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. A word from our sponsor: At Ripple, we manage all of our fund expenses and employee credit cards using Jeeves.  The team at Jeeves helped get me and my team setup with physical and virtual credit cards in days. I was able to allow my teammates to expense items in multiple currencies allowing them to pay for anything, anywhere at anytime. We weren’t asked for any personal guarantees or to pay any setup or monthly SaaS fees. Not only does Jeeves save us time, but they also give us cash back on our purchases including expenses like Google, Facebook, or AWS every month. New users can earn up to 3% cashback for their first 90 days. The best part is Jeeves puts up the cash, and you settle up once every 30 days in any currency you want, unlike some other corporate card companies that make you pre-pay every month. Jeeves also recently launched its Jeeves Growth and Working Capital initiative for startups and fast-growing companies to enable more financial freedom for companies. The best thing of all is that Jeeves is live in  24 countries including Canada, US and many other countries around the world. Jeeves truly offers the best all-in-one expense management corporate card program for all startups especially the ones at Ripple and we at Tank Talks could not be more excited to officially partner with them. Listeners of Tank Talks can get set up with a demo of Jeeves today and take advantage of our Tank Talks special with a‍ $250 statement credit after the first $2,500 in spend or a $500 statement credit after the first $5000 in spend. Lastly, all Jeeves cardholders receive access to their Lounge Pass program and access to over 1300 airports globally. Visit tryjeeves.com/tanktalks to learn more. 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 Fast Favorites 🎙- Favorite Podcast: Invisibilia 📰- Favorite Newsletter /Blog: CBInsights /Economist 📲- Favorite Tech Gadget: Phone 📈-  Favorite New Trend: Pandemic trend of emphasizing time spent with friends and family 📚- Favorite Book: Sapiens 🤔 - Favorite Life Lesson: You miss 100% of the shots you didn't take Follow Matt Cohen and Tank Talks here! Podcast production support provided by Agentbee.Agency