.
Here's an example email template you can use to reach out:
Title: Feedback requested for [YOUR COMPANY NAME]
Hi [FIRST NAME],
Thank you for being a [YOUR COMPANY NAME] customer!
I'm doing research to help our team better understand our best customers.
Can you help me out?
I'd like to schedule 30 minutes for a Zoom call to ask questions about your journey to become a [YOUR COMPANY NAME] customer.
Please book time on my calendar here (ADD CALENDAR LINK) or reply with a day and time that work for you this week or next.
Thanks for your help!
[YOUR NAME]
If you feel it is needed, you can offer to compensate the customer for their time. Usually, a $25 Amazon gift card will suffice.
If you want to offer a variety of gift card options, Tango is another service I've used that can help facilitate this.
Interview format and best practices
Here is an outline of the format and best practices of a good customer interview:
Setup: Conduct a Zoom call or similar video-recorded call. Greet them warmly (with your camera on) when they join the Zoom call.
Small talk: Take 1-2 minutes to introduce yourself and get to know the customer you're interviewing. Ask them how their day is going. How the weather is where they live, etc. These things will help build trust and put them at ease.
Call overview: Thank them for taking the time to do this interview. Ask if you can record the conversation to help with note-taking. Reiterate the purpose of the discussion and how you'll use their responses. Share a brief overview of the format. Discuss how they can expect to receive their gift card (if this is something you promised in your outreach).
Questions: Follow your question outline generally but dive in deeper with follow-up questions or skip questions as needed. During the interview, the customer should talk 70-80% of the time. Interject only to clarify, probe, or steer them back on course. Start broad with your questions, then get more narrow. Ask questions that dig for facts. (Ex. When is the last time you…? How often do you…? On a scale of 1 – 10, how important is...?) Push to get to "why." Record specific customer quotes.
Conclusion: Be sure to end on time. Thank them again for their time. Let them know how/when to expect their gift card (if applicable).
20 buyer journey interview questions to guide your calls:
Journey Triggers
Describe when you first thought of buying something like this. (Ex. Where were you? What were you doing? Why were you there?)
What was the primary problem you were trying to solve? What did the business need? What did you need? What would the impacts have been if you couldn't find a solution?
Who were you with? Who did you talk to? What were their roles? What did they care about?
Consideration
What alternative solutions did you consider? How could you and your team have achieved the same desired outcome?
Where/how did you go about finding such a solution? What did you Google? Who did you ask? Is there anything in this sourcing process you find particularly frustrating?
Who else was involved in this stage? What were their roles? What did they care about?
What are your favorite websites or blogs in your industry? Are there specific thought leaders in your industry that you follow?
What were the most recent events you attended or were planning to attend (virtual or in-person)?
What social media platforms do you use? Do you belong to any online communities or groups?
Are there any specific associations or network organizations you belong to in your industry?
Purchase
What were the "must-haves" you needed in a solution? How did you make your final decision?
Why did you choose us? What was our company's biggest differentiator that made us stand out from alternatives?
Did you have any doubts or reservations about choosing us? How did we alleviate those?
Who else was involved in this stage? What were their roles? What did they care about?
Results
What are the main results your business has experienced after using our product/service? What are the main results for you personally?
How quickly did you see those results after purchasing? When did you first see results that helped you feel like you made a good purchase decision?
What is our company's superpower?
What is our company's kryptonite?
If our company delivers on one promise, what is it?
On a scale of 1-10, how likely would you recommend our company to a friend or colleague?
Encourage your GTM team to participate in the interview process
I've found that many founders can be nervous and protective about who they allow to speak with their customers.
I get it. Revenue is precious in the early days, and you don't want to do anything to lose it.
But this is also a huge mistake.
In the early days of a startup, success is all about learning and validating hypotheses. The best way to do this is by talking directly with your customers––and founders can't be the only ones doing this.
Of course, you want to avoid overwhelming your customers or bombarding them with too many questions. Still, the occasional 30-minute interview is a manageable burden for most, especially if they find value in your product/service.
Often, an interview helps your team build stronger personal relationships with customers and can strengthen customers' loyalty to your company.
Coordinate efforts across teams, but don't limit or restrict these conversations with customers.
Step 3: Create your buyer journey maps
Record notes from your interviews
Block off 45-60 minutes on your calendar for each interview. Each interview will only take 30 minutes, giving you time to update your notes and synthesize learnings.
After each interview, create a buyer journey map using as many direct customer quotes as possible. Review the call recording and transcript to identify and add anything you missed.
Summarize each persona's "job to be done" at the top of each buyer journey map.
Here's an example of what a buyer journey map might look like for a company that offers employee training development services:
Add ideas for how to improve each stage of the buyer journey
A buyer journey map is only valuable if you make it actionable.
After you have recorded key customer quotes and insights, the next step (arguably the most important) is to add your ideas for improving each stage.
What can you do to reduce friction along the buyer journey? What channels did the customer mention that you should focus on? What content can you create to help at each stage? Which words and phrases should you use in your messaging?
Record your ideas for improving each stage in the "Our Perspective" section of the template.
Compare buyer journey maps to find similarities and create your buyer personas
After completing 5-10 interviews with best-fit customer champions and creating buyer journey maps for each, the last step is to look for similarities and differences across each. Here are some questions to consider:
Are there common themes across the "jobs to be done"?
Are there similar journey triggers, or do they vary?
Do they consider the same alternative solutions?
Do they search for solutions across the same channels?
How do the different purchase criteria vary?
Do customers care about the same results, or are they different?
Create your buyer personas based on the buyer journey similarities you observe. Add your details to your ICP + Buyer Personas document so these can live alongside the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) you previously developed.
Here's an example of what the final output might look like (obviously with more details filled in):
Conclusion
As mentioned above, the key to winning in a startup is understanding and focusing 100% of your effort on your best-fit customers (and only your best-fit customers).
That means your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and Buyer Personas are some of the most important tools your company can develop.
If you need to invest more time creating these for your business, do it. If you need help, feel free to reach out.
ICP & Buyer Persona Templates
If you missed them, get copies of the templates to help you with this process below. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions about how to use these.