Buyer Persona Blog

When sales people don't pursue good leads

I generally don’t write about leads. But ON24 asked me to deliver a talk on “Getting Sales to Love Your Leads” in a webcast yesterday, and I thought you might want to know about the archived version. The webinar is not about generating leads or managing their quality – ON24 had already hosted a number of speakers on that topic, and frankly, most marketers devote so much energy in that area that they miss the critical next step. The question I was asked to address -- what can we do when we have generated really good leads and the sales people won't follow up?

If you take a persona-based "think like the audience" approach, the problem is simple -- the reps who don't work our leads believe that there is an easier way to make quota. We need to find out why they think that way and change their perception.

So my first question -- is it true – is it actually easier for the rep to close other business? If we agree that marketing's job is to drive profitable revenue growth, the product marketing role is about a lot more than lead generation. We need to take responsibility for influencing both the buyer persona and the sales people. Within each of these audiences, we need to find a leverage point and eliminate whatever obstacles we can.

The webinar goes into some detail about how to analyze the problem and begin to resolve it. I focused on marketing’s role in assessing the sales process and overcoming the five obstacles that cause sales resistance. Here’s the short version.

Answer this question. If I want the sales people to work these leads, what will they have to do differently? Will they need to (1) build a relationship with a new type of buying influencer, (2) learn how to communicate about new product details or technologies, (3) work on deals with a lower overall value, (4) manage a different level of product or market maturity, or (5) engage in a more or less complex sales process?

If I am asking our sales people to make changes in these areas, I am headed for trouble with lead follow-through. Why should the reps take that risk? If my job depended on my timely arrival at a distant destination, wouldn’t I want a well-traveled highway -- not a roughly hewn path with unknown obstacles?

If I am a marketer responsible for profitable revenue growth, I want to map out and facilitate the entire trip – the full sales process, not only the first steps in that process. I need to really, really know the buyers who will influence each step (hint: build personas), and then give the reps the messages, tools and programs they can use to win the favor of each of the buyers they will encounter along the way. The old product-focused stuff isn’t going to work here – I need to personally interact with people who represent the target buyers, gathering the insights that will make everything we do real. It is only then that I am in a position to gain the trust of the reps and convince them that the road is clear.

A different version of the same problem was posed by Patrick - one of the attendees on the webinar - he asked: how do we get the reps to develop “net new” customers when they only want to call on the installed base? My question in reply -- why do your reps believe that is easier to make their number with current customers? Have you fully analyzed what you need to do to make it easy for the reps to sell to new customers? And just as critically, do you have a plan to change the sales people’s perceptions about how easy it will be if they follow your leads?

Although I devote most of my posts to the buyer persona, it is common that the most important part of a company's go-to-market process involves winning the minds and hearts of the sales channels. I hope its still apparent that you can't do that without first grokking the buyers.

Bugs -- the cause of poor marketing vision?

My client (let’s call him Tim) says his company is blind to the strategic role of marketing. During a phone meeting last week, he told me that “if you have flies in your eyes, you can’t see them,” attributing the quote to the 1961 novel Catch 22 by Joseph Heller. I tried to verify the quote and couldn’t, but it sure sounds like something Heller would have said in that book, considered by some to be one of the most influential novels of the 20^th century.

The culture at Tim’s company is all about building a great product and then giving the sales people whatever resources they need to close the next deal. This approach worked for a long time – the company where Tim works is the recognized leader in a big market. But now their pipeline is shrinking, customer engagements are steadily more difficult, and downward pricing pressures are eating into their profit margins. 

Tim’s company has a marketing department, but they aren’t doing anything strategic, they’re working on a checklist of activities. When Tim tries to confront the issue, the marketing people say “just tell us what you want us to add to our list.”

That’s the problem. Tim doesn’t want more lead generation programs or another case study. He wants marketing to evaluate every step in the sales process, assessing the needs of the sales people and the prospective buyers who are engaged in that process. He wants marketing to segment buyers and think critically about a messaging strategy that targets each segment’s most compelling needs. He wants marketing to use the segmentation data to make careful decisions about how to allocate the budget, identifying just a few activities that will reach buyers on their own terms. And he wants to see ongoing analysis that reveals what’s working and what isn’t, so that the company can continuously improve all of the above.

Say what?

You may think that Tim works for your company, but I doubt it. It’s just that nothing about Tim’s situation is unusual (except that this is the first time I’ve been told that “flies in the eyes” are the source of the problem).

Whatever the cause, there is no simple solution. The company’s strategy worked for many years and no one expects to take direction from the marketing people. So I told Tim that he can’t be the source of the information – he needs to get data from real buyers who have recently chosen not to do business with his company. Tim needs to conduct interviews with several of the buyers where they won and lost deals, searching for real insight into what goes on during the buying and selling process. Surprisingly, buyers are usually quite willing to talk to someone from the company about their decision, so long as that person is not in sales and does not try to change the outcome of the deal.

Tim would benefit from having one other person, maybe the product manager, participate in the interview process. This will make it easier to record as much as possible about what is said, while mitigating the concern that Tim is coloring the information based on his own agenda.

Then Tim needs to present the data he uncovers, along with a convincing plan to influence the buyers and steps in the process that he heard were broken. Tim’s opinion, although interesting, is irrelevant. But speaking in the voice of his target buyers, Tim may just begin to clear up the company’s vision.

Personas generate some controversy

There’s an interesting discussion going on in the blogosphere about the merits of personas. In late January the Cranky PM did a rant about the “crap detail” in personas, complaining that they don’t “include the facts that really matter.” A few days later, Saeed Khan jumped into the fray with a post at On Product Management. Like the Cranky PM, Saeed expressed disdain for the prevalence of so much useless, irrelevant information.

Now this week’s post from Kristin Zhivago says that personas can create trouble. Her concern -- that sales people might use personas to forget everything they were ever taught about consultative selling. It appears that she’s also seen websites with misguided persona practices, since she references web copy that describes a persona rather than answering her questions. From those two vantage points, it’s no wonder that Kristin's raising a red flag.

Those of us who do understand personas need to know that there is a lot of misinformation going around. Before we launch a persona project internally, we need to be familiar with these concerns and make sure we don't do anything to reinforce them.

The first step is to make sure that our personas accurately reflect the real needs of a target set of buyers. I did a webinar last week that outlines seven ways to gather good persona information. If you want a refresher, or if you are new to persona development, you can view the webinar here.

Then we need to consider the needs of each of our internal audience personas and deliver only the information that makes sense. If I want to communicate with a developer about the capabilities that drive buying decisions, I'm careful to stick to the facts. Developers want Data. Anything that could conceivably be perceived as fluff will only discredit everything else I have to say.

When I talk to sales people about a new persona I want them to reach, I tell them a story about the process the buyer will go through to make a decision. Sales people want Stories. I make sure that my story illustrates the sales tools we built to answer each persona’s questions throughout the stages of the buying process. I don’t generally use the "persona" word when I talk to sales people. Instead I talk about someone with a specific job title in a target industry. I tell them who I talked to in a particular role, and what I learned from these conversations. Here’s a recent post I wrote on this subject.

If my target is a web designer, I tell them to use the persona information to think about who will visit the site, which stages in the buying process they are completing online, and what questions we need to answer if we want to move the process forward. In most cases, it should not be apparent to the web visitor that personas were utilized by the designer. The persona simply communicates the needs of the buyer(s) so that the developer knows how to enable a satisfying  buying process.

And if the internal audience is an executive, read yesterday’s post on the Tuned In Blog by Phil Myers at Pragmatic Marketing. Phil talks about using personas to distribute leadership responsibilities and align different parts of the company around the needs and concerns of the market. You might also think about whether your senior executive is really a developer or sales person at heart, and utilize the ideas in the relevant paragraph above.

The good news is that personas are generating a lot of discussion and notoriety. But fame often exposes an idea to criticism, so we all need to stay grounded in the facts and the importance of the problem we’re trying to solve. Keep reminding everyone that market-driven companies need to implement practices to understand and communicate internally about the needs of different segments of the market. Tell them that we will use personas to avoid all of the wasted effort on messages, programs and tactics that speak to no one. Those are goals that won't generate any controversy.

Buyer personas get personal

Working on a buyer persona for a chief information officer last week, my client listed the predictable pain points on the flip chart -- shrinking budgets, conflicting priorities, legacy solutions that are difficult to integrate but costly to replace.

These aren't the real issues for Sam, I said. He’s been living with these problems for years – why would he be motivated to talk to you now? We explored the more personal side of this issue for Sam – could his job or career be compromised by sticking with the status quo? Which aspects of this decision look riskiest to Sam? What, exactly, is at stake if he makes a decision to go with your solution and it doesn’t work out?

I kept asking for deeper insight into Sam’s resistance to their solution. Sam knows about products such as yours, I said, so this isn’t about the obvious problems. Let’s talk about his attitudes and what it would it take to change those perceptions.

After a bit of discussion, my client said, “I get it! Buyer personas are about ‘stake-in-the-heart’ marketing.” A bit violent, I thought, but the people in the room suddenly understood that capturing the same old “pain-points” in their buyer persona renders it meaningless.

I’ve never seen a more interesting example of stake-in-the-heart marketing than this year’s U.S. presidential campaign. I confess that as a marketer I am predisposed to see the election through the lens of effective campaign strategy, but think about it. Can you see that the proposed answers to the country’s problems (health care, the economy, terrorism) are the candidate’s “feature-benefits,” crafted into messages that target different persona pain points? Do the differences in their plans fully account for your decision? Are their solutions new enough to explain the record numbers of people voting in the primaries? Or could it be that these candidates have managed to communicate on an entirely different level, and to audiences who are seeking something more?

With rare exceptions, the technology solutions I hear about each week are a lot like politicians – the differences between competing features and benefits aren’t enough to drive most people to take action. Plus buyers know that technology (and political) solutions are more difficult to implement than anyone wants to admit. Marketing needs to get personal if we want to convince buyers that our solutions can be trusted get the job done, come what may.

Sales people say every buyer is unique

One of the seven ways I start to build buyer personas is to talk to the company's salespeople. For starters, sales has some insight into which roles will influence the buying decision. Further, the really good reps know quite a bit about the criteria the various influencers use to make a decision. Veteran sales people have discovered that visibility into each of their buyer’s perceptions, success metrics and resistance points could result in a winning account strategy. Gathering this information can kick-start my project.

But I'm also cautious about how I collect and use sales input, which is why it is only one of the seven methods I use. Salespeople may not be calling on the very buyers that I most need to understand, and the nature of the sales job means that salespeople have a relatively narrow view -- they think about only a few deals at any given time. Some recent interactions reminded me of another problem -- many salespeople think that personas can't be done -- that every single individual is unique. Hmmm. I guess that means that the folks behind the 1992 presidential campaigns were wrong about the "soccer mom" persona. All moms are unique, aren't they? 

So if you think your reps will resist the idea, you don't need to talk about personas per se. Personas are a tool, and no one really needs to know that much about tools except the experts who use them.  Focus instead on the result. My husband is all excited about the new table saw he bought -- some outrageously expensive thing that replaced another table saw that seemed fine to me. He says that he loves the sound it makes and cites all sorts of details about it that I can’t even remember. Seems like the old one also managed to cut boards in half. What would impress me? If he could complete some of the projects on my honey-do-list.

When I want to get a persona project going I look for a new initiative, goal or launch that the sales people and their management really want to make work. It helps if the project is already perceived to be difficult. Examples of this might be a new market segment we need to enter, a competitor we want to overtake, or a merger where cross-sale of the acquired products isn’t happening as anticipated. Then I find a rep who has had some success and I start asking questions – which type of buyers were involved in the deal, what were their priorities, what have you said or done that got their attention? If this is a new product or service and no one has sold it yet, I find a rep who has been selling to the target buyer and ask the same questions.

If the salespeople are resistant to the idea of personas, there is no need to mention the “p” word. Think of it this way –- buyer personas may need a beta test and a success story before we introduce them to people who are suspicious about whether they will work.

Meeting very interesting people

People sometimes ask me why I have a blog. What possible value does anyone get from sitting at a computer, writing down their thoughts, and publishing them on the Internet? Like the people who ask me this question, I don't have the kind of readers that advertisers are lining up to reach, so we can't expect our blogs to generate revenue. And it takes time, doesn't it?  (The answer is yes.) Who has time to spend on stuff that doesn't impact revenue?

I know a few people who have blogging in their DNA -- I can assure you that I'm not one of them. I don't have a NEED to blog. I don't get any personal gratification from writing down my thoughts. But give me a microphone or a telephone and I'm in my element. My favorite past time is talking to people who care about eliminating the waste in marketing and doing work that has a measurable impact on their target audiences.

Thus the primary reason that I blog is that it leads to conversations with very interesting people, people like Jill Konrath of Sellling to Big Companies. Jill's emphasis is on reaching sales people, not marketers, but she and I work on different aspects of the same challenge -- getting companies to stop talking about themselves. (Here's one of Jill's great posts on this topic). Because I have a blog, Jill found me and asked me to deliver one of a series of four seminars that she is doing for Marketing Profs.

Here's a one-paragraph shameless promotional plug -- the seminar is Buyer Personas: The Smart Way to Align Sales and Marketing, and it's tomorrow, Thursday, January 17 at noon Eastern time. Marketing Profs charges $129 for the seminar, or you can pay $249 and see as many seminars as you want for one year. This includes the other three parts of Jill's series -- two have already happened but all seminars are archived for later viewing. Note to anyone who has attended my Effective Product Marketing seminar -- I won't be presenting anything you haven't heard before.

Jill is just one of many people I've reached through this blog. Yesterday I got an email from Amy Lively, who says that she develops personas for retail stores, helping her customers to identify their most effective merchandising and promotional strategies (sorry, I don't have her website yet). Even though Amy and I work in different markets we have a lot in common. and through this connection we may find a way to help each other.  She ended her email with a question that plagues me too -- why don't more marketers use personas to think like their target customers?

Which brings me to best reason to have a blog. Besides people like Jill and Amy, professionals who may have resources I can leverage or answers to my questions, my blog reaches many of my past, current and potential customers. A blog post may not seem like an activity that is directly tied to revenue generation, but in fact nothing is more important than optimizing every chance I have to start a conversation, see what resonates, and truly listen.

Meatball Sundae, Anyone?

After three weeks away from my real job (it was great), I needed a quick way to grab some inspiration and get my head into the game again. So I was happy to sit in on a Marketing Profs seminar by one of my favorite marketing gurus, author Seth Godin. He was speaking about his latest book, Meatball Sundae. I’m never disappointed when I hear Seth speak. Even though he’s a B2C guy and I spend most of my time with B2B companies, he is engaging and thought provoking, and I always take away a few ideas that are entirely relevant.

The premise behind his latest book is that we cannot pile the new marketing ideas on top of an old business model and expect them to work. That’s the metaphor behind the Meatball Sundae title – businesses that have mastered the delivery and marketing of good, affordable, commodity products (think Walmart) are in the meatball business. The sundae toppings are the new ideas such as blogs, social networks and YouTube videos. His message – don’t put gooey sweet toppings onto meatballs. He’s got a good point.

Seth says that success with the new ideas is about much more than tactics, that companies need to have the right business model if they want to succeed in the new world. He also says that marketers need to be leading this strategic discussion and lays out, in detail, 14 areas of business strategy that need to be evaluated.

I haven’t read Seth’s book yet (I will), but based on the bits I heard in this seminar, I’d recommend it, plus David Meerman Scott’s acclaimed book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR. I figure that the guidelines from these two experts will let you decide whether your company has what it takes. If not, Seth’s book will give you the ammunition to fend off the meatball sundae disaster. Or you may see that you meet some of the requirements and you’ll have very specific recommendations for improvement (this where The New Rules of Marketing and PR will be especially helpful).

What’s clear for all of us is that a new world order is emerging -- Seth compares its significance to the industrial revolution. It’s a good thing we had a few weeks rest. Marketers have a heap of work to do. 

Bring me problems, not solutions

I went to Tel Aviv a few years ago to teach the Effective Product Marketing seminar for one of the Pragmatic Marketing clients. For some reason that I can’t remember, I scheduled a 1:00 a.m. departure for my return to the U.S., which meant teaching all day, maneuvering through a very unfamiliar customs process, flying back to New York, and finally connecting to a flight to Seattle.

If you’ve spent much time on planes you will be as surprised as I was about what happened when I ran into Jeff, who occupied the seat across the aisle from me on the last leg of my trip. We talked until one of the other passengers complained, and then set up a time to talk again later. I've traveled hundreds of thousands of miles with thousands of other passengers since then, but that conversation still stands apart.

Jeff runs product management for a well-known product line at one of the largest technology companies in the world, but I meet people in similar roles almost every week. What makes Jeff so compelling is that he tells his product managers that their job is to manage problems, not products. His point is simple – if you give a guy a product to manage, he’ll find capabilities to add to the product, whether the market needs them or not. Jeff doesn’t want to hear his product managers talking about solutions; he wants to hear, in detail, about the problems that potential buyers are facing.

Even though this focus on market problems is embedded in all of the work we do at Pragmatic Marketing, Jeff made me realize how thoroughly we’ve been trained to think about the answer, and how hard it is to shift our focus to the question. When was the last time someone in your company told you to bring them problems, not solutions? Jeff has turned a basic cultural norm inside-out, and has leveraged this philosophy to achieve a series of rapid promotions.

Jeff told me that his idea has had a significant impact on internal meetings. He interrupts any debate about the merits of various decisions and asks participants (even significantly more senior executives) to present as much detail as possible about the problem. He says that it is relatively easy to get people with different agendas to agree on the nature of a problem, and that the solution is then obvious and more readily accepted.

Although it’s been years since I met Jeff, I regularly think of him when I’m working with marketers who are struggling to gain internal support for a strategic, market-driven process. How many times do product managers argue for investment in a new product capability without thoroughly understanding and communicating the unsolved problem it will address? How much time and money is spent on a go-to-market initiative without first defining the problems that matter most to the buyers, and what attitudes have prevented them from doing business with us? 

Grokking the owner-contractor persona

My husband and I had a big party this weekend to thank all of the contractors who helped us build our dream home. Our Seattle-based architect, Geoff Prentiss, arrived at the party with a nice couple, Chuck and Dana, who are thinking about following in our footsteps and acting as their own general contractor. I wasn’t surprised that Geoff brought them along – he didn’t say so but I’m sure he wanted them to hear how painful this project has been for us, hoping, no doubt, that they’ll change their minds and hire a professional to implement his design.

I realized yesterday that an architect’s business has something in common with many of the tech companies I’ve worked with over the years. How many great technology products fail because the customers aren’t fully prepared for the implementation?

Geoff Prentiss is a very talented business owner who knows that his success is measured by the final outcome. He doesn’t want his name on a project unless it is just right. If he accepts customers like me and my husband, or Chuck and Dana, who for reasons of personal interest or cost savings want to manage our own projects, he needs to know how to target people who will successfully implement his highly customized homes

So I started thinking about how personas could be used to identify the companies and individuals who are capable of successfully implementing a company's solutions, avoiding some of the painful (and well-publicized) disaster stories that damage the vendors’ reputations and destroy the customers’ faith in all of us. Better yet, maybe this clarity about target personas would allow us to help the buyers measure their own capacity to succeed. Perhaps buyers could recognize the need to spend more on implementation services, putting them off their plans to do things themselves if they aren’t fully prepared for the work involved.

Plus people are always asking me for examples of buyer personas. So here are my thoughts about a persona for the type of buyer who would be likely to succeed as "owner-contractor", which is construction-speak for hiring all of the workers yourself when you build or remodel a home. It doesn’t necessarily mean doing the work yourself (the preferred term for that is owner-builder), but building a house requires a lot of vendors, including plumbers, electricians, carpenters, masons, roofers, etc., and the general contractor is responsible for managing all of these sub-contractors, and is ultimately responsible for the total cost of the project.

Note that the persona I am describing is targeted for a project where the owner-contractor is building his or her own home, not for a speculative investment. We had previously built homes for investment and, although some of the issues were similar, the emotional commitment to the final result and the level of customization are not typical for an investment property.

We’ll call our owner-contractor persona Janice. She’s 52 years old and has been married to her second husband for ten years. Her daughter just started college and her son recently graduated with a degree in engineering.

Janice had a 20-year career in the software industry, doing project management and systems analysis. She isn’t sure that she’s retired yet, but she has decided to take some time off to help with the construction of the couple’s new home in Boulder, Colorado.

Janice’s experience in project management required her to work with a wide variety of people who have diverse levels of skill and education, which will help a lot as this new role requires her to motivate and interact with contractors from all walks of life. Because she changed jobs several times, Janice knows how to quickly learn new languages and terminology, a skill that will come in handy when she has to assimilate new construction concepts.

One of the most critical aspects of Janice’s persona is that she doesn’t easily lose her temper. This will be important when something goes wrong and each of the contractors is pointing to one of the others as the source of the problem. Janice will need to evaluate all of the options and determine the best course of action, especially when no one accepts responsibility or wants to do his part of the work over again.

This also means that Janice is able to make decisions quickly and without having perfect data – she knows how to ask good questions and is willing to make an educated guess. Janice knows that it’s important to keep the contractors working and the project moving forward. A lot of starts and stops cost money and extend the project (which are somewhat synonymous).

Janice is also very good at managing finances – her prior jobs required her to keep projects within budget, but also to find more money when necessary. Janice will need to use both skills for this project. Because there is no single contractor to promise a price, and her best plans will not anticipate some of the vendors and costs, Janice will need some financial dexterity. She needs to prepare her husband for this and keep him in the loop so that he isn't surprised.

It’s a good thing that Janice is putting her career on hold, because this house is going to run her life until it is finished. She needs to be at the job site almost every day at the beginning of the project, and during the final six-to-eight months when “finish work” is in progress, she will want to check on the contractors at 60-90 minute intervals. If Janice isn’t there to answer a question, even the best contractors can misinterpret an instruction that she thought she had communicated. No matter what, some aspects of the project will require rework if she wants it to be just right.

Fortunately, Janice is really good at networking and planning ahead, because she will need to source materials and vendors who can deliver what she needs when she needs it. Her project management skills will help her to anticipate lead times and get items delivered on time and on budget, anticipating and managing inevitable and frequent delays. Janice will need to get contractors lined up for specific dates, call them again to remind them about their commitments, and then repeat the process over and over again until the work is actually finished. The first few hours of every day will be consumed with this effort.

So yes, some of the details about this persona are characteristics that you'd find in me and my husband, but we partnered through the project and there are aspects of Janice that aren’t like us at all. This is intentional. Personas shouldn't be descriptive of any single individual. I wanted to define a fictitious person based on a composite of the qualities that an architect might assess if he wants to accept  customers for owner-contractor projects. To get this persona right, I'd want to talk to more people who have been through the same experience and see if there's something that I missed or that weren't relevant in my project. Maybe you know someone who can help.

Surveys don't tell me anything I didn't know

My recent post about Dave’s success developing buyer personas generated several requests for help with survey questions. The request is good but my answer isn't a list of questions. If I help you develop a survey, someone will send it out with a web tool, or show up at an otherwise promising venue with clipboard in hand. “Excuse me, sir, but we are about to launch our new supercharged business optimizer. Do you have a minute to answer a few questions?” Uh, no, I don’t think so.

Dave’s persona project was a success precisely because he went to conferences sans survey. His goal was to meet people he didn’t know, people who (hopefully) represent his target buying influencers, and to find out what they want to talk about. He listened to the conference presentations, got an idea for a topic, and then met people at lunch or by arriving early at breakouts, asking people about some of the issues that were discussed in the general sessions. As each of his conversations progressed, he learned more and developed new questions, striving to recognize themes and patterns about his target buyers’ compelling, urgent business priorities. His assignment was to listen carefully and delve deeper into areas of interest to each individual, engaging each person so that he could develop an in-depth understanding of how his target buyers think about their challenges and potential solutions.

People who have no experience with this type of unstructured research are often worried about entering into open-ended conversations. But we’ve all had relevant experiences in social settings. When I meet someone at a party or through a friend, it’s easy to create rapport if I am clued in to one topic that person is passionate about. The quality of our conversation is enhanced when I’ve been studying or reading about the issue and am genuinely interested in what this person has to say about it. If I’m not positional and really listen, asking good questions, the conversation will continue almost indefinitely. People tell me the most amazing things.

As Dave continued to meet new people in the weeks we worked together, he built upon the topics he had learned in previous interactions, asking new contacts if they had similar concerns. He started  with a few general ideas from his first conference session, and as the range and depth of his knowledge increased, his meetings gained more specificity and were more valuable. By now Dave has the insight he needs to anticipate his buyer's response to his marketing strategies and the solution itself. He knows that every person is unique, but he also knows how to develop a buyer persona that will be the basis of his go-to-market strategies and tactics.

If Dave had started with a survey he would have asked the wrong questions and people would have been less willing to respond, plus he would have missed the in-depth insights captured during his personal interactions with the people who represent his target buyers.

I use surveys when I want to quantify or validate what I learned during the first qualitative step. If Dave needed quantitative data to convince his management about the validity of his findings, a survey would be the next step in his process. He would also do a validation survey if the buyer persona would be used to make decisions that were very risky and not easy to change. Dave will present his findings to management next week, and we anticipate a favorable response. We also have a plan to monitor the results of his marketing strategy so that he can continuously improve. I think that we completed the project, but I don't expect that Dave will ever stop listening to his buyers. He's been assimilated.