Describe the two or three people involved in a purchase and what each of them cares about.
Open your sent messages and find a recent prospect who said they needed to run things past someone else before deciding. Write down who that other person was, and whether you have ever spoken to them yourself.
A common version goes like this. You have a strong first meeting with the owner of a small cafe group. The owner follows your explanation, nods along and agrees the problem is real. When you follow up, the reply is "Let me check with my partner first." A week later a polite no arrives, and it comes from the partner, someone you never met and whose question you never had the chance to answer. Nobody in the meeting lied to you. You spent your time with one person, and the decision belonged to several. The aim is to see those other people early, before they quietly vote you out.
The ideal customer profile you wrote in lesson 1.1, "Your best customers tell you who to look for next", is about the account or household as a whole. A food and beverage business with two to five outlets is one example. A couple in their early thirties with a new baby is another. The profile tells you where to look for buyers.
A persona focuses on a single person within that business or home. That person has a job of their own, worries of their own and a particular way of describing the problem. Inside one company, two people can want opposite things. A founder may want to stop worrying about the books, while the operations manager wants the way receipts get entered left exactly as it is, since she is the person who enters them.
With only a profile, you end up writing one message aimed at "the business". With personas, you can write for whoever is reading this particular message, and get ready for whoever will read it after them.
You will usually find three roles in a business purchase. In a small firm one person can cover two of them, so there may be fewer people than roles.
The first role is the user, whose working day changes once the purchase goes through. For the cafe group, that could be the operations manager, or the outlet manager who closes the till each night. A user's questions are about effort: how much extra work you are adding, and whether something that runs fine today will stop working.
The second role is the decision maker, the person choosing between the options on the table. Usually this is the founder or the head of a department. Their concerns are getting the problem solved and not looking foolish if the choice goes wrong.
The third role is the person who signs off the money. In a small company this might be the founder's husband or wife, a co-founder, or an accountant from outside the firm. They look at price, at the contract terms, and at whether this spend is the best use of this quarter's budget. Because they often never sit in a meeting with you, their objections tend to reach you by message afterwards.
Mei, the bookkeeper from lesson 1.1, went back through the deals she had lost and found that nearly all of them had died with this third person. The founders she spoke to liked her. Their co-founders, who held the cheque book, had never heard of her and saw only a new monthly cost.
Selling to households follows the same pattern with fewer job titles. Whoever books the appointment is seldom deciding alone. The absent decision maker, someone in the household who has a vote but does not attend the meeting, is the most common reason a household deal stalls after a good first meeting.
Darren, the new financial adviser from lesson 1.1, finds that his best clients are young parents. In most of these homes, one partner gets in touch first and the other never comes to the first coffee. Sometimes one of their parents is involved as well, because they have opinions about insurance or once bought a policy they regret.
Knowing this lets Darren act sooner. Early in the conversation he asks, "Who else would want a say in this?" He offers to meet both partners together the second time. When that cannot happen, he gives the partner he is speaking with what they need to explain the decision at home. You will not always get to meet the missing person, but you can help the person in front of you explain the decision to them.
You can leave out the stock photo and the made-up hobby. A usable persona fits in four lines:
Role: the person's job or place in the household, for example a founder, an operations manager, or the partner who handles the family's bills. Problem: what they actually feel, said plainly, for example month-end taking three evenings. Words: the exact phrases they use about the problem, taken from real conversations, reviews or posts. Fear: what they worry will go wrong if they say yes, for example being locked into something that does not work.
Give the words line more attention than it seems to need. Sellers tend to name a problem in their own vocabulary. Mei used to talk about "cash flow visibility", while her clients said "I never know if we actually made money this month." The customer's own phrase gets the reply, because readers recognise themselves when they see it. Look for these phrases in your own notes, in what customers have written to you, and in what people who match your profile say in public forums and reviews.
The fear line shows you what to deal with before anyone raises it. An operations manager who expects more work should hear, in your first message to her, how little of her week will change. A co-founder worried about wasted money is best reached through the founder, so give the founder something short and concrete to forward.
These people already exist in your past deals, so there is nothing to invent. Go through your last few deals, including the ones you won and the ones you lost. For each, note who was in the room, who was mentioned but absent, and whose question arrived after the meeting had ended. Patterns appear quickly once you look back over recent deals, and the same roles start to repeat.
In the activity below you will write a half-page persona for the two people who come up most often when someone buys what you sell. Use real phrases you have heard, not ones you think they should say.
Pick the two people most often involved in buying what you sell. Write half a page on each, including the exact words they use for the problem.
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