Step one is to clarify your marketing objectives. And in fact, clarifying your marketing objectives will help you hone in on what your personas should look like. So you want to identify market priorities, you want to focus and essentially make it easy on yourself. The more you can focus, the more it will feel like you're shooting fish in a barrel, which is a whole lot easier than boiling the ocean. So there's specific implications for your persona that's based on the marketing objective that you choose. For instance, let's say that your marketing objective is to win 10 new customers, you don't care who those 10 customers are.

Well, the implication should be let's have the persona look like the customer you just want. And so interviewing a sales rep finding out more about why that customer chose to do business with you and build a persona based on that. Why not carbon copy what your last one looks like. You Your last win is a template for what the next 10 should look like. And your persona can reflect that. Now in contrast, let's say that your marketing objective is broader.

Let's say it's new customer acquisition, you want to win 10,000 new customers. Okay, so now you have a choice. There's an implication for your persona. And one dimension could be Do you go vertical? Do you go after specific industries? Or do you go horizontal, which would be based off of a job description or responsibility.

So whether you go vertical or horizontal, has a has a profound impact of what your persona will look like. Another dimension might be or objective, let's say is to grow your installed base. So what that would mean is that your persona should look like customers you already have. And in fact, the personas some of the dimensions you might pull from would be regarding what those what your current customers are currently doing, what problems are They're solving what issues are they solving? Where did they want to grow and expand their business, all of that plays into the care and feeding for what the persona of your installed base looks like, which would be very different from, let's say, the new customer acquisition lens of a persona, where those people may not even know how to spell your name. Here, your installed base, not only do they know how to spell your name, they have experience with you.

And we want to reflect that within your persona. One last example would be what I call defending a current market segment. So let's say you've got a competitor who is eager to go after a specific segment of yours, and they're going to be investing to show that they're a better fit in this particular segment. Well, the implications for your persona might be to dig a little deeper to understand where and why your persona might be at risk. So understanding and evaluating their fears objectives, their personal goals as well as professional goals, and bringing that to the forefront of your persona. Those levels that the competitors might be willing to exploit should be things that you're ready to understand and defend.

And that should be reflected in what your persona looks like. Now, these are just a few implications, your objective will be unique, and therefore the implications for your persona will also be unique, but it's something worthy of taking careful thought before you dive into the exercise. So this leads to a common question my company persona, do I need you and I have many or should I have for you? And I'm a simple guy. I can only think of maybe three things at a time before I get confused. So I always default to what I call the rule of three.

Give me three things to think about and I will likely remember them any more than that I get confused and also Consider this that likely you don't have enough money time or resources to invest in marketing and supporting more than three personas at any given time. So just focus on three, the three that you believe are the most important as it relates to the marketing objective that you've just defined. Now, as we move forward, one last thought that I want to give you is to be persona smart. And we'll be exploring these items in a little bit more detail in the other steps of the 10 step program. But just in summary here, you want to be able to share and develop personas across your company. This is not something you should do yourself, as you're talking about your specific marketing objective.

And the personas that reflect the opportunities for sales, invite others to be part of the persona conversation. And you want to also think in terms of families of persona. So for example, let's say you're part of of a bigger company, where you've got multiple business units, and each business unit wants to sell to the same individual. But there's a nuance there's something different that business unit a is interested in versus business unit B. Well, rather than having too many personas developed at any given time, I like to think in terms of a family of persona, where maybe there's enough of a flavor of the persona that's consistent and relevant for business unit a and business unit B. But there'll be one or two elements that will be different that you'll want to exploit and take advantage of persona A versus persona B.

So rather than coming up with a completely different set of personas that look and feel completely different. Think about it in terms of a family where there's some distinguishing elements that might separate out brother and sister personas, but they all fit together in something that is relevant to your company and consistent with The overriding marketing objective you want to achieve. And lastly, trust your gut. You'll know intuitively and instinctively if you're on the right track, we'll talk about that a little bit more later. And lastly, if I can leave you with one word, as you're thinking about your objectives and your priorities, the word is focus. You cannot be all things to all people.

If you try to do that, you will fail. Your messaging will be confused, your position will be confused and you will spread your limited marketing resources much too thin. You want to focus on those persona where you're going to invest proactive marketing dollars to make a difference and focus being focused will help you make better business decisions.