Click the image for details "Hey beauty, is that your profile picture? Send me a photo!" Well, this is the most off-putting pick-up line for women these days, basically bordering on sexual harassment. Yet in today's world where looks are justice, a pretty WeChat avatar does attract curiosity, sparking chat impulses in men and leading wives to question their husbands: "Who is this woman? Why are you chatting with her in the middle of the night?"

Similarly, in enterprises, user personas have become an increasingly common method. Before the mobile internet became popular, collecting user information was difficult. User personas were basically exclusive to industries like civil aviation, banking, and telecom, which had policy support and the power to force users to provide personal information. With the rise of mobile internet, through the integration of social information and increased user interaction, more and more user data is being captured by companies, making user personas more widespread. "Xiao Wang, create a user persona for our APP users," Xiao Wang receives such requests every now and then, but he grows increasingly frustrated: "Why do we always need personas? What's the use of this? Every time it's similar, why do we keep doing it?"

Understanding the purpose of user personas naturally clarifies what they should look like A user persona is a descriptive statistical analysis of user characteristics and behaviors. The term 'user persona' is quite vivid—it's like drawing a picture of the user to show everyone who they are, where they come from, and where they are going. Of course, today this task is mostly achieved through photos. Using photos as an analogy, user personas serve three purposes:

  • ID photo: Ugly but real. Like an ID photo, a user persona can quickly identify users and find target groups. It's often used in sales.
  • Life photo: For example, photos you post on social media showing your daily life, food, travel, etc. A persona like a life photo, combined with specific product usage scenarios, helps discover market opportunities. It's suitable for marketing and operations planners to devise tactics.
  • Art photo: This is the 'photo-shopped' version, edited beyond recognition, but it reflects your inner most desired image. When you need to do brand promotion or product placement, this type of persona is most needed—it can see through the surface and touch users' emotions.

Today, let's start with the simplest: application in sales When we mention ID photos, we think of: no makeup, facing the camera directly, looking so ugly it's shocking, afraid to show it to others, fearing your boyfriend will see your true self. Why are ID photo requirements so strict, deliberately making people look ugly? It's for easy identification. ID photos serve the purpose of most accurately and quickly identifying individuals. Identification is crucial; otherwise, what if the police arrest the wrong person? What if the bank lends to the wrong person? If everyone took ID photos with colored contacts, fake eyelashes, double eyelid tape, and a 45-degree pout, then if a social media influencer committed a crime, the police would have to fill two trucks before catching the right one.

When user personas are applied to frontline sales, they also need to have the effect of an ID photo for easy identification

Persona = Efficiency. Because frontline salespeople, like police officers, are pressed for time and have heavy tasks. Their base salary is only 1500, and they rely on commissions. If they can't quickly and accurately identify valuable customers in the vast crowd of the store, then "all they talk to are broke people, and a hard day's work is all in vain." A low conversion rate greatly harms the stability of the sales team and the achievement of performance goals. The aces in the sales team can differentiate between customers, but many salespeople lack experience, skills, and analytical ability. Therefore, a clear user persona helps salespeople see the characteristics of each customer type, preserving the experience of top salespeople and improving the overall performance of the sales team.

Persona = Execution. Often, companies need salespeople to find specific customers. These customers may not be the easiest to close, but they have strategic value. In such cases, frontline guidance is needed: you need to find people based on these conditions. This also requires a clear user persona. Salespeople have only a short time to communicate with customers, so it must be clearly pointed out who our target customers are, making it easy for salespeople to execute. Without a clear persona, if you throw the strategic plan at the frontline team, you might as well leave those plans in a Word document.

Persona = Low Risk. Just as there are high-quality customers, there are also bad customers. Avoiding bad customers also saves costs and improves efficiency. Especially for companies that don't have a rigorous review system like banks, it's more necessary to create clear personas for problematic customers and low-value customers, allowing salespeople to foresee dangers immediately.

When applying to sales, note the following:

Easy to observe: Frontline salespeople are not psychologists, not mathematicians, and most are not even college graduates. Complex fields are hard for them to understand, and too obscure descriptions, such as values or consumption concepts, are impossible for them to observe and they have no intention to observe. Therefore, the backend analysis logic can be complex, but the indicators given to the frontline should be simplified as much as possible, choosing the most differentiating and easily identifiable indicators, such as gender and age.

Simple indicators: The output indicators should not be too many. Statistically, you might see that your target users are males aged 25-30, with a family monthly income above 20,000, unmarried, and using iPhones at a high rate. But in the store, you'll find that no one meets all these conditions simultaneously! Too many restrictive indicators will make salespeople feel at a loss, miss many opportunities, or simply ignore the indicators and do as they please.

Clear pros and cons: Frontline salespeople care about money, money, and money. Simply describing a type of user for salespeople to follow up will inevitably raise questions: "Why must we do this type of user? Why not others?" In severe cases, it may even trigger accusations: "How many times have you walked the market? How many deals have you closed? Why do you office-bound people with air conditioning arbitrarily command us who run around outside every day?" Therefore, a user persona must clearly calculate customer value. Sales manpower is limited; each day they can only close a limited number of transactions. So for each transaction, how much more can a target customer earn compared to a non-target? Over a month, how much more do those who follow the target earn compared to those who don't? Use facts to reduce doubts.

The ideal state is that after we complete the target user persona, we find teams in the sales force that currently have high income, good performance, and do more target users, and let them stand up for us, setting a successful benchmark. Salespeople may question us office workers who don't go to the market, but they will never question the big shots in the market who earn more than them. This way, the market benefits, and analysis gets the credit—that's the best cooperation.

To achieve the goal, user personas for sales are generally done like this:

  1. Clarify the persona group. You can choose:

    • By user value: high, medium, low value users
    • By transaction difficulty: easy to close, hard to close
    • By lifecycle: old users, new users
    • By customer need: users of XX product category

  2. Select easily observable fields to describe user characteristics. This is for market/business department leaders; be as detailed as possible.

    • Natural attributes: gender, age, birthplace (if data is collected)
    • Social attributes: occupation, income (if data is collected)
    • Internal needs: emotional needs, functional needs (requires new media text analysis or qualitative research support)
    • Membership card level: VIP card level held (this data is definitely available)
    • Transaction behavior: product types purchased, amount, combination purchase habits (this data is definitely available)
    • Activity behavior: frequency and time periods of customer login, visits, transactions (this data is definitely available)
    • Value analysis: lifecycle length, lifecycle value (this data needs to be estimated)

  3. Summarize core characteristics. This is for the frontline; the number should not be too many (three is appropriate), extracting easily observable indicators from the above. As long as you find customers according to the indicators, there is a high probability of improving efficiency.

    • Preferred: natural attributes and membership card level, most direct and easiest to observe
    • Secondary: transaction behavior, requires CRM software reminders or salespeople to proactively ask
    • Third: internal needs, requires salespeople to proactively ask, but more difficult

  4. Calculate target user value. This is also for the frontline.

    • For example, take a salesperson, calculate how much more they can earn per closed deal.
    • Following target users for a month, how much more can a salesperson earn?
    • Best practice: how much more do currently well-performing teams earn compared to average teams?

When finalizing the report, if presenting to market/business department leaders, follow the above order: first explain the starting point of the analysis, then go deeper layer by layer, and finally summarize the action plan. If presenting to the frontline or as an action guide, reverse the order: prioritize the benefits, then how to do it, and finally the reasons. If space is limited, directly omit the analysis logic and thinking. Highlight the benefits and goal orientation, after all, performance is achieved through action, not calculated by analysis.

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