Negative Personas

Admit it, there are folks out there you do not want as a customer. Folks who are too expensive. Cost of acquisition higher than revenue, not willing or able to pay your price, too expensive because of unfulfillable demands in after-sales services.

Nightmare customers

It might seem counterintuitive to exclude potential customers, but at least they are willing to give you their money. But talk to your sales reps, some people are nightmares. Demanding beyond all reasoning, complaining bare any sense and disruptive to your work flows.

Enter: Negative Personas

Just as buyer persona creation represents your ideal customer, negative personas are archetypes of the people you do not want to market to.
By defining negative or exclusionary personas, you gain efficiency across marketing and sales. If you know who you do not want to market or sell to, you can focus on potential customers that really add value to your business.

Negative Persona, not negative person

The one pitfall one should avoid when using negative personas is thinking of them as negative or bad people. Actually, they help you in more than one way.
They did not do something wrong; your product and your business are just not right for them. Understanding negative personas gives you a laser-sharp view of who your product works for and who it does not. This enables you to open up about new improvements that would make a negative persona to a future brand ambassador.
In the end, pain points of negative personas can be killer features of the next best thing you are going to build.

Building negative personas

Creating a negative persona is similar to crafting your ideal customer personas. You need to understand them, ask them the right questions, and profile what does not work out with them, what they are missing, or why there is negativity towards your products. Analyzing data of sales processes might be handy to identify too expensive sales cycles.

Mnemonic AI can create negative personas on the fly for your business and products, and keep you updated if anything changes.