Create Personas with HubSpot CRM data | Customer Persona by Delve AI

A customer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customers that’s based on market research and audience data. It groups buyers with similar traits and characteristics — like their needs, pain points, goals, objectives, job title, company size, industry, and location — into distinct segments.

When built, these segments allow you to craft personalized marketing strategies that drive awareness, engagement, and conversions. And not just marketing, you can also further your sales, product, and business development goals.

Delve AI helps you generate personas that give you a deep understanding of your ideal customers. In this post, you will learn how to create personas using HubSpot CRM data with Customer Persona by Delve AI.

How to Create a Persona with HubSpot CRM Data in Delve AI

Customer Persona by Delve AI lets you create personas directly from your CRM data — no guesswork, just real insights. All you need to do is connect your CRM/MAP account or upload a CSV with customer data. Currently, we support HubSpot and Klaviyo integrations, along with Shopify and Stripe data.

So, what makes this approach different from other persona creation methods?

We know that traditional personas rely on assumptions and are susceptible to internal biases. Your data is all over the place and not enough to convince stakeholders about anything, let alone big business decisions. Using CRM data, you can make personas that reflect your actual customer data – their actions, interactions, and preferences.

It’s accurate, actionable, and better than generic market research. Below, we’ve described the process of creating personas with HubSpot CRM data.

1. Connect your account or upload HubSpot CRM data

Creating a persona using HubSpot CRM data is quite an easy and seamless process. The first step, of course, is to Sign Up or Log In to Delve AI. After you’ve done that, just follow these steps:

• Click on Persona Generator > Customer Persona in the sidebar
• Select the Buy Now option on the product page
• Pick a pricing plan that suits your needs (starting from $1400 /year for 2k Contacts)

The next step is to connect your HubSpot CRM account to Delve AI. You can also upload your customer data in the form of a CSV file to our platform. In the case of the former, pick HubSpot from the Connect CRM dropdown button.

You will see the following screen. You will need to sign in to your HubSpot account and provide the necessary authentication. Once we have the authentication, we will pull your contact data to kick off the persona generation process.

Here are some of the customer and product attributes from your HubSpot CRM data that Delve AI uses to build customer personas. We’ve listed these attributes, along with their definitions in the context of HubSpot.

• Record ID – A unique number that identifies each contact.
• First Name & Last Name – The contact’s full name.
• Email – Their email address.
• Twitter Username – If available, we use this to understand your customer’s social media presence and interactions.
• City, State/Region, Country/Region – The place where they’re located, which can influence your product, marketing, and sales processes.
• Job Title – Their role at the company; allows us to segment leads based on their decision-making authority.
• Phone Number – A direct line to the contact for sales follow-ups.
• Website URL – If they have a website, it gives us details of their business activities.
• Company Name – The company or organization they work for.
• Total Revenue – The revenue figure tied to the contact’s company.
• Number of Associated Deals – The deals they’ve been involved in within your company. More deals = key customers.
• Recent Deal Close Date – The last time they successfully closed a deal, good for gauging their buying cycle.
• Create Date – When they were first added to your HubSpot system.

Besides customer and company contact data, we use data points related to your products or services in the buyer persona creation process.

• product.hs_object_id – Product ID.
• product.name – The name of the product.
• product.hs_images – Any images linked to the product.
• product.hs_url – A direct link to the product page.
• product.description – A summary of the product, its features, measurements, etc.
• product.hs_product_type – The category the product belongs to.
• product.price – The cost of the product.

If you’ve directly connected your HubSpot account with Delve AI, you don’t need to worry about finding or selecting the attributes mentioned. However, if you choose not to connect your account, you can simply export the customer data from your HubSpot CRM, as outlined below, and then upload your customer database to Delve AI.

2. Export contact and company details from HubSpot

You can find customer and company details in HubSpot’s dashboard by navigating to different sections within the CRM. These are the places where you should look:

1. Contacts Tab for details like name, email, phone number, job title, etc.

• Log in to HubSpot > CRM > Contacts.
• Click on a contact’s name to open their profile.

You'll see their First Name, Last Name, Email, Phone Number, Job Title, Twitter Username, City, State, Country, Website URL, and Company data. Plus, this is where you’ll find deal-related information, like Total Revenue, the Number of Associated Deals, and Recent Deal Close Date.

You can view or simply customize the attributes in your contact records by going to Settings > Properties. Search for any attribute (e.g., "Create Date" or "Total Revenue") to find it and adjust how it's displayed in the dashboard.

You can then select the number of contacts you want and hit the Export button. Download the information in CSV format and upload it to Delve AI. The rest of the customer persona creation process is similar to the automatic one, where you connect your HubSpot account to our platform.

3. Generate customer personas with Delve AI

After we get your data (manual or automatic), our system analyzes and enriches the data with publicly available information (voice of the customer data, for example). We then segment the customers automatically based on their psychographics, demographics/firmographics, technographics, transactions, behaviors, and geographies, to create rich personas of your customers and their needs.

Customer Persona by Delve AI typically creates three to six buyer personas for your business, regardless of whether you operate in a B2C or B2B model. After data processing and analysis, your customer segments are usually labeled as “High-Value Customer,” “Low-Value Customer,” “One-Time Buyer,” and “Repeat Customer.”

The example given belongs to a B2B business and is highlighted in green, whereas B2C persona segments are highlighted in blue. This persona segment provides insights into a specific customer profile, "Dan Kraus," categorized as a Mid-Value Customer. You can see his Total Spend –$1128 – and Payment Count indicating 17 transactions.

When you click on Persona details, this AI-generated persona segment gives you insights into customer demographics, psychographics, and buying behavior.

Here, we start off by providing you with the name, age, urbanicity, marketing generation, and customer segment your persona belongs to, i.e., a mid-value customer. This is followed by a brief quote summarizing what they're looking to achieve with your product or service, and finally, a map that helps you pinpoint their location.

The four modules at the start offer in-depth details about this persona segment and encompass additional attributes, such as:

• Profile information – summary, reports to, responsibilities, and jobs to be done.
• Psychographics – goals, motivations, and key needs.

• Buying behavior – factors influencing purchase decisions, triggers, role in the buying committee, and role in the decision-making process.
• Key obstacles – core challenges, day-to-day pain points, and perceived barriers.

That’s not all. You get job profiles, communication preferences, news sources, social networks, and brands. In this case, we see that Dan works in the Health & Fitness industry, running his own business as a founder. He prefers to interact via social media channels and reads Forbes and The New York Times.

Besides the brands and social networks he engages with, we have a graph displaying his personality traits. Delve AI leverages the Big Five personality model or the OCEAN model to map your customers’ personalities based on five key traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

In a similar fashion, the 2-D valence-arousal model is used to measure emotions. It’s a framework that groups buyer emotions into a two-dimensional space – valence (positive to negative) and arousal or intensity (high to low).

The emotion and personality traits module is succeeded by Dan’s interests (both business and otherwise), values, the places he’s likely to visit, and the tools he uses or wants to use in the future. For instance, Dan’s business interests include advertising, marketing, finance, project management, and technology.

He currently simplifies his work by using collaboration tools, healthcare software, mobile development platforms, and cybersecurity software.

Apart from marketing and advertising, Dan’s other interests include international trade, taxation, and the global economy.

Below, the section “Dan’s Likely Interactions with Your Business” explores his first interaction with your business – in this case, MyAgency.com – and the resources that influence him. You see that he’s active on weekdays, particularly at night, and is heavily influenced by social media, events, promotions, and reviews.

The products or services, and topics that resonate with him are further listed below. As represented by the Resonating products/services, Dan is very much interested in Search Engine Optimization, followed by MyAgency.com’s Social Media Marketing and Paid Search services.

In this example, business growth, marketing strategies, search engine optimisation, paid search, brand identity, and digital marketing agency are some of the topics that resonate with him.

The industry-specific insights are based on the mentions, page views, and keywords your customers use. These provide you with data about the industry your business belongs to.

Furthermore, the Distribution tab offers data grouped into five categories: how, who, where, when, and what.

• HOW: Devices, marketing channels, search engines, organic and paid keywords, and social media channels.
• WHO: Industry, job function, company size, seniority levels, job titles, and organizations.
• WHERE: Urbanicity, territory, city, country, and region.
• WHEN: Day, time, weather, and season.
• WHAT: Resonating topics and keywords.

These categories show you the customer distribution within this persona segment as a whole. We have 2-D graphs under WHERE and WHEN that depict how consumers are distributed across different geographic levels like Urbanicity & territory, Day & time, and Weather & season.

Quick Tip: the darker the shade, the stronger the customer representation or activity levels within those categories.

Your auto-generated persona also comes with an Influencers tab that helps you identify popular individuals and organizations your customer follows and interacts with online.

You get detailed information, like:

• Names of influencers and organizations.
• A brief description of these influencers.
• Contact channels, including their website and social media handles.

With these details, you can reach out to the right industry leaders and influencers for partnerships, collaborations, and influencer marketing campaigns.

You can easily download each of these reports (Persona details, Distribution, Influencers) in JPEG, PPT, and PDF formats by clicking the Export button. For bulk exports, go to Settings > Reports, where you can instantly download all your persona reports or receive them via email.

You’ve Built Customer Personas, What Next?

Automatic customer segmentation, persona segments, industry-specific insights, audience distribution, and influencer identification are just a few of the benefits you get with Customer Persona by Delve AI. Now, let’s look at some additional features you can leverage below, including a few that make the generated personas actionable.

Create custom persona profiles with the Filters feature

Delve AI allows you to generate personas using just a subset of your customer data. You can set up data filters to filter CRM data (including or excluding specific customer data), limited to the following dimensions:

• Continent, Country, Region, and City
• Products or services
• Social network

Filters are available as an add-on feature and are not included in your Customer Persona subscription plan. To add a filter, contact sales to purchase an add-on after you’ve subscribed to a Customer Persona plan. Once done, choose the Dimension (e.g., "Product") > Criteria (e.g., "Include") > Value (e.g., "MacBook") to create personas for customers who have shown interest in or purchased a MacBook.

Note: Filters cannot be edited. If you want to delete a filter, go to Settings > Filters and "Delete" the filter(s) you wish to remove.

Filters are a great way to create custom personas for your business – say, product-specific personas or country-specific personas [eg. Dimension (e.g., "Country") > Criteria (e.g., "Include") > Value (e.g., "Canada")]. You can analyze customers purchasing a specific product or belonging to a particular region or country, delving deeper into their preferences, shopping behavior, purchasing patterns, and buying barriers.

Uncover unique audience attributes with Compare

Like customers in real life, different persona segments also share certain similarities and differences. Delve AI’s Compare feature allows you to spot these differences between your transacting and non-transacting audience segments, so you can identify new targeting, keywords, and content ideas that drive conversions.

Here’s how you can do it:

• Go to Customer Persona in the dashboard.
• Select the persona segment you want to compare (e.g., Segment 4).
• Click the Compare icon near the Export button.
• Choose the segment you want to compare with from the drop-down menu (e.g., Segment 1).

The image compares two customer persona segments – Michelle Avery, a 1-TIME BUYER (Segment 4), and Kim Howe, a PASSIVE BROWSER (Segment 1). The bars represent their level of interest or engagement across different categories, with Michelle’s data in red and Kim’s in blue.

We can see that both prefer English, but Michelle’s engagement is higher than Kim's. Also, Michelle shows a significantly higher interest in surfing than Kim. The same can be said about their interest in crafts, however, Kim has notable engagement this time.

In the HOW Section, it’s apparent that Michelle engages more on Instagram compared to Kim, although both show significant activity.

Interact with your customers with the digital twin software

Wouldn't it be nice if you could interact with your personas instead of inferring things on your own? Delve AI’s Digital Twin of the Customer software lets you do this. It’s similar to how ChatGPT answers your questions. However, the data being used is that of your personas – your customers.

You can directly engage with your customer personas. Chat with them online and ask for feedback on your latest products, marketing campaigns, and sales plans. For instance, if you’re too not sure how your audience might react to a new blog article, you can ask for their input to help refine them and make them resonate better with the same audience.

The digital twin functionality can be accessed through the dashboard menu: Digital Twin > Select a persona to chat.

You and your team members can also interact with the digital twin via collaboration tools, such as Slack. All you need to do is to connect your Slack channel through our dashboard: Settings > Integrations > Slack. Once connected, your team can easily integrate virtual twins into your workflow and make customer-centric decisions – ones that benefit your business and your buyers.

Get marketing and audience targeting ideas with Advisor

Advisor by Delve AI (coming soon) is our specialized AI marketing software that reduces manual efforts by converting your persona-related data directly into actionable campaign ideas across different channels.

It makes personas actionable by mapping them to marketing campaigns across different channels, like content, SEO, PPC, media/display ads, social media, email, events, public relations (PR), and sales. With dedicated tools, the Marketing Advisor can be a huge resource saver for your company.

Case in point: Our SEO advisor automatically suggests opportunities for free guest posting (and thought leadership submissions) and link-bait ideas for your business.

Under guest posting, it compiles a list of blogs that accept guest blogs in your industry, filters them by domain authority (DA) plus traffic, and gives out Suggested Topics and Related Questions. The See Outline option further gives you an article outline for each topic or question with a title, description, and section ideas.

Note that these blogs cater to an audience that matches (or is very similar to) your ideal customers and cover the keywords or topics relevant to you.

Similar to SEO advisor, the other tools also make recommendations related to your business and target audience:

• Content Advisor offers content suggestions.
• PPC Advisor provides campaign optimization and ROI analysis.
• Media Advisor helps reach the right people on Google, Meta, and Linkedin.
• Social Advisor identifies trending topics, hashtags, and influencers.
• Email Advisor gives email content, A/B testing, and time recommendations.
• PR Advisor spots opportunities for press releases.
• Sales Advisor lists out potential B2B customers and leads.

So in the end, it’s not just customer personas you’ve generated. You’ve also equipped yourself with a full suite of tools that provide actionable marketing advice to optimize your business strategies across multiple channels.

Wrapping Up

Customer personas are a must-have for brands looking to expand their customer base and ensure the success of their business. And why not? Persona-generated insights empower you to understand who your customers are — what they want, how they think, and what factors influence their decisions.

Creating personas using your HubSpot CRM data adds depth to customer insights that other persona-creation methods simply can’t match and makes them actionable. You know your customers, but with CRM personas you learn more about the segments and sub-segments that exist within that customer base.

So, connect your HubSpot customer data and build personas with Customer Persona by Delve AI today!