How do Personas impact Sales for Salesforce users:

 How do Personas impact Sales for Salesforce users:

Personas can be described in many different ways and are tools that help businesses to better understand their customers and their needs. In the Salesforce context, a persona represents a group of users clustered based on shared behavior, motivations, goals, pain points and other characteristics. User personas are based on real people who use Salesforce for their day to day activities.

Sales process is multi-step from lead generation to bookings and customer service to revenue generation. Multiple users need to be included with different sets of requirements such as sales reps, marketing reps, customer service reps and financial analysts. Salesforce lets you integrate these different user personas into a cloud-based team, so that they can work from anywhere , anytime for maximum results.

How to Develop User Personas

The development of user personas need to go beyond just providing customer information for your organization’s ideal customers. The persona profile should also include other characteristics such as the current behavior of the personas, goals and expectations. A right target audience can be identified by both quantitative and qualitative research, therefore forces organizations to consider these personas in terms of user design and implementation of their products.

Qualitative research includes tools to gather feedback from focussed groups and interviews. While quantitative data provides unique insights and perspectives and therefore is not measurable and cannot be generalized. This is the reason why quantitative research plays an important role in the creation of personas.

Personas are rich representations of users that go beyond demographic and personal details. Most well-crafted personas contain a multitude of information including demographics (such as age, marital status, income, etc), personal details (such as name, photograph), attitudinal or cognitive details (mental models, pain points, key tasks that are required to be performed, feelings), goals and motivations for using the product and behavioral details about the persona tends to act when using the product. 

Many times user personas may seem unnecessary, especially for smaller Salesforce projects with only one user type. However, creating user personas is an essential part of the Salesforce UX design process. It would be impossible to design a user experience if you are not aware of who you are designing it for. For example, user personas are consistently used in marketing and advertising because customers are their target audience and personas can add a face to specific market segments.Multiple personas can be used for various market segments and further refined to the overall target audience. There is no one-size-fits-all approach when creating personas , but according to Jodie Harris from Content Marketing Institute, the following aspects should be considered when developing personas:

• Personas to embody an ideal customer - background information such as name, age and other important attributes should be included which are relevant to the business.

• Persona profiles should consider goals and motivations - Understanding the goals and motivations of an ideal customer will help understand the reason behind customer’s decision making.

• Personas should define their role in relation to the business - As not all your customers are sole decision makers and having information on their role in business will help in understanding logistical decisions such as promotions.

• Persona profiles should include communication preferences - Persona profiles should include functional insights related to their role, therefore details related to their engagement behaviors and content preferences, including topics, formats and social channels. This would help businesses understand the context and tailor their communications to the potential target audience.

• Putting the Personas in use - Once a user persona is developed, these personas should mimic real world scenarios with customer questions and concerns backed up by possible solutions.

Let’s understand how the personas developed by us impact Salesforce users.

The Magic behind streamlining Salesforce with Personas 

Salesforce is a highly flexible and customisation platform which means different people at different organizations may carry out same or similar tasks using different Salesforce components and features , or even systems. By identifying and asking relevant questions about user goals, motivations and tasks they perform regularly, Salesforce has come up with Personas for Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud users. The grouping of users into different Personas improves utilization of resources required for each user, therefore lets you build on previous work. 

Salesforce have grouped the above personas by understanding each group’s core tasks and job functions which provided detailed information about their priorities, preferences and features required in Salesforce in order to do their jobs efficiently. When planning to add any new features, Salesforce already has some sort of shorthand description of what defines each group and how the new feature would impact the group of users.

Let’s take a look at 5 ideal user personas for Sales Cloud:

Sales Leader  - The users with this persona spend most of their time managing, training and coaching sales reps in the organization on various tools and processes for sales reps. On an average their main salesforce activities include:

• Viewing and creating reports and dashboards

• Customizing and doing administrative steps in Salesforce

• Collaborating with colleagues in cloud

Sales Leaders are motivated to ensure that their team is working well to meet their quotas. While in some organizations, Sales Leaders may also own revenue activities such as lead generation, quota setting, their work is less likely to be quota-based than some of the other user personas.

Deal Closer - The users with this persona spend most of their time prepping for sales calls and meetings, preparing quotes and contracts. Some of these users also participate in demoing solutions to potential customers, therefore often have in-person conversations to close the deals. When working in Salesforce, they most likely do the following:

• Entering data on calls, notes and emails 

• Updating contact information for existing prospects and customers

• Creating new prospects and client records

• Review and work through a list of sales to-do tasks such as leads or opportunities

As Deal Closers have to spend most of their time with in-person meetings with potential customers and prospects, they are rarely in the office. Deal Closers main activities are commission driven and hence their focus is on the customer to maintain existing relationships to make a sale.

Data Expert - The users with this persona spend most of their time in sales forecasting, managing sales pipeline and tools for the sales team. They rarely meet customers and 50% of them have no quotas. When working in Salesforce , they do the following:

• Viewing Sales reports and dashboards

• Customizing Salesforce with any new features as they become available for sales teams

• Perform general administrative tasks in Salesforce

The Pipeline Builder - The users with this persona kickstart the whole sales process by generating leads. Pipeline builder spends half day finding leads, responding to inbound leads and qualifying leads for the sales team.The other half day is spent in finding new opportunities in existing accounts. While working in Salesforce, they do the following:

• Entering data for new prospects and customer information

• Updating data for existing prospects and customers

• Logging data on calls, notes and emails.

Pipeline Builders are heavily revenue driven and about 68% of them are working towards a revenue quota. In fact, their role often comes with an activity quota and a sales target that they would need to meet.

Trusted Advisor - The users with this persona spend half of their time in managing existing customers. Roles such as Account Managers have this persona, where they upsell existing customers to grow business with recurring sales. For larger accounts, trusted advisors are generally looking for new opportunities. While working in Salesforce, they do the following:

• Updating data for existing prospects and customers

• Logging data on calls, notes and emails

• Entering data for new prospects and customers.

Trusted Advisors are focused on building relationships, therefore they are in front of the customers most of the time. This allows them to build repeat business and won’t need to worry about meeting sales quotas. The dashboard will allow trusted advisors to look for sales activities and tracking to follow leads easily.

The next set of personas are focused on Service Cloud in Salesforce. They are:

Case Solver - The users with this persona provide direct support to customers with cases and handle escalations. They interact with the customers over phone, email and sometimes through social media (ex. twitter). While working in Salesforce, they do the following:

• Log activities such as email, notes.

• Troubleshooting customer issues

• Updating profiles for existing customers

• Viewing the status of cases regularly

• Collaborating with colleagues to find resolutions

Case Solver may be able to solve cases with first interaction with customers and sometimes may take days and weeks to resolve critical issues but would regularly reach out to customers.

Expert Agent - The users in this persona have a lot of experience and handle mostly case escalations. They contribute to the company’s knowledge base by creating or updating knowledge base articles and training other colleagues. While working in Salesforce, they do the following:

• Troubleshooting customer issues

• Log activities such as email, notes,etc.

• Support case escalations

• Collaborating with colleagues to resolve cases

• Viewing the status of cases regularly

Team Leader - The users in this persona supervise, support and provide training to other case agents. Most Team Leaders spend less time in Salesforce and do the following:

• Viewing status and notes for specific cases

• Creating or updating reports and dashboards

• Troubleshooting customer issues

• Changing ownership of a case from agent to another case agent. 

Team Leaders spend most of their time interacting with customers directly.They perform quality checks, provide feedback and coaching to people working under them.

Service Admin - The users in this persona are the admins of Service cloud. They manage and maintain the organization’s Service Cloud instance doing various administrative tasks. While working in Salesforce, they do the following:

• Customizing and administering Salesforce features and functionalities

• Creating and updating reports and dashboards

• Creating user profiles and accounts

• Viewing status on specific cases

• Troubleshooting customer issues on Service Cloud

Service Admins are often responsible for other Salesforce products such as Chatter, Sales Cloud, Salesforce Mobile, Digital Experiences, Knowledge articles, Live Agents and Einstein Analytics. They update and modify Salesforce instances based on new features and updates from Salesforce.

The last set of personas are focused on Marketing Cloud as shown below:

Marketing Manager - The users with this persona are active managers who oversee teams, projects, people and processes. They are responsible for creating a strategy and execution of this strategy in the organization. They are skilled in cross-channel marketing and execute customized, real-time marketing campaigns. While working in Salesforce, they do the following:

• Coordinate cross-channel marketing messages, cadence and customer journeys

• Approve campaign content

• Analyze campaign key performance indicators and metrics

The Marketing manager would focus on growing the company’s revenue through marketing for providing enhanced customer experience.

Strategic Leader - The users with this persona have higher responsibility to craft their company’s marketing strategy. They are experienced marketers who give strategic direction to the marketing team to look for innovative ways to use Salesforce. Using their skills in multichannel marketing, they are able to execute real-time , lifecycle and targeted campaigns across market segments. 

While working in Salesforce, they spend more of their time:

• Reviewing dashboards to understand customer engagement and ROI

• Approving content for major campaigns

Strategic Leaders are invested in making a difference to their company’s success.

Marketing Specialist - The users with this persona are skilled across cross-channel marketing and executing real-time/ lifecycle marketing campaigns. They use data to find insights to customize campaigns according to customers. While working with Salesforce, they spend most of their time:

• Executing on the marketing plan

• Creating, updating and sending marketing communications (bulk emails, etc)

• Monitoring and analyzing data for Campaigns and to find insights.

Marketing Specialists are passionate about marketing campaigns and use analytics to find insights on customers. These users would like to get involved with strategic decisions and aspire to become Marketing Managers.

Designer / Developer - The users with this persona are highly technical as they create and code marketing assets. These users are skilled at single-channel marketing, executing lifecycle and segmented campaigns. While working with Salesforce, they spend most of their time:

• Designing marketing assets.

• Creating and testing marketing (bulk) emails.

• Coordinating approvals across current marketing assets.

Designer - Developers are motivated to create beautiful content and continue to expand their technical skills.

IT Services - The users with this persona provide support to marketing data operations. These users are focused on real-time, lifecycle and segmented marketing on a single channel. While working with Salesforce, they spend more of their time:

• Managing infrastructure for the organization.

• Create APIs for Marketing Cloud

• Debugging or updating automations and journeys.

These users are motivated by improving the organization's infrastructure and support marketing team and Marketing Manager.

Conclusion

While personas should be a real depiction of real people, we need to take care that these personas are reviewed annually and are accurate representations of user goals, motivations and challenges. We need to make all relevant information on the user profiles available to business to make right decisions for design and user experience. Salesforce Personas bring attention to the key tasks, job functions and motivations of users therefore enabling you to create a streamlined sales process and a cloud ready team. This provides companies ways to optimize usage of resources to increase ROI.

Personas are the starting point for the company's next significant challenge: the user journey. My next article would focus on crafting user flows and how to create the perfect user journey for your customers.