On Mar 2, 2009, at 7:14 AM, Tom Dell'Aringa wrote:
"Can voice a 'no%' and make the selling process more
difficult. Requires overcoming specific objections. Will share
experiences with the Marketing Director, and likely to be the person
to show the Marketing Director how to use the system or outcome from
the system. "
Hi Tom,
Have you asked your colleague what he wants to use this persona for?
Can he give examples on how this might change the design?
Out of curiosity, are the personas your designing for general
functionality or are the purposed for specific functionality?
Have there been specific research to inform the personas? Has your
colleague collected data from actual individuals that show that the
attributes of the "decision maker"?
From what you've said, it sounds to me like he's describing a
Technical Buyer right out of Miller / Heinman's Strategic Selling.
This doesn't really sounds like a persona attribute as much as it is a
role description. I've found role descriptions to be less helpful in
informing design decisions.
As I mentioned before, I advice our clients to use a very specific
razor on every sentence in the persona description: can they describe
how that sentence will alter the outcome of the design from other
alternatives?
If there was a scenario that involved a free trial period or a
interactive demo, I could see this being the start of a useful
description. But it's probably lacking because it doesn't describe how
the persona might investigate objections or what they'll be looking
for in the process.
Getting beyond the role and into specific behaviors of the persona
(hopefully based on actual observed behaviors of potential technical
buyers in sales scenarios) will help tremendously iron this out.
If, on the other hand, this isn't from research and is fabricated from
a perception of what the sales process is like, it would be a red flag
to me that you and your colleague don't really have enough information
to do this justice. You can either decide to invest in the research,
you can decide to let the fabrication go through (and probably weight
it less than anything else in a pick-your-battles strategy), or you
can decide to suggest you remove it from the persona until you have
data.
Hope that helps,
Jared
Jared M. Spool
User Interface Engineering
510 Turnpike St., Suite 102, North Andover, MA 01845
e: [email protected] p: +1 978 327 5561
http://uie.com Blog: http://uie.com/brainsparks Twitter: jmspool
UIE Web App Summit, 4/19-4/22: http://webappsummit.com
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