WRITTEN BY Shari Diamond, Principal at Fluvio
Is the idea of consolidating all of the potential personas you might come in contact with during a sales cycle overwhelming you to no end? Is thinking about the number of personas your product, marketing and sales teams need to consider keeping you up at night? Are you spending team meetings getting bogged down in customer titles and industry nuances?
It sounds like you are in need of a simplification tool that has the potential to completely change the way you and your internal teams are talking about your customers. Enter Archetypes.
What is an archetype exactly?
In the truest of sense, an archetype is a character in a story that represents a universal pattern, in other words a summarization of a “typical” person. In product marketing, we use archetypes to summarize defining characteristics of key personas, providing insights into one’s typical role or part in the buying process. This includes their characteristics, goals, frustrations, motivations and buying criteria. Archetypes can ultimately be used to inform and tailor sales conversations and enablement materials, and even inform product development.
This approach goes hand in hand with the increasingly popular Jobs to be Done theory, which focuses most closely on the customers’ needs section of their psyche analysis. This lens allows us to determine which needs are unmet and then conceptualize products that meet those needs, or messaging that aligns with those needs.
How is it different from personas?
While personas typically drill deep into the details of a specific role and subsequent motivations, an archetype takes a higher-level view of one’s role in the sales process. Often, personas are associated with a single human character who has a name, face and title, while archetypes are not tied to a name or face, but rather are a representation of audience clusters. It’s important to note that a number of personas fall under each archetype, and some personas may fit into different archetypes depending on the company and role.
Persona example:
Mary, Social Media Marketing Manager
Archetype example:
The Doer Archetype
When should I use archetypes vs. personas?
I recently worked with a client who had different roles and levels of customers across a variety of industries, resulting in the need to build out and manage over 40 different personas. Not only was the task of creating these daunting, but expecting internal teams to digest and action on so much information was ultimately unreasonable and certainly not productive. We recommended they streamline their personas into archetypes, making the process of understanding their different types of customers much more digestible and usable.
Another client spent hours in meetings arguing over the nuances of titles. The energy was misguided, seeing as roles and titles mean so many different things depending on the company, industry and other factors. We convinced them to use archetypes to help focus their team on the true important factors of each customer that could be used to drive their business forward, rather than getting bogged down in titles.
While personas are incredibly useful in bringing different types of customers to life, if they get overwhelming or there are too many variables to consider, archetypes may be a good fit. As with the two examples above, archetypes help streamline efforts and focus attention on what ultimately matters: the psyche of the customers you are looking to sell to. Additionally, it presents an option that can prove to be much more actionable for cross-functional teams.
How do I put these into practice?
Speaking of action, archetypes can be used to arm a number of different internal teams in their daily interactions with customers and prospects. Marketing can use them to tailor messaging to archetypes’ key wants and needs. Product can use them to better understand customer end-goals and objectives, and shape product development accordingly. Knowing prospects’ key pain points in their role can help a sales team in how they approach and guide a sales motion and subsequent conversations.
The second step once you have identified and designed an archetype is to understand their buyer journey: the steps they take to research, discover and learn about and purchase a product. Any given archetype will experience their own buyer journey based on their unique pain points, mindset, and resources. However, it’s important to also consider how an archetype will interact with other archetypes at their company in the buyer journey towards a buying decision.
Here is an example of how one archetype’s journey might play out:
The key to making this framework a success is knowing who you’re speaking to and assigning them an archetype based on their unique role and responsibilities. By using this approach, a team can align on what’s most important to each of their customers, and communicate to them in a way that’s most impactful and will lead to sales success.