During my MIT No-Code AI course, I was exposed to various data types, ranging from structured data, which is organized data that’s searchable, to unstructured data that isn’t searchable and predefined. We can use these different data types to change how we build and think about personas.
I believe B2B firms’ personas will no longer be generic and static. Instead, with AI, personas will “always be on” and we’ll “always be learning,” turning them into a critical Intelligence Layer for your business.
Today, many firms have personas based on:
👥 Demographics
Represents the target audience segmentation information, i.e., the CEO is between 40 and 45 years old, has been in that role for 5 years, has a B.S. in engineering, and previously served as a product director.
🏢 Firmographics
Provides business context about the firm, such as $50M in revenue, located in the suburbs, and firms with between 500-999 employees in the insurance industry.
🧠 Psychographics
Behavioral understanding of a digital-first, data-driven company focused on risk mitigation.
This data is generally available for many firms’ marketing, sales, and customer success. In some cases, the psychographics sit in the heads of the sales teams. However, firms have more data available to understand their customers than they’re using:
📊 Structured Data
This data sits in presentation decks, spreadsheets, and databases. It also includes zero-party data like survey-predefined answers. First-party data includes web analytics, second-party data such as customer upsell history, and third-party data like social media demographics.
As their Intelligence Layer, organizations can continually capture structured data and mine it using regression and classification analysis to identify patterns in the data. It can inform how the persona is changing. In times of uncertainty, this becomes critical when customers’ buying behaviors change in real time, or in times of certainty when customers embrace a trend and purchase a solution in droves.
Identifying new patterns can enable firms to personalize their response to individual customers:
💡 Enable Product Marketing to adjust a product mix and messaging for the strategic Procurement Officer to encourage her to continue investing in a strategic solution at a slower pace to manage the CFO’s concern about cash flow.
🎯 Provide Account Executives with specific questions and tools to probe and identify new problems they can proactively solve for Procurement Officers to close the deal.
⚡ Empower Onboarding and Customer Success teams to proactively address potential implementation delays to address cash flow challenges by adjusting payment strategies so firms can better manage budgets.
Want to align your teams on your ideal customer fit so they hit revenue faster and sustainably grow? Schedule a Discovery Session.
