The motivation behind developing a business strategy is defining the organization’s overall goal and creating an execution plan accordingly.
For most businesses,
being customer-centric is one of the key elements to become more profitable.
Personas are an excellent tool to achieve customer-centricity and play a significant role in the business strategy development process. The executive level is often far away from the actual customers. The
created buyer personas will provide an in-depth understanding of the client base to make the right strategic decisions.
Review of Status Quo
To know where you want to go, you need to know where you are. Gather as much information from the different departments to paint a clear picture of where the company stands.
Creating personas by analyzing customer reviews, surveys, social media, analytics, and so on will turn the data into actionable insights about your customers and help you understand where the company stands. Acknowledging the pain points, emotions, Go-tos, interests of the current customers uncover areas within the business that need attention. Additionally, creating competitor personas will help set goals for the future sales, marketing, and product development team.
Creating the vision statement
After you understand the status quo, it is now time to create a vision statement. Being customer-centric means building the strategy and every department involved around the customers. Thereby, the better you understand your customers, the easier it will be to define the vision and steer the entire team towards it. When you see the personas in front of you, it will be much easier to define a strategy that fits the customer’s requirements.
Creating the mission statement
The mission statement will give the overall guidance on how to achieve the vision. Identifying the pain points, emotions, Go-tos of the personas will help you to do so. Think about what needs to be done to sell your vision to different customers.
Analyzing Core Competencies
Re-examining the core competencies of your team and mapping them with your client personas can be extremely useful. By mapping these two, you can identify areas that need extra attention and further development. You might realize that particular customer service’s core competencies are missing to please specific customers.
By looking at your competitor personas, you can uncover that specific product attributes are missing, and your product development team lacks the competencies to develop them. Summing up, the personas help to prioritize missing competencies or enhancing those that already exist and are of high value for your clients
Depending on the depth of the analysis, this might be a pretty lengthy process. Conducting market research and analysis, customer reviews and surveys, financial projections, etc., are essential to a successful SWOT analysis.
Using personas as a source of information in this process is growingly common. Mapping strengths and weaknesses (internally), as well as opportunities and threats (external) with your client personas, make the analysis more tangible.
Identifying and Solving Strategic Issues
Once you have identified the core competencies, created the SWOT analysis, and mapped both with your personas, you will define and communicate the strategic issues combined with a clear set of goals. Here a quick example - how would you compare the following plans.
We need to improve our customer service to increase our customer lifetime value.
Vs.
To increase our persona X’s customer lifetime value, we need to improve our technical email support. It will enhance the trust and avoid anger towards our service, which seems to be a significant trigger to cancel our service for persona X.
Creating clear defined goals for the different personas will save you money and help the various teams better allocate the resources.