ChatGPT Can't Build You A Business
Creating Personas You Win With
Stage 3 - Selection: Winning Personas
Given the importance of the selection stage, it’s useful for us to stop for a moment and examine a key tool marketers use to shape their efforts to attract and win buyers: the buyer persona.
2023. The Year we Make Contact.
It’s 2023, so here’s my obligatory reference to ChatGPT…
A colleague recently shared a persona that ChatGPT spit out a full buyer persona of a CMO for him in under a minute.
I looked it over. It looked good.
It had all the elements of a standard persona. It was intelligent, complete, and organized. Pretty amazing! Think of all the time saved! We’re truly at a point where marketers can automate even parts of their jobs that previously seemed completely impossible.
Only here’s the thing: it was useless.
Wait - what?
It was a perfectly standard buyer persona, but it was disappointingly ineffective at doing what it’s created to do… help sales and marketing teams convert these personas into customers.
The problem had nothing to do with Chat GPT. It was a human error.
In fact, the AI had done a very good job of replicating what it finds in most personas on the web… a job description of someone involved with a B2B purchase decision.
Fine. But there’s nothing to build a business on in these instant, generic job descriptions.
To be truly useful, a real persona needs to NAIL what makes THIS person our prospect? A persona is not really valuable until it reveals…
WHO are our BEST prospects and WHY?
My wife is not a woman
Let me offer an example. Take my wife. With apologies to comedian Henny Youngman, you can describe my wife as a woman of a certain age, height, weight, hair color, complexion, etc. That will give you a generic description of a female human. But not my wife.
The key descriptor left out is, “she loves me”. This is what makes her stand out (believe me, I’m not exaggerating – plus, I love her). That takes a generic job description and turns it into a difference-making persona description.
Useful personas must reveal the WHY behind the WHO.
The persona WHY test
Do your personas tell you WHY this person is going to select you over competitors? Does your sales team find them helpful?
There are probably some difference-making gems hidden in your profiles. If you like, we can use the benefit of an outside perspective to identify what we call the “Key Prospect Insight” inside your good-looking but perhaps under-appreciated personas.
It’s a free opportunity to shine brighter, without any work beyond what you’ve invested already! Let’s have a chat. Just reply to this post or email me. No bot will call.
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B2P Partners