B2BMX2018

www.quarry.com personas@quarry.com THE SAVVY MARKETER'S GUIDE TO LEADING WITH PERSONAS 20 ere you have it. Four different stories about leaders in very different situations. But are there important similarities between Sanjay, Susan, Isabella and Juno? Are there commonalities in the way they used personas to help them achieve success? We think so. Each leader created and leveraged personas to: 1. Simplify complexity While the tasks were different, all four of the people studied in this guide faced complex situations in which the achievement of a business outcome depended upon diverse people coming together and making better choices in an atmosphere wrought with ambiguity. All used personas as a vehicle to guide thinking and lead positive change. And, in all cases, personas were ultimately used to constrain possibilities and simplify the complex to a point that a particular course of action made sense. 2. Displace prior biases In the first three stories in this guide, the persona that was ultimately selected as "primary" replaced an older mental model of the customer. In the fourth story, Juno's, what was displaced was not just the single mental model of a customer, but also a whole system of customer categorization that affected almost every unit in his organization. In all cases, a valuable part of the persona's function was to free individuals and teams by discarding unhelpful ideas about the customer. 3. Fuel decision-making activities Rather than looking at personas as the only resource they needed for problem solving, Sanjay, Susan, Isabella and Juno brought leadership to their initiatives by integrating personas with other decision-making tools. In Sanjay's case, this involved predicting the adoption rate of the product for each of the potential primary personas. In Susan's case, she employed personas in the context of buyer-journey mapping to identify a key disconnect. Isabella leveraged the concept of the anti-persona in order to prevent history from repeating itself. In Juno's case, he used personas as a framework with which to accumulate and contextualize new research findings. is really goes to underscore the point of this guide—that having or using personas isn't enough to ensure success; it depends upon their artful use in solving the problem at hand. 4. Personify quality insight Context matters. In each of these stories, the project lead carefully selected the right research approach to investigate his or her particular business situation. In every case, there was a serious primary research effort aimed at discovering new and actionable insight. In the real-life cases upon which these stories were based, the data for the personas began with qualitative research using customer ethnography. 4 ways savvy leaders use personas

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