Knowing your customer is obviously an important part of ensuring your business is actually providing value to them. But actually taking the time to document those personas is something a lot of companies and teams don't take the time to do.
Here's why you need to create customer personas for you business:
First, personas will help you scale:
If you are a growing company or team, are you going to take all of that internal knowledge you have about your customers and just tell new employees and hope they remember? At the very least, personas will help you onboard new employees.
Second, you might think you are on the same page as the rest of the team, but you'd better check:
Documentation forces organizations to find consensus on internal knowledge and when disagreements arise, the best way to agree is to use data...
Third, your sense of your personas may be flawed without actual data:
Everyone in your company will have a perception of your customer but they come from their perspective based on their experience. If you have data on your customer, you can cut through those opinions.
Fourth, documenting personas will help your company grow:
The more you learn, the more you adjust the personas and therefore the smarter your organization gets at solving their problems. Unifying your messaging, demos, value props will improve customer awareness.
Even relativity small companies get siloed quickly as they grow and different departments or individuals will have different approaches to the same thing. If you and another leader are aiming at different targets and using different tactics, are you even in the same company?
Fifth, personas save time:
Every decision that gets made about customers can end up being made in a vacuum and therefore can reinvent the wheel. If you have established guidelines for those decisions, you'll save people time making large and small choices about their work.
Sixth reason, you'll realize how little you know about your customer:
As you document, you'll soon see there's so much more you need to know about them and you'll start projects that help you collect that data. Suddenly, your organization will get obsessed with learning.
As you learn, you can add to the persona or realize you have multiple personas with different needs. All of this information becomes a lot to manage which leads us back to reason one: document to scale. Make it a person's or team's job to own personas in your company.
With that information stored, updated, and shared, you'll not only see your team work more efficiently, you'll actually further help your customer.
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