Revenue Journal®

Those persona articles I wrote recently (here and here), created a bit of a stir out there in BlogLand. Adele Revella from Pragmatic Marketing mentioned my concerns about personas and then went on to describe how those problems could be addressed, including not talking to salespeople about personas, but by relating stories about real buyers. Good advice.

Pragmatic marketing also blogged about my persona blog, with a piece about how people find numerous ways to avoid visiting clients.

Brian Eisenberg quoted Adele's quote, then also went on to talk about how to solve persona problems, using a 4-question survey that will help put flesh on the bones of your personas.

More links here - Phil Myers in the Tuned In blog, and Tony Zambito in Persona Insights.

And, my old friend Jeffrey Tarter sent me a note and suggested that I read The Inmates Are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper. I've had that book since it came out, and I've tried to read it all the way to the end several times. I've read most of the book by now, including the parts about personas. Alan is a great product designer, and it's a good book.

My problem with reading The Inmates Are Running the Asylum is that reading it is like reading a book called Kristin Zhivago's Working Life. Or, What Drove Me to Get Into the Business I'm In. I've been working on the problem of the disconnect between technologists and their customers since I started selling machine-shop tools in 1969, and I will be still working on this problem, as far as I can tell, until I keel over.

Life in the asylum? Tell me about it. My first "real" selling job consisted of a Pratt & Whitney distributor handing me a catalog and telling me that I had the proud distinction of being the first woman to sell machine shop tools, and that I would make $3000 a week that summer. Well, he may have been right about the first part, but the second part was an outright lie - because, as I learned the hard way, you can't sell if you can't answer customer questions about what you're selling. That humiliating experience made me determined to learn everything I could about high-tech.

But even that wasn't enough, as I later learned when I was selling a software product for an entrepreneur who came here from Europe. This entrepreneur excitedly explained to me, in his heavy French accent, as he held a filterless cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other, exactly what the product could do, how it was created, why it was important, and so on. Soon, I knew that product inside and out (it was a precursor to spreadsheet programs). By the time we made our presentation to a bunch of executives at HP in Palo Alto, I knew it was a significant new type of product, and I was fully prepped.

Why didn't it matter? Because, as soon as the entrepreneur had finished giving his presentation, those HP executives basically said those Dreaded Nine Words every salesperson hates to hear: "Well, that's nice, but what we really need is..."

This is the real problem with personas. Even Alan Cooper's book describes personas as people who are made up, by the developers. Now, hang on, because I'm going to try to describe an important but extremely subtle difference between the persona and a real, live human buyer.

When you make someone up, you are in the catbird seat. It's easy to feel a little superior, something that developers are prone to do anyway, because they are a pretty smart bunch. I quote from Alan's book, page 128:

The more specific we make our personas, the more effective they are as design tools...for example, we don't just say that Emilee uses business software. We say that Emilee uses WordPerfect Version 5.1 to write letter to Gramma. We don't just let Emilee drive to work. We give her a dark-blue 1991 Toyota Camry, with a gray plastic kid's seat strapped into the back and an ugly scrape on the rear bumper. We don't just let Emilee go to work. We give her a job as a New-Accounts Clerk in a beige cubicle at Global Airways in Memphis, Tennessee.

With apologies to Alan and to my friend Jeffrey, and at the risk of setting off another bloggostorm, there's a lot of judgment in this persona. Doesn't Emilee sound a bit like trailer trash? Truth be told, Emilee is not as smart as us programmers. So we better dumb down the product for her.

Fast forward to the day when the programmers launch their product, and they are trying to sell it to the Emilees of the world. She takes one look at a screen shot, and says, "Well, that's nice, but what I really need is..." The point is, the most common problem is that developers, as they create their personas, will unwittingly design a persona that matches the product they have in mind.

I'll never forget a great demonstration of this by Derrith Lambka, speaking at one of Jim Sterne's eMetrics Summits about how important it is to actually listen to your customers - without prejudice. She asked the audience members to close their eyes, then described a consumer to us: "Female, in her thirties, divorced, two kids, out of work." She asked everyone to get a good picture of that person in their minds. Then she asked everyone to open their eyes...and on the screen was a picture of Princess Di. Everyone gasped, of course. Not a person in that room was picturing Princess Di.

Fast forward to last night, when I was looking - for the millionth time - for a decent web-based project management tool. I was pleased to see that there are now dozens to choose from, contrary to what I found when I looked as recently as six months ago. But now it's impossible to tell what each one does unless you either sign up for a salesperson to give you a demo (which you don't want to do at 10:15 PM), or sign up for a 30-day free trial. Most of them were missing the most important part - decent screen shots and/or a step-by-step, website-based demo. This is an example of the very narcissistic, unrealistic "selling" methods that technologists tend to employ, and proof that the inmates are indeed still running the asylum.

I even found a program that seemed to be exactly what I was looking for, but the automated "confirmation email" function didn't work. I tried signing up under two different email addresses, and still no confirmation email. I ended up sending them two webform emails; the subject line on the second one was "GRRRR."

When you are the buyer with a specific need, it's obvious how personas can get companies into trouble. When you are the developer or marketer at a company that is using personas, they seem perfectly logical. In the cloistered conference rooms and cubicles, Emilee looks and feels like a real person.

But if Emilee looks at the program and says, "That's nice, but..." all efforts leading up to that moment - including the construction of elaborate, detailed personas - are wasted. Wasted.

And all this happens because executives are so petrified of meeting customers face-to-face, or even on the phone (which is actually better, in my experience - people always talk more freely on the phone than they do in person).

Developing real personas that reflect real buyer needs requires real conversations and then real humility. So often, the feature that the developers are most proud of is the feature that matters the least to the customer.

The project management programs are a great example. There are all sorts of bells and whistles that really don't make much difference, while the fundamentals have been neglected and underdeveloped, resulting in a lot of excess work to do a single task. It can take eight clicks to do something routine that should be done in one or two clicks. Hardly any of them organize projects and tasks as file folders. Instead, they're all just listed - and the list, if you are managing a complex project, gets ridiculously long in quick order.

So, in spite of the protests to the contrary, and Jeffrey's claim that my "Buyer Scenarios vs Personas" article was a "foul ball instead of your usual out-of-the-stands home run," I stand by my position, which is: Personas have their place in the development and marketing phases of a product launch. But they better be based on real interviews with real people, they better not be condescending, and, if the product is to be really useful, it needs to be tested with real people as it's being developed.

During those usability tests, those real customers, hitting brick walls before your very eyes, will force you to create a product that works for them.

And, as I've said many times, if product developers really did design customer-friendly products, and marketers did a good job of showcasing those functions, all the salesperson will have to do is put the product in front of the customer and then point and grunt.

The alternative - one that happens millions of times a day - is the salespeople are sent out into the world with the shiny new product, meeting with real buyers - who watch the presentation, then say those Dreaded Nine Words.