I love dots. And I obsess about connecting them. That’s why I wonder when people obsess about other things, like this — “Leading CMOs Will Excel at Customer Obsession in 2016” — without connecting them to other things, like this: “5 Questions You Should Answer When Developing Customer Personas“.
The former article posits this:
2016 will be a consequential year in the race to win in the age of the customer … The key to success will be a relentless focus on customer obsession. That is why savvy CMOs in 2016 will step up to lead customer experience efforts, accepting it as their number one strategic priority for the coming year … Personalization is the first critical success factor in the customer journey.
And it concludes this:
You will need to … deliver a business technology agenda.
Aside from being obsessive about dots and their connections, I tend to be fairly phrenetic about words, too. And I when I see personalization, I tend to think persons or, more commonly, people. What I don’t tend to think is business technology. That, ostensibly, is where the latter article comes in because it posits this:
The more familiar you become with your potential customers the more specific your content can be directed towards them.
Now there’s a dot of common sense to which my obsessive mind only needs one connection to be at peace … at least for a while. And what is that connection?
One helpful tool companies are using to help gain a better understanding of the needs of these groups is to create personas.
Wait. I can get familiar with my potential customers by adopting a tool? That tool is to create? (I imagined the tool might have been a noun, rather than a verb. But why quibble?) And I’m going to use that tool to create a persona? Of course. Persona has person in it. Why didn’t I connect these dots before?
First thing tomorrow, I’m going to use my business technology agenda to create the persona of a corporate executive who’s empowered to spend $millions on enterprise systems of all sorts. Dang!
Before you know it, I’ll be selling those multi-million-dollar systems like hot cakes. (All my personae will have to do, of course, is come to my website. It’ll be jam-packed with irresistible sales-ready content, armed to the teeth with marketing-automation software, and — presuming those feverishly voracious personae have credit cards — transactionally ready for them to ACT NOW!)
My biggest concern the day after tomorrow will be deciding my destination in retirement the day after that.
I may be a little slow. But I can connect me some dots.
—
Image courtesy of ClipArtsFree.com.