Master HubSpot Buyer Personas Quickly | In-Depth Tutorial for Marketers

All right, so today I definitely want to talk about how I think historically there has been a problem with the way that we think about Personas and getting them into HubSpot. I'm not talking about how we think about Personas from a global standpoint of the tools that you've seen, the books that you've read, the, you know, people talking about what they are, a fictional character and this, this, these things, I, I don't think any of that's wrong. But, but where I go is that when we're talking about HubSpot, there is a connective tissue that happens when we think about this in the right way that I think is fundamental to HubSpot working better than it might be working for you as a user currently. And so when I think about this and who might be watching this, I fully understand people might join the community and they're like, wait, what the heck is a Persona? And so if you go on the Internet or you watch HubSpot Academy, you're going to hear that a buyer Persona is a semi fictional representation of a company's ideal customer. Yada, yada, yada, you're going to hear something about that. It's based on research and data about existing potential customers. It paints a vivid picture. These are all words that you'll hear on the Internet. But I think there's. What's fun is on the Internet, you'll hear things like who the customer is, what they do, and what their motivations are. And I think we need to really understand those three pieces when we move forward are actually what is important out of all of that. What is a Persona? By the way, my definition of what is a Persona is dramatically different than what I just kind of talked about. For me, a Persona is a human. It is a human being who happens to have a hurdle or a aspiration that they're trying to reach. And so when we think of this human, and of course we're talking a collective group, a pattern of people that have this problem or have this aspiration, we have to realize leaning in on the human side of being empathetic, of being of value, of trying to be significant in the journey in which they're trying to take. So again, they're a human, they're not a fictional anything. And so that helps us tie the importance of what we're going to do and why we have to do it fast because we need to be able to understand again, who the customer is, what they do, and what their motivations are for interacting with our company. What problem what hurdle, what aspiration do they have? And so again, when you think about your humans, the contacts that you're going to be putting in HubSpot, when you think about reverse engineering the Persona, the tool that we're actually going to be building, tweaking, changing, so that we can understand who those customers are, what they do in their daily lives, and how we're going to help them achieve the motivations that had them convert on a HubSpot form, or what I love to call conversion, is starting a conversation with a HubSpot form. We have to think about these three things as we move forward. Now, again, understanding that the historical problem is that Persona creation seems like it's complex. You've got books written about it, you've got tools to help you do it. It's created a psychological bridge that has been blown up. And it almost seems like companies can't get to where they can actually use it quickly. We're usually talking about conversations around, well, we've got to collect data and we have to have voice of customer and we've got to go ahead and create a PowerPoint presentation. Then we've got to print them out, we've got to put them on the wall. And now we're talking about three months, six months, sometimes a couple of years later, we finally have these fully baked out Personas. And it's like, it's like a, you know. Oh, like a like religious moment because we unveil these Personas that we've been working on for so long. But meanwhile, there's been an engine running in HubSpot and we have been missing out on so many potential things that we could be doing if we would have just taken these first steps. And one is getting rid of this problem of it being something that has to initially be complex. Now, again, will it be complex to get to what I just described? Maybe. Will what we do and what I'm going to teach here make it easier potentially. But here's the thing. When you think about getting started, right, getting started fast in HubSpot, there are a couple things that we're going to dive in and think about. But what I do want everybody to realize is there the key word in here is fast. I have helped clients, folks who actually email me, ask the question, even how do I get this going? And we've been able to get people going in the matter of an hour, a couple hours, like the first steps of being able to actually make HubSpot more successful. And when I say successful, I mean better segmentation, better Communication, better reporting. Based on that, we got this in the system. And one thing that you'll hear me talk about is better. Second, smart questions. In other words, being able to collect more data specifically or contextual to now we know who that person is. Remember that first bullet point, who that person is that we're actually trying to help through the process now. Warning, warning. I am not dissing any of the historical information. I'm not saying that you don't have to build out Persona stories. I'm not saying that we shouldn't do Persona research. All of these things are true. I'm simply saying if we focus in on the word fast and if we focus on get it done right, there are some steps that we can take that immediately set us up for success and to be able to do the things that have been historically told on the Internet. But to do that, you have to realize a couple of things specific to being inside of HubSpot, right? Specific to being inside of HubSpot. Personas are about understanding immediately who's in the room. And of course, I don't mean the physical room, I mean the digital room, right? The CRM. The list that happens to have or hopefully listen that happen to have or happen based on those people. Who is it that we're talking to? Because we fundamentally would talk to people differently, we would help people differently. If we knew that there were different problems they were facing. If we knew they had different communication styles that they like to have. If we knew that they had different roles inside of an organization, if we knew that they were different sizes of organizations, startup versus enterprise versus a small to medium sized business. There's going to be different ways that we would interact as marketers. I love to kind of talk about how we need to have a chameleon effect, not in an unauthentic way, but we need to be able to mold into those people or mold our system into that thing that is actually best serving the person in the room. And so how do we do this? If a Persona is actually just a sheet on a wall or a slide in a presentation, not fundamentally tied to the tools that we're using for collection, conversation starters, AKA conversions, it makes it very difficult. So the next thing we need to realize specifically in HubSpot, that Personas are about self segmentation. Right? Many times we spend minutes, hours, days, weeks in research trying to figure out that Billy Bob converted on our website. And is Billy Bob this type of person? That type of person, when we can actually just put our tool into place in one way that they can actually say, hey, this is who I am. Now, what's interesting is there's a psychological hack that we're going to show the way that we set up our Persona tool, the way that we help everybody set up their Persona tool that will allow them to easily trigger and define who they are in a very unique way, even if. Even if they are a negative Persona. Again, self segmentizing doesn't only mean I'm going to put all these good things in these good buckets, AKA lists. It means I'm also going to allow them to tell me if I should spend time with them or if I should have some type of automated process because they've proven to not be somebody that we would work with at the company that we work at. So another thing that we need to think about is Personas are both positive and negative. And again, for years and years and years, when you would go and listen to things, folks would always talk about the positive, the positive, the positive Personas. And sometimes it's actually more important to know who we're not a good fit for than who we actually are a fit for. Because again, it's about streamlining the process. It's about not wasting time. It's about saving our sales, our service teams, and especially ourselves too, as a marketing team. So if we are sitting here and right now we don't have something in HubSpot that is easily showing us our positive Personas versus our negative Personas, then there's some work that can be done, because we have to understand those fundamentally in the moment, with ease. So here's the thing. Personas, we're going to get negative for a second now, I most of the time as a positive person. So we're going to get negative in a good way. Because I want anybody who is starting this journey out and they're thinking about doing the things that we're going to talk about doing in HubSpot to understand kind of the future of what it looks like if you do these things. And so we're going to talk about negative Personas, and we're going to talk about apartment Annie. Now, it could be apartment Adam, it doesn't matter. But here's a scenario. We helped the pest control company with HubSpot, and one of the things that they realized is that as a negative Persona, one of the folks was going to be apartment Annie. Because. Because when you get pests in an apartment type complex, it's very hard to get rid of them. Because if the person above, below, or beside that person doesn't take care of it, they can very easily come back. So this pest control company was like, yeah, if people live in an apartment complex or something like an apartment complex, we really don't service them. So what they wanted to do is they wanted to create Apartment Annie as a negative Persona. But we wanted to let Apartment Annie self identify in a very positive way. So a little hint here is in the dropdown of the form that we would use, Apartment Annie would actually see I'm an apartment dweller or live in an apartment style housing unit. It's not negative, doesn't sound negative to Annie. That's where Annie lives or where Adam would live. But as soon as the team would see that was selected, they knew a couple things would happen. One, based on that response, there would be a negative 100 added to the HubSpot score of that person. Because they knew that if we were using lead scoring to get to a number where sales or some team should be tagged in for a conversation, we wanted to push them way back. The second thing that we wanted to do is we wanted to leave Apartment Annie with warm fuzzies instead of cold pricklies. Meaning there was automated email that went out five minutes later. And of course the company did the research. Research. And of course the company put a plan in place. But this email went out five minutes later and it said, hey, unfortunately we'll say her name was Jenny for a second or Annie or it could be Bob or Billy, whoever. Unfortunately, we don't service apartment style complex. However, we've done some research and here are three companies that actually do help folks who live in apartment complexes. And here's also a couple articles on how to do DIY pest control. However, if you do want to know when we are a good fit for or who we're a good fit for, you can check out our who we're a good fit for page on our website, which then linked to the page and it talked about if you're a homeowner or you live in this type of scenario. And so now not only did they let the contact Apartment Annie be educated to when they would be a good fit, they left her or him with information to actually fix the problem, either with another company or with them doing it themselves. So without even like knowing that they'd get paid for this, which is unique because usually if we ain't getting paid, we ain't communicating. It just kind of drops off on the vine with some companies not saying any company that is watching this, a person that works for a company that does that, but we know it all happens. So again, we saved the sales team time. We educated the consumer and we gave them a way to actually reach their aspiration, even though we couldn't help. These are things that can happen if we focus on understanding and building processes around not only positive folks that we can work with, but negative folks that we might encounter along the way as well. So what does that look like in HubSpot? Well, it's actually really easy. And what you're seeing on the screen is you're seeing some examples of what might be positive and negative Personas. So for instance, Barry, the SMB small to medium sized business, we're simply adding to the naming convention of this Persona a P dash because we know that it's somebody we want to work with. Anybody who is a negative Persona, you would just put an en dash. Now you'll have to sit down and really have an internal conversation, preferably with your sales and marketing teams together and probably a little bit of the C suite. Who do we truly want to do business with and who do we not want to do business with and at least come up with the naming convention. Now the other thing I'll say too here is we get a little cutesy with our naming convention. It doesn't have to be that way. Right. Adam the agency owner or employee. Sam the student. Student Simon the startup. Like we just like words, I guess, to start with the same letters to be in the same line. You can call them whatever you want. The most important part is that a, you understand who that human is that's entering the room and you understand if they're a positive or a negative Persona. So what I want to do is I actually want to dive into HubSpot because I want to show a little bit under the engine of again, what do we have to have in place to be able to turn the system on and what does that then allow us to do over time? So what I'll do is I'll go ahead and bring over a browser here and we're looking at the same thing. That was a screenshot a minute ago. But we're going to dive into one of these Personas. And this is the second thing that we teach. The only three things really that we would want you to have immediately is one, the name of the Persona. Notice we haven't even put a photo in here. Can we put a photo? Yes. Should we maybe? Do I care? Absolutely not. Because it's multiple different types of humans. I know that might be multiple different types of age groups. So it's nice if you put it in there, but we don't ask you to have it. The first thing that we ask though is again, that positive or negative and that name that you know has entered the room. The second thing is the description. And in this case you're going to see that it starts with I'm an owner or employee at an established 2 plus year SMB looking for help with HubSpot. There are a lot of things happening right here. Number one, an owner or employee who's entering the room, decision maker, researcher. I don't know but we're going to find out it's one of those two. And that also might lean into one of our second smart questions. We'll get to second smart questions here in a little bit. Establish two year SMB. What are we trying to do? We're trying to let them know who is a good fit for us. If it's less than two years, would we take them? Maybe. If there's less than two years, would we want to ask some additional questions? Most likely, absolutely. What are they looking for? What's the aspiration? What's the. Remember those three bullet points immediately when we started and we ripped out what we actually believe out of that kind of Internet definition of Personas. What's the action? They need help with HubSpot. If you don't need help with HubSpot, we're probably not a good fit. You're using, you know, marketo are using sharp spring. Are you, Are you looking for help with like, you know, I don't know, making wood carvings of like bears and tigers. We're not the right place. Like we're here to help people with HubSpot and then we do some roles. We want to kind of know, okay, this could be an owner, it could be an employee, it could be, you know, sales, it could be service, depending on who's reaching out, who's researching. But notice we don't really have goals in here. Should we. Could we. Yes. We don't have challenge in here, Demographics in here. None of this. Now over time we can get this information because if we just focus on getting these three pieces of information into the Personas and if we focus on just getting the Personas in place, the magical thing is that we can start to implement the Persona property inside of our form and we can start doing our own data collection, our own understanding by asking some of the questions that are, what are your goals? What are your daily challenges? I don't really care about age, but maybe in your organization that's a very important piece. You know, we can ask income range or education or maybe we find that along the way when we're actually having human interactions and eventually that can build out a robust story. But again, I go back to are we trying to work with them? Are we trying not to work with them? I want to. For the second time, you're going to see this says, I'm an owner or employee of an enterprise level company. The IMA is probably the most important part of what you're going to do with your HubSpot Personas. Because again, shooting to the end of what is going to happen to bring it into the light of how we're going to use this, we need to understand that we're going to change the word or label Persona inside of our HubSpot forms to say, how would you best describe yourself? And if we're asking the question how would you best describe yourself? I want you to step out of HubSpot landia for a second. I want you to step out of marketing mindset for a second. And when anybody asks you who you are or what you do, how do you start your sentence? I'm a, I'm a mother, I'm a father, I'm a marketer. So literally we're asking the question how would you best describe yourself? And we're psychologically leading you into answering the question with I may. So many times I've opened up a HubSpot portal and it's been like mid level marketer as the description. And I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm gonna lose my mind right now. Because that's not giving them the trigger, it's not giving enough information. It's not hitting those three points that we talk about. Again, owner or employee, enterprise company, help with HubSpot three points. Know who's in the room, know what we're trying to do, know the aspiration, the goal, the thing, right? So I can go through the rest of these and we're going to see all of them are that way except for one, and that is the other. The other has a very specific rule. And this is again, if we think about, we're getting these built fast, we're getting them in the forms, we're focusing on getting Persona research done over time. Well, the other layer of just not knowing more about the people that we know we do or don't want to work with is are there other people showing up for the conversation that we didn't even think about? And so this is where other comes into Play. And literally if we go into other, it's like, wow, I'm none of the above. And they can select that. And what that does, when they select that is it opens up a dropdown and it says, well, then how would you describe yourself? And this allows us to collect people over time and potentially see patterns. When we do Persona reporting of man, there's a lot of these folks coming to the website. We're not creating content for them. Notice how that ties to a content strategy. We're not talking to them or paying attention to them on social ties to a social strategy. We need to do more research or see if we can reach out to more of these types of people. Voice of customer or potential customer or future customer. So even knowing this or collecting this can dramatically change the direction of your business. For instance, the only reason that Adam the agency is in this list of Personas is because we ran with the other and we figured out there was a lot of agencies coming to the website looking for help with either training or different things that they are asking for. And so hey, we've got to pay attention to agencies, agency owners, employees, how, how we fit into the ecosystem of those folks. We've got to start having those conversations and value for them because they're showing up. That means we have to show up. Okay, now when we think about that one, we can immediately see how many people of each of those are in the Personas. But we have to take this to the next level. We have to think, where does this live? And so if we go into a HubSpot form, what we're going to see is we're going to see that again. Persona, we have changed the label. This literally says how would you best describe yourself? And because we are asking that, we then want to have rules that are actually happening when maybe somebody selects other or somebody selects something that is important. Now what's fun about this is second smart questions while I'm talking about them in Persona style right now. I want you to realize there are superpower that I train on in every forms tool training I do to allow people to actually collect more data but not add more fields at first to get past that conversion rate optimization psychological trigger where people go, oh my God, they want to know everything about me and my firstborn child. We want to keep it simple, we want to keep it easy. And so in this case, if we were actually doing this in a way that any organization could use it if other of course, how would you best describe yourself based on your industry or your company or what you're trying to do? If it's one of the positive Personas, what are the two, three, maybe even four questions that you would ask specific to in this case, I'll say if it was a marketer, but what are the three, four, two questions you would ask? If it was a sales rep, or in our case, if it's a small to medium sized business, what are the questions we want to ask? If it's enterprise business, do we want to ask any questions? You saw that it was a negative Persona? The answer to that is yes, there are questions that we want to ask because one of the things that we should be trying to use this tool in diagnosis, even when we think they're a negative, if they answered some questions, second smart questions the right way, would they actually turn themselves into a positive? Because again, what somebody calls themselves and what we call them sometimes don't actually align to being the same thing. So we want to give that room for second smart questions. Now there's another piece of this too, that I've seen people fall prey. This is kind of a little hurdle to watch out for. And that is whenever you're dealing with your Personas, you're gonna see that you will have. That's. How did you hear about this? I clicked on the wrong thing. You're gonna see that you have the ability to edit Personas here on your form. For me, this is a big no no. Now, I love that with 99% of the properties, you can edit them here in a form level. However, if all of a sudden you decide to go back to your Persona tool and you decide to update something, the IMA or the name of it or whatever, and you've actually hit this pencil and you've edited it at a form level, the global change does not take over what you've done here. So I always with Persona, not every property, but with Persona, I always leave this untouched and I use the global version in the actual property to power what's happening in here. So the idea of this is when we come to a form, when we're trying to work with somebody, we want to give them the opportunity to be able to see in a snapshot what one of these 3, 5, 6, 7 positive and negative Personas, they fit into that. So you can see here it's really easy to diagnose am I an SMB, am I an enterprise, am I an agency, am I a student, am I a startup, or am I none of these? In a snapshot you can define, oh, well, I best fit to this one thing and again if we do other then we can see well, how would you best describe yourself? Look at that. I've said that I'm a marketer before and my browser is remembering that. But that's the thing. You have to have a strategy, a plan to understand what is happening. Almost at the end point I am trying to get to a place where when I build a form I can ask people how would they best describe themselves and they can see a simple snapshot in a dropdown of the Personas, positive and negative, that they can choose from and the ability to tell me who they are if I don't know who is entering the room. You, when you think from that perspective now reverse engineering and going back and adding those three little pieces to each Persona, understanding that you're starting with that I'm a hack. As far as them being able to select who they are, it almost becomes easy. This has to get in HubSpot immediately. The second smart questions should be in HubSpot almost immediately. The ability to segment, understand and communicate in a proper way. 5x 10x maybe depending on what you're doing. 100x when you have this in place because now you've got lists that are being created, you've got emails that go out automations based on it and not just automation based on that. They're an SMB but. But they're an SMB that makes 1.5 a year, has 20 employees and has a remote team. Now I'm sending it out a way different email than if I just knew they were small to medium sized business. Right? Think granularity, think specificity. Because specificity wins the day. Feeling very much like a one to one instead of a one to many. Based on this that you kind of put into place now I will say that there is some homework that we want to talk about. This is one of the hardest things that I've seen people try to work through and what I mean by that is just keeping Persona simple. But then when you ask somebody, well what is the second smart question that we want to ask those humans? Many times we'll find crickets. Because we as marketers, we as sales teams sometimes are completely fine with first name, last name, email, company name, job title, how can I help you? And we haven't taken the time to think about shoot the end process. What do we need to know? What's the right timing to ask it? Like how would we ask it? Shoot. All of our things are single line text. Maybe we actually need to make sure they're multi select or drop down select, because then we can actually segment off of it or report off of it. So there's a little bit of like conversation that needs to happen, a little bit of strategy that needs to happen around. We now have these humans defined. What are the second smart questions we want to ask them? Now let's go into the HubSpot tool and start adding and building these rules based on those things. That would be the homework is look at what you have, see what you've learned today, and what you need to transition or edit or dare I say kill, so that you can actually bring something together. Now I am going to circle back around on something, and that is two warnings here. I literally use the word kill something, which I don't mean in like the literal, like as negative as it sounds sense. But if you are changing the way that you're doing Persona and you feel yourself getting ready to hit delete on a historical Persona. Warning, warning, warning. The first thing you should do or think about before you actually hit that button is have I mapped this Persona to another Persona type that I'm going to create? Or have I mapped the data from that Persona to something else so I at least have it historically to be able to use in some sort of fashion? Again, what we had to do personally is we reimagined our Personas. Even though we were doing it right, we changed who we wanted to work with. We had to reimagine our Personas and map different Personas to new ones that we were going to be using moving forward. So before hitting delete, think, map, think saving your data so you can use it for a later date. The other warning is the second one. I'm going to go back to the original warning that I kind of put out there, slightly joking of. I'm not discrediting anything from the mass amount of articles you could find, videos you could find that talk about Personas and what we can do to actually get them through our organization. What I'm simply saying in my own way is what we've talked about today should be your phase one. You get it up, you get it running, you start collecting the data, you start asking smart questions, you start segmenting, you start things in specificity and start one to one versus one to many. It's about the humans. And realize that everything that you've bumped into that may have felt like it was where you had to start actually is phase two. By no means am I saying what we learned today is the end of your Personas. It's Just what we need to get in place because we need to keep going. We don't want to stop. We want to make sure we're doing that Persona research with our own collection. Persona research with educating ourselves or having some type of voice of customer system educating how we can get it to go through our organization, whether it be in a PowerPoint presentation stapled on the wall, put it on the bathroom mirror, wherever you got to do to get people to understand who the heck they're actually trying to help. I'm by no means saying that we shouldn't be buying the books, right? We shouldn't be buying one of the two best books around. What the heck are buyer Personas? I'm not saying that we shouldn't dive into the HubSpot Academy and actually watch the videos that they create around buyer Personas and leveraging them. But I do feel like all of this is part of the conversation after we at least get into the trenches and have a system built out around this little tiny property that attaches to every other tool inside of HubSpot. Think about that. If you create a custom property or you use something like HubSpot Personas, you have to bring the connective tissue together that now you are able to affect segmentation, you're able to affect conversion, you're able to affect internal triggers inside the CRM based on dropdowns or data being added, and you're able to impact or affect reporting just by building this little system inside of the property that is Personas. And of course, I would be remiss if I didn't say one of the things that I actually do love. Once you have this, once you're collecting the data, once you're starting to read the books and you're in phase two is that being able to use a simple tool like make my Persona is a good step to take. But don't sit in the books, don't sit on this tool and have an empty Persona tool in HubSpot, because you're doing yourself and you're doing your company a disservice. So I'm going to go ahead and stop there. I'm going to ask if there's any questions on any of the things that we've talked about as far as getting Personas inside of HubSpot quick and effective to actually change quite a bit about what you're doing in HubSpot.