Persona Development for SaaS Users

 Design Personas That Actually Work in UX! Stop surface-level thinking; start understanding Real personas = research + meaningful insights. Why Personas Matter ✅ Show who users are and what they need to do ✅ Complement Jobs-to-Be-Done frameworks 🤔 Different focus: • JTBD → user needs & outcomes • Personas → behavior, mindset, and goals Build Useful Personas ✅ Base them on deep user research ✅ Visualize users, goals, motivations 🚫 Avoid demographics-only → prevents stereotypes ✅ Include thought process, background, “a day in the life” ✅ Always include at least one persona with a disability Add Context & Story ✅ Include pain points & product usage ✅ List habits: daily, often, rarely ✅ Capture needs, wants, and fears ✅ Prioritize key points for each team role Personas + JTBD = Powerful UX Insights Both help shift focus to real user needs. Remember: no invented details—always root in actual research 💡 How does your team bring personas to life?

56% of sales & marketing people get customer personas wrong. Let's understand how to create personas with little/no access to first hand data... Last quarter, we analyzed 750+ “ideal customer” profiles. → 73% were just job titles & demographics → Only 27% mapped actual behaviors, buying triggers/pain points If your persona looks like this: "CMO at a mid-sized SaaS company, 35-50 years old, USA-based" You’re already off track. Here’s how to fix it: ✅ Analyze Unstructured Data (CRM alone won’t cut it) → Scan support tickets, live chats, & sales calls → Spot recurring objections & frustrations ✅ Reverse Engineer Buying Triggers → Check LinkedIn, Quora, & Reddit in your niche → Find what’s making people switch vendors ✅ Use Competitor Reviews → Study G2, Capterra, or Trustpilot → 1-star reviews show pain points (5-stars reveal what matters most) ✅ Validate with Prospects (No Costly Surveys Needed) → DM 5-10 people on LinkedIn: "Hey [Name], I see you’re working on [industry problem]. I’m putting together insights on [pain point]. Curious - what you seeing as the biggest challenge with [specific issue]?" Personas built this way drive conversions –  because they reflect actual buying behaviors, not assumptions. Find this useful? Follow → Junaid Dar

As the first marketing leader at a SaaS startup my number one priority is to ensure our messaging and positioning is right. If it’s not, it doesn’t matter how good our channel execution is or amazing our content looks and feels. None of it will resonate. Our marketing will fall flat. Pipeline will flatline. Here’s how I’m getting our messaging on point in my first 30 days. Research 🔬 I’m finding every way I can to actually hear directly from our customers and prospects. This means: → Digging into all the data our amazing CS team has collected over the years → Trawling through our G2, Capterra, and other reviews → Joining sales demos with prospects → Listening to sales call recordings → Interviewing any customers I can I’m looking to understand the problems they want to solve, the current ‘bad alternatives’, the solutions they’re looking for, and how they actually use our software. I want to hear this all in their own words. Our positioning 💎 I’m then using some of April Dunford’s amazing templates to pull all this together into a coherent strategy. Initially this goes into a positioning canvas, which covers: → Current bad alternatives: what would customer do if we didn’t exist? → Unique attributes: what do we do that others don’t? → Customer value: how do our attributes enable customers? → Buyer personas: Who actually cares about it? After this, I map out our product features to: → Benefits: how the feature actually enables our customers → Values: how this maps to a customer goal → Buyer personas: who actually cares I’ll do this for our platform as a whole and each one of our products. It’s a lot to get through in the first few weeks when you’re getting up-to-speed in a new role. But it’s critical to get right. Consistent messaging is the thread that ties our funnel together. And, most importantly, this will feed directly into quick improvements across our website, campaigns, customer comms, and more. #b2bmarketing