A persona is a semi-fictional character, built from research and data, that represents a target user of a product or service. By combining demographic, psychographic, and behavioral information, personas transform raw data into a relatable profile with distinct goals, motivations, and challenges. This process helps teams understand who they are building for, guiding product development and ensuring the final result solves real problems for a specific audience.
The concept of personas emerged from IT system development in the late 1990s. It was a response to the need for a better way to understand and communicate user needs. Software designer Alan Cooper is widely credited with popularizing the method in the design community.
He introduced personas in his 1999 book, “The Inmates Are Running the Asylum.” This shifted focus towards human-centered design, moving away from building products based on developer preferences. The practice has since become a standard in UX design and product management.
In marketing, personas are crucial for tailoring strategies to specific audience segments. They ensure that messaging, content, and campaigns resonate deeply with the intended customer, which boosts engagement and conversion rates.
While both represent user types, personas and archetypes differ significantly in their creation and application.
Personas are a cornerstone of effective user experience (UX) design, providing a clear, shared understanding of the end-user. They bridge the gap between research data and design decisions, ensuring the final product is both useful and usable. By grounding the design process in real user needs, personas help teams create more intuitive and engaging experiences.
Personas reflect a cultural shift in business towards greater customer-centricity and empathy. They help teams understand diverse user backgrounds, moving beyond their own cultural biases. This practice enables the creation of more inclusive products and marketing messages that resonate with people from various walks of life, respecting their unique values and preferences.
How many personas are needed for a project?
Most projects benefit from 3-5 key personas. This range is manageable enough to keep the team focused, yet broad enough to represent the most significant segments of your user base without getting lost in too much detail or edge cases.
Aren't personas just stereotypes?
No, effective personas are the opposite of stereotypes. They are built on real user research and data, not assumptions. This data-driven approach ensures they accurately reflect the goals, behaviors, and pain points of your actual audience, preventing design based on generalizations.
How often should personas be updated?
Personas are living documents and should be revisited every 6-12 months or when significant market shifts occur. Regular updates based on new data and user feedback ensure they remain relevant and continue to guide strategy effectively.
An account is a company or organization that you're targeting for sales. It can be a prospective, current, or even a past customer.
Learn about B2B demand generation strategy, including key elements of demand generation, & crafting your demand generation plan.
The Target Buying Stage identifies a prospect's position in the buying journey, from initial awareness to the final decision to purchase.
Sales Operations, or Sales Ops, streamlines sales processes, manages tools, and analyzes data to help sales teams sell more effectively.
The marketing mix is the set of marketing tools a company uses to sell products, defined by the 4Ps: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion.
Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) is the portion of the market you can realistically capture with your current resources, sales, and marketing.
A tire-kicker is a prospect who shows interest in a product but has no intention of buying, wasting a salesperson's time and resources.
Warm outbound is a sales strategy for contacting prospects who've shown interest in your brand through prior engagement, like website visits.
User testing involves observing real users interact with a product to identify usability issues and improve the overall user experience.
Cold calling is a sales tactic where reps contact potential customers by phone who haven't previously expressed interest in their product or service.
Freemium is a business model offering a product's basic features for free, while charging for advanced or supplemental features.
A sales coach is a mentor who trains and guides sales reps to enhance their skills, boost performance, and ultimately close more deals effectively.
Ramp-up time is the period a new hire takes to get fully up to speed and become a productive member of your go-to-market team.
Accounts Payable (AP) is the money a company owes its suppliers for goods or services bought on credit. It's listed as a current liability.
Dynamic segments are self-updating lists that group contacts based on real-time data, ensuring your outreach is always timely and relevant.
Predictive lead scoring uses AI to analyze data and rank leads by their likelihood to convert, helping sales teams prioritize their efforts.
Sales pipeline management is the process of organizing, tracking, and managing potential deals through every stage of your sales funnel.
Direct sales involves selling products directly to consumers in a non-retail setting, such as at home, online, or person-to-person.
Sales productivity is the measure of a sales team's efficiency, focusing on maximizing revenue generation while minimizing the resources spent.
A small to medium-sized business (SMB) is a company whose employee count and annual revenue fall below certain industry-specific thresholds.
Learn about business process management, including benefits of implementing BPM, steps to effective BPM, common BPM mistakes to avoid, & BPM tools and software.
Data encryption translates data into another form, or code, so that only people with access to a secret key or password can read it.
Lead scoring is the process of assigning points to leads based on their attributes and actions to determine their sales-readiness.
A decision-maker is an individual with the authority to make significant choices for a company, especially regarding purchases or strategy.
Hadoop is an open-source framework designed for the distributed storage and processing of extremely large data sets across clusters of computers.
Guided selling simplifies complex sales by giving reps step-by-step instructions and data-driven recommendations to close deals faster.
GDPR compliance means following the EU's strict data protection laws to ensure the secure and lawful handling of personal data.
A Salesforce Administrator is a certified professional who manages and customizes the Salesforce platform to meet a company's specific business needs.
AI in sales uses smart technology to automate repetitive tasks, analyze customer data, and help sales reps close deals more efficiently.
Customer experience (CX) is a customer's total perception of your business, based on every interaction across the entire customer lifecycle.
A marketing budget breakdown is a detailed plan that allocates your total marketing funds across various channels, campaigns, and activities.
Process Builder is a Salesforce automation tool that lets you create 'if/then' business processes with a user-friendly visual interface.
Video prospecting is the sales technique of sending personalized videos to potential customers to grab their attention and secure more meetings.
An elevator pitch is a short, memorable summary of what you do, designed to be delivered in the time it takes to ride an elevator.
Prospecting is the process of identifying potential customers, or prospects, to build a sales pipeline and generate new business opportunities.
A needs assessment is the process of identifying the gap between a company's current state and its desired future state.
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Think of a trademark as a brand's unique signature—a word, symbol, or phrase that legally protects its identity and sets it apart from the rest.
Outbound lead generation means proactively reaching out to potential customers who haven't yet expressed interest to introduce them to your brand.
Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) is the predictable income a company expects to receive from its customers over a one-year period.
Reverse logistics is the process for goods moving from the customer back to the seller, covering returns, repairs, recycling, and disposal.
CRM analytics is the process of analyzing data from your CRM to uncover insights that help you better understand and serve your customers.
Enrichment is the process of adding third-party data to your existing customer profiles to get a more complete picture of your leads.
The Dark Funnel describes customer buying activities that are untrackable by companies, such as private chats and word-of-mouth referrals.
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"Smile and dial" is a high-volume sales tactic where reps make numerous cold calls from a list, often with little to no prior research.
A marketing automation platform is software that automates marketing actions. It helps manage tasks like email campaigns and lead nurturing.
“End of Quarter” (EOQ) refers to the final weeks of a business quarter when sales teams rush to meet quotas, often leading to a flurry of deals.
Email verification is the process of confirming that an email address is valid and deliverable, which helps improve campaign performance.
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A sales kickoff (SKO) is an annual event for a sales team to celebrate wins, align on goals, and get motivated for the upcoming year.
Software as a Service (SaaS) is a cloud-based model where users subscribe to an application and access it over the internet.
A Representational State Transfer (REST) API is a web service that uses a simple, stateless architecture for systems to communicate online.
A headless CMS is a back-end content repository that delivers content via API to any front-end, decoupling the content from its presentation layer.
Cloud storage is a service model where data is stored on remote servers and accessed from the internet, rather than on a local drive.
Learn about batch processing, including benefits of batch processing, best practices for implementation, & common use cases.
Product-market fit is when a product meets the needs of a strong market, leading to high demand, customer satisfaction, and organic growth.
A Software Development Kit (SDK) is a set of tools that allows developers to create applications for a specific software package or platform.
Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM) is the portion of the market your business can realistically serve with its current products and sales channels.
Lead routing is the automated process of distributing incoming leads to the right sales reps based on predefined criteria.
Target Account Selling is a focused sales strategy where teams identify and pursue a specific list of high-value accounts.
Sentiment analysis, or opinion mining, automatically determines the emotional tone behind text—whether it's positive, negative, or neutral.
Employee engagement is the emotional commitment an employee has to their organization, motivating them to contribute to the company's success.
Learn about below the line, including key strategies for below the line marketing, & distinguishing above and below the line tactics.
A touchpoint is any time a potential or existing customer comes in contact with your brand, from seeing an ad to receiving an email.
CCPA compliance is adhering to the California Consumer Privacy Act, a law that grants consumers more control over their personal data.
An early adopter is a user who embraces a new product or technology before the majority, helping to validate and popularize the innovation.
Real-time data is information processed and made available almost instantaneously, enabling immediate analysis and decision-making.
Channel sales is an indirect sales model where a company leverages third-party partners, such as resellers or affiliates, to sell its products.
Digital Rights Management (DRM) is technology that controls access to copyrighted digital content, restricting its use, modification, and distribution.
Lightning Components is a UI framework for building dynamic web apps for mobile and desktop devices on the Salesforce Lightning Platform.
A sales pitch is a persuasive presentation of a product or service, aimed at convincing a potential customer to make a purchase.
An AI sales script generator is a tool that uses artificial intelligence to create personalized sales scripts for any outreach scenario.
The 80/20 rule, or Pareto Principle, posits that 80% of results come from just 20% of the effort. It's a key concept for prioritization.
A Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) is a prospect vetted by marketing and sales, deemed ready for a direct sales pitch after showing intent to buy.
A hybrid sales model blends traditional and digital sales methods to engage customers across multiple channels and buying preferences.
Account mapping is comparing your customer list with a partner's to find common prospects and unlock new sales opportunities.
A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a contract defining the level of service between a provider and a client, including metrics and penalties.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a digital marketing strategy that uses paid tactics to increase a website's visibility in search engine results.
Trigger marketing uses customer actions or events to automatically send highly relevant, personalized messages at the perfect moment.
A marketing play is a repeatable tactic used to achieve a specific marketing goal, like generating leads or driving engagement.
Cost Per Click (CPC) is a digital advertising model where an advertiser pays a fee each time one of their ads gets clicked by a user.
Load testing is a type of performance testing that determines how a system behaves under both normal and anticipated peak load conditions.
A dialer is software that automatically dials phone numbers for agents, boosting call efficiency and connecting them to live prospects faster.
Sales prospecting software automates the process of finding, contacting, and tracking potential customers to help sales teams build their pipeline.
Lead generation tactics are the strategies and methods used to attract potential customers and convert them into leads for your sales team.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a premium tool helping sales teams find and engage with the right leads and accounts on the LinkedIn network.
Zero-based budgeting (ZBB) is a method where all expenses are re-evaluated and must be justified from scratch for each new budget period.
Mid-market companies are businesses larger than small businesses but smaller than large enterprises, often defined by revenue or employee size.
Low-hanging fruit are the most obvious and easy-to-tackle tasks or goals that provide a quick, valuable return for minimal effort.
Contract management is the process of creating, executing, and analyzing contracts to maximize performance and minimize financial risk.
Learn about bottom of the funnel, including maximizing conversions at the funnel's end, & strategies for nurturing bottom-funnel leads.
Pay-per-click (PPC) is an internet advertising model where businesses pay a fee each time one of their online ads is clicked by a user.
Key accounts are a company's most valuable customers, vital due to their significant revenue contribution and strategic importance for growth.
Customer Data Management (CDM) is the process of collecting, organizing, and analyzing customer data to create a unified view of your audience.
Customer Retention Rate (CRR) is the metric that measures the percentage of customers a company has kept over a specific period of time.
Expansion revenue is the extra money a business makes from its current customers via upgrades, new products, or additional services.
Video email involves embedding a short video directly into an email. This lets recipients watch your message without leaving their inbox.
A product champion is an internal evangelist who drives a product's adoption and success by ensuring it solves real problems for their team.
A Quarterly Business Review (QBR) is a recurring meeting to assess performance against goals and align on strategy for the next quarter.