I first came across the use of “personas”, in the buying-cycle, in ‘This is Service Design Doing’ by Marc Stinkdorn, Edgar Hormess, Markus, Adam Lawrence, and Jakob Schneider. This is one of those books that have a pivotal impact on your thinking and go directly into your Top 20 reading recommendations.

But it has been a while since I last picked the book up. And so when I was reading ‘Personas – A Simple Introduction’ by Rikke Dam and Two Siang  this week (as material for this week‘s newsletter)  it brought me immediately back to Service Design Doing; especially, or probably more particularly, who Dam and Siang define “persona” as being:

Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research in order to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way. Creating personas will help you to understand your users’ needs, experiences, behaviours and goals. Creating personas can help you step out of yourself. It can help you to recognise that different people have different needs and expectations, and it can also help you to identify with the user you’re designing for.

How many law firm business development / tender / pitch / pursuit / etc professionals use this concept  in their bid/no bid process? Not many would be my guess.

But think of the benefits of your law firm role playing (or at least giving a chair to) the following personas in any tender “bid/no bid” discussion:

• the Procurement person’s persona
• the Legal operations person’s persona (increasingly) – CLOC / ACC and the growth of legal operations
• the Client/user persona
• the Client/payer persona
• the GC persona
• the CFO persona
• the CEO persona
• the In-house lawyers persona
• the Business Managers persona

And the list can go on and on.

If your firm played this game, do you think you might start to get a little better at wining tenders?

As always though, interested in your thoughts/views/feedback.

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