Validate your personas with a post-conversion survey (Playbook)

You’ve created personas. Good first step!

Before you waste time and money and frustrate everyone, validate whether your hypothesis is born out with your actual customers. Is that crazy? No, it's not. But here we are.

There are a lot of ways to do this, here's an easy one to implement if you're already running customer surveys.

The playbook includes:

• How to write questions and responses that differentiate your personas with examples.
• Sample questions you can use or repurpose if you get stuck.
• Where to ask the validation question.
• What to look for when you review the results of your survey.
• What to do if your results are weird.
• Some ways to get started using your personas now that they've been validated.

But why?

Well, most companies create personas by making sh!t up and filling in a template or brain-vomit their groupthink assumptions onto whiteboard. Then they put those personas on a shared drive and never look at them again. Which is fine because that's how you make awful and useless personas.

But that ain't you. Even if you didn't start your persona/ICP process with customer research, you're going to validate your personas with actual customers to see if they're any good. If they're not, you'll fix it. If they are, then you'll actually be able to use them (unlike those other jokers).

Win-win.