What is a buyer persona and why are they important to your startup? Buyer personas are models of your ideal customer, but what is the best way to generate those personas, and more importantly, are those the right personas to model in the first place? Our guest today is Leena Joshi Co-Founder and CEO of CloseFactor, a company that helps build better buyer personas. We cover how companies can collect and use data to enhance their buyer personas to be more targeted and how CloseFactor assists in this process. We also talk about building negative buyer personas, and how startups can use all of this to their advantage.
About Leena:
Leena is the Co-founder & CEO of CloseFactor. She is an enterprise software GTM veteran with over 20 years of experience spanning product management, product marketing, inside sales, corporate marketing and business operations at Splunk, VMware, Redis Labs, Intel, and advanced AI company, Petuum.
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In this episode we discuss:
02:33 Leena’s journey before Co-Founding CloseFactor
03:33 Leena’s experience at Splunk
05:28 What it was like to go through the Splunk and VMWare IPOs
06:15 Dealing with rapid growth and hiring sprees
07:27 The opportunity she saw with CloseFactor
10:13 Building the initial buyer persona for CloseFactor
13:32 How companies can start building their own buyer personas
16:05 What early stage founders need to think about in terms of selling today’s customers versus tomorrow’s customers
17:20 How CloseFactor helps in building buyer personas
19:33 Balancing customer discovery and sales
20:54 Finding customer interviewees for research
22:25 Defining negative buyer personas and why they are helpful
23:56 How buyer personas can help with marketing
24:59 Getting internal stakeholders aligned with each persona
26:16 How CloseFactor helps distill down buyer personas
27:49 Early success stories on CloseFactor
30:56 How CloseFactor’s ICP and buyer persona has evolved
32:47 Plans for CloseFactor’s recent raise of $4.5M with Sequoia and Bogomil
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How to Develop the Best Buyer Personas in Sales with Leena Joshi of CloseFactor