Step three is about forming a team. Now, if you build the persona by yourself, you will politicize the outcome. And that's not gonna work. Nobody likes the not invented here syndrome, which is why building a persona is a team sport, you must involve others in the organization, but you must do it carefully. And so let's talk a little bit about what this team looks like and how the team works. So who exactly should be part of the team?

You want to invite a few people who are able to add value people who have relevant knowledge to share people whose opinions you trust and value, people who will help you socialize the output. And so you know, let's let's just be obvious in many companies developing the persona In fact, all of marketing tends to be a political hot potato, and to ensure that you've got an objective If that is clear and aligned, and you've developed a persona that sales and marketing agreed to, you need to do this carefully, you need to develop the persona carefully with the team of credible people who will help stand up and say, Hey, this is good. I agree, this is the direction that we're going. So who exactly are the people that you should pull from? Well, oftentimes the persona is developed by marketing, director of marketing or marketing VP of such, but others need to be involved and who you might want to pull from might be sales, Product Management, others in marketing and customer support.

The reason being that each of these departments has a unique perspective of the customer, and of the engagement model and you want to invite them to share that knowledge as well that will help you craft a more well rounded persona and getting their involvement will help you avoid police heartburn, let's say you developed a persona and you didn't involve anybody from sales, I can pretty much guarantee you that when you go to execute it, sales is going to say, Hey, I didn't participate in this, this doesn't work at all, I'm not going to use it. And I'm going to create all kinds of angst within the organization. Because you didn't involve involve me early on. Well, let's avoid that by having somebody not just anybody, but somebody from sales, who's got an opinion that's valued, who can be a thought leader, and more importantly, can help you socialize the outcome, and say, Hey, you know what, I participated in this.

And I think this is good. This is really important. Now, the reason why you want to have a team, the primary output of the team is to actually document this so that the rest of the organization has it available, because unfortunately, corporate memory is short. People have these Hallway Conversations and they agree, and then things happen, people change jobs, people leave the company. other priorities come to pass. And next week next month, people are saying, did we ever develop that persona?

Gee, I don't remember, I guess we have to go do it again. And you waste so much time repeating the process over and over again. So the primary responsibility of the team is to not only develop it, but to document it and get some perspective and and influence around the company to say, guys, this is the plan. This is what we're acting on. Now. Let's all get aligned.

So, again, as I've been talking about documenting the persona, what you're going to be building is a hypothesis. Remember what I said earlier, we're aiming for the 75% accuracy level, we're not going to strive for 100% because we'll never get there. And you know what, you actually need a persona. Right now this afternoon. Now, some of you might say, well, Mike, we need to be careful. We can't just jump into this and not do a good job.

And we need to invest the time to do this in a way we're going to be feeling good about it. Absolutely yes to all of us. But I want you also to avoid analysis paralysis, and taking too long, so unpractical, pragmatic kind of guy. And here's the reality how I see it. Chances are, you're marketing today, you you have actually developed a hypothesis of a persona, whether you've done this consciously or unconsciously, you're executing activities that assume certain parameters, assumptions presumptions about your target market. And quite often those things are never documented.

So here's my promise to you that if you find yourself in that kind of experience, where you haven't done it before, and yet your marketing, I promise you can only do better by taking it Afternoon to conduct a persona exercise to build a hypothesis. And then to align on the hypothesis even though it's not perfect, even though it might be incomplete, but build off of something that can unite your sales and marketing team. And when you do, so, your messaging will be better, you'll have will be more consistent, and you'll be more likely to achieve high levels of marketing ROI that you're looking for. Now you'll refine and you'll get better over time. But if the choices doing nothing, or taking three months to do a persona, versus doing something quickly, to align the team and move forward, I will always up for doing something quickly.

Fact I had an old boss once who said if it's worth doing, it's worth doing quickly, is there'll be time to correct it moving forward. And that's what we want the team to be responsible for to do something quickly to document the hypothesis to challenge assumptions to discover gaps. To align the team that has huge value, and will help you start making better marketing decisions this afternoon. It's immediate. Now was talking about team responsibility. How big is the team, I do not like big teams, big teams becomes too bureaucratic.

So ideally, we're talking about four to six people, including yourself as the team leader, you pick the individuals that you think add the most value. And this becomes your core team, people who actually sit in the room with you to grab a flip chart and to start by identifying ideas postulating and developing that draft persona. You'll then document the draft and then you'll socialize it now what I mean by socialized is that each member of the team will be responsible for taking a copy of that persona, and then going out to the organization you share it with others and to get some feedback. This is is a great opportunity for others in sales and customer support and other members of executive management to allow them the opportunity to see what you've developed to offer some feedback, a chance for them to get their fingerprints on the persona.

And for you to say, Hey, thanks for the ideas we've heard you. We're going to now do a second draft that has your input, and then we're going to lock it down and we're going to move forward that helps you manage the politics of the persona exercise and will help you then execute your marketing program staying consistent and on track with who your persona target is because everybody will have participated. People will know what you're doing with a persona and they will feel partial ownership.