Slides from PreSeed Academy StartupTalk#27: Create your first B2B buyer personas in startup sales

1. December 2020
Building B2B personas
for Capdesk

2. ❖ My role at Capdesk
❖ My background and prior work with
buyer personas
❖ My objective at Capdesk
❖ How the task broke down:
➢ Understanding existing personas
➢ Validating them against current
evidence
➢ Updating them to remove bias
➢ Communicating them to the team
❖ What’s next
2

3. Understanding existing personas
Goal: learn what insights inform our starting point
● We inherited personas from the previous marketing team
● Designed using a HubSpot template (of course)
● Interviewed the current team to learn origins

4. Organised Ollie
• COO
• Eton bred, from posh family, with determined career path
• PwC consultant, Friends with investment bankers
• Co-founder, looking for responsibility
Male, 42
90k per year plus equity
London
2 kids
Fairly easy to reach directly
Analytical, makes decisions based on facts
Has the authority to make his own decisions
Reads Financial Times
Not very tech-savvy
Trusts choices of larger corporations
Would like to be seen as a professional in finance and is interested in it,
but might not have the expertise

5. Validating them against current evidence
Goal: evidence for relevance of personas, understand priority order
● Like many fast-growing companies, our user data is imperfect
● Primarily spoke with our Head of Customer Onboarding Sindy
● Reviewed HubSpot persona tags to gauge volumes

6. Updating them to remove bias
Goal: bring up to date and reduce stereotyping that could harm business
Done wrong, personas can work against our best interests, contradicting
our company values and harming business.

7. Updating them to remove bias
Removed:
● Name
● Gender
● Location
● Salary
● Education level

8. A new approach
Keeping the good stuff and shedding the unhelpful bits to create
personas that support us in reaching our business goals.

9. Example persona
● Organised Ollie becomes ‘The Operator’
● Photo replaced by a symbolic icon
● Added:
○ Career aspirations
○ Jobs to be done by Capdesk
○ Capdesk team insights

10. The Operator
Now: COO
Then: Consultancy
One day: Founding their own company
Identifiers:
● Fairly easy to reach directly
● Analytical, makes decisions based on facts
● Has the authority to make their own decisions
● Reads Financial Times
● Not very tech-savvy
● Trusts choices of larger corporations
● Not a financial expert
Goals:
● Executing company strategies and reaching
revenue goals
● Improving processes to better execute strategies
Challenges:
● Balancing an overview of all departments and
managing special projects
● Lacks knowledge in some of the areas that they
are overseeing
Job to be done by Capdesk:
● Save them time by streamlining reporting
processes
● Generate accurate reporting for them as a non-
expert
Common objections:
● We already have a process/person for this
● I have more important things to tend to
Capdesk team insights:
● Don’t tend to have much involvement with
managing the account, except when a company
is so small it doesn’t have a CFO

11. Communicating them to the team
● Everyone had negative past experiences with personas
● Our not-just-buyer personas needed to be useful across the
business
● Launched with a Loom video
● Held a whole-team workshop with an activity – how would we
frame this event differently for different personas?

12. What’s next?
● Personas are being used to segment our audience, prioritise
segments and tailor nurture email flows
● Used to plan content (which personas do we need customer
testimonials for?) and distribution (none of our key personas use
Reddit – don’t invest there)
● Data validation of anecdotal evidence