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When I hear about buyer personas built on input from the sales people, I think about all the times that I asked our reps why a customer chose us (or didn’t).
For deals we won, it was always some version of “I have a great relationship with the customer.” And when we lost, the story revolved around a competitor’s rep who had a prior relationship with the account, that our solution was too expensive, or because we were missing a key feature.
Go ask your reps. I bet you’ll get a similar response.
A recent LinkedIn discussion reminded me about a question-asking technique that was originally developed by Toyota. The methodology, now widely used in quality initiatives such as Six Sigma, is known as the “Five Why’s” because researchers determined that it took five tries to get to the root cause … the real answer to their question.
Here’s an example from a Wikipedia article on the Five Why’s:
The vehicle will not start. (the problem)
- Why? – The battery is dead. (first why)
- Why? – The alternator is not functioning. (second why)
- Why? – The alternator belt has broken. (third why)
- Why? – The alternator belt was well beyond its useful service life and not replaced. (fourth why)
- Why? – The vehicle was not maintained according to the recommended service schedule. (fifth why, a root cause)
- Why? – Replacement parts are not available because of the extreme age of the vehicle. (sixth why, optional footnote)
You can see that the first answer was obvious and that the truly useful information only came after repeated questioning. This is one of the key reasons that surveys or structured interviews will confirm or invalidate existing assumptions but fail to reveal new insights.
Probing interviews require skill. Anyone would be incredibly annoyed by someone who, like a three-year-old child, responded to every answer by asking, “Why?”
And I’m not suggesting that you pursue this line of questioning with your sales people. The buyer hasn’t shared this level of detail with your rep and is unlikely to do so, especially when they didn’t choose you.
But if you ask the right way, buyers will open up to you, revealing facts they haven’t yet shared with anyone. When they give you information your competitors don’t know, your buyer insights are a source of competitive advantage. This is the real purpose (and value) of buyer personas.
I’m leading a deep-dive Buyer Persona Masterclass online workshop on May 10 for marketers who want to master these specialized buyer interviews. Workshop participants will learn unique approaches and practice the new skills in interactive role playing. We’re doing the class online, but trust me, this won’t be like any online workshop you’ve ever attended.
The key to buyer personas is to get beyond the obvious first answer about what matters to your buyers. Do you know the real reasons why your buyers choose you or your competitors, or decide to do nothing at all?
Enrollment is extremely limited. Register today to reserve your seat at my Buyer Persona Masterclass online workshop on May 10 from noon to 4 p.m. EDT.
I’ve always suspected that B2C marketers got far more respect than those of us in the B2B world. While well-marketed B2C products seemed to sell themselves, the sheer complexity of matching B2B products to a particular buyer’s needs appeared to position Sales as the permanent source of meaningful revenue results.
I’ll never forget a workshop I led many years ago – the marketers’ stunned reaction when a senior exec asked for proof that any of the company’s revenue was influenced by those in attendance.
Fortunately, I’m now seeing indicators that our days as the “Rodney Dangerfield” of sales and marketing are ending. And who can we thank for our elevated role and status? None other than the buyers as they change the rules about how they make decisions for even the most complex B2B solutions.
A recent report by Corporate Executive Board’s sales practice reported that B2B buyers are 57 percent of the way to a buying decision before they are willing to talk to a sales rep. It’s becoming clear that only a strategic and buyer-savvy marketing organization could be relevant to such independent buyers.
Here’s a case in point: I just had an interesting online dialogue with a sales rep who had recently lost two deals for a complex B2B solution because the buyers believed in the competitor’s approach.
“I have been in two different cycles this year already where the buyer was armed with a portfolio of misinformation and dug their feet in because their people researched it on social media and the Internet,” the sales rep wrote. “I didn’t care so much that we lost, what I cared about was the clients’ addiction to that information as if it were the truth.”
As an experienced sales rep, he had lost deals like this in the past, but always because the competitor’s sales rep got to the account first. In this case, the competitor’s marketing had been the source of success for those deals – quite an acknowledgement from a sales guy. I suspect he’s going to be talking to his marketing team about that.
Buyers are creating a huge opportunity for us to change the relationship between B2B sales and marketing. When buyers depended on our sales people for most of their information, we could communicate the basic benefits of our solutions, and then it was the sales rep’s job to discover each buyer’s specific needs and build the trusted relationship that would win the deal.
I’m working with marketers who are learning how to be the buyer experts. I’m watching as they gain deep insight into exactly which factors their buyers evaluate. I’m coaching them to leverage these insights to build highly segmented, relevant messaging.
And now I’ve got anecdotal evidence through this week’s online dialog that B2B marketers are generating leads that are 57% (or more) ready to buy their solutions.
Would you like to become a buyer expert and play a strategic role in your organization? Consider taking my first online public workshop, Buyer Persona Masterclass, on Thurs., March 29, 2012. My half-day workshop will give you the tools to become a buyer persona expert and plenty of hands-on experience.
Enrollment is extremely limited, so register today. I hope to “see” you there!
Watching the Grammys last week, I was captivated by the acclaim for Adele, who dominated the night with six awards, including best song, best record and best album.
I love her music and was anxiously awaiting Adele’s post-surgery performance Sunday night. I was unprepared, however, for how surreal it would be to hear ‘my’ name spoken again and again, and under such auspicious circumstances!
But what really stood out was the contrast in the way Adele presents herself. Unlike my usual audio-only experience of her, it was easy to see so many other ways that she differs from the ‘typical’ star.
Am I the only one who thought her dress was a bit tacky? And while she is a beautiful woman, Adele lacks the movie-star attributes of Carrie Underwood or even the slimmed-down version of Jennifer Hudson (who knocked me out with her tribute to Whitney Houston).
The staging of Adele’s performance was unique, too. She just stood on the stage and sang, without all of the acrobatics and fancy staging that dominated performances by almost everyone else (Did you catch Katy Perry?).
In Adele’s acceptance of the biggest prize, the album of the year, she apologized for the “snot” as she wiped away her tears. Can you imagine Lady Gaga swiping her arm across her nose and making such a statement (note that Lady Gaga won nothing at last week’s Grammys!)
I’m hardly a music expert, but I see all “products” through a marketing lens, and I can’t help but think that Adele has absolutely nailed her buyer persona, and that a big part of her appeal is how well she has instinctively matched her presentation, and her story, to her target audience’s needs.
Every marketer knows that conflict and tension are central to engaging any audience. How could an Adele fan fail to notice when damaged vocal cords rendered her silent?
The tension grew as we waited to learn whether the surgery would work . . . whether her voice could possibly be as powerful afterwards. We’d seen enough press to anticipate a positive outcome, but still, when she sang on Sunday night, it was a thrill for all. No special effects needed.
Just as we were feeling some relief, we hear an announcement that we may lose her again, as she is thinking about taking the next few years “off” to focus on her personal life. Say it ain’t so, Adele!
Please don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that anything about Adele’s story has been staged or contrived to win awards or sell music. I am certain that she is the genuine person she appears to be, in absolutely every respect.
But I do think that those of us who are marketing more banal products can learn from her.
1) Don’t take shortcuts. As I discuss in my e-book, The Buyer Persona Manifesto, it’s tempting to make stuff up about buyers. For example, it would be easy for us to guess that the music buyer persona is a 30-something who plays video games, multi-tasks constantly, and craves theatrics, staging and sex appeal along with his or her music. But Adele’s success tells us something very different is going on.
2) The power of story. However perfect your product, you need to build a story around it that resonates with your persona. Building conflict and scarcity into the story increases its appeal.
3) Be real. All buyers are craving authenticity and humanity. Could it be that we actually get more credibility with our target audiences when we don’t pretend to be perfect?
I’ll talk more about the secrets of building and applying buyer personas at my MarketingProfs online seminar this week. Please join me Feb. 23, 2012, at 12 p.m. EST (9 a.m. PST) for How to Build Personas that Persuade Buyers and Increase Sales.
In your marketing strategy meetings, do you discuss Jason’s reaction to the new launch, and why Sharon is the target for the upcoming campaign?
Experienced buyer persona users know that a well-researched buyer persona generates high confidence in marketing and business decisions, while transforming a marketer’s ability to impact buyer attitudes on solutions and brands.
In my February 23 seminar at Marketing Profs, I’ll talk about the insights that are needed to build buyer personas that deliver on these promises. I’ll talk about how they break down barriers between sales and marketing by enabling both groups to address buyer needs and visualize their respective contributions to revenue.
As companies learn to appreciate personas’ ability to predict buyer behavior with uncanny accuracy, marketers can find themselves awarded a place at the strategy table thanks to their insight on key issues influencing buyers, which, in turn, determine the company’s future. When all media channels answer the buyers’ exact questions in plain language, trust in that brand builds and competition melts away.
This ‘magic’ only happens when buyers see that a brand offers a solution that perfectly fits their definition of a problem.
The buyer persona value proposition
Although the value proposition for buyer personas is well understood, confusion still exists about what to include and how to build them. The concept is equally likely to be oversimplified or overcomplicated.
Marketers know that personas have the capability to deliver access to incredibly actionable, unambiguous information on how to reach and motivate target buyers through example buyers that are both real and persuasive.
Deep accurate buyer insights guide marketers, enabling them to gain in decision-making confidence in nearly every aspect of marketing, from content to product design, lead generation to business strategy and sales enablement to segmentation.
There have been many retweets about ‘eight personas that sales people need’, ‘four consumer buyer personas’ and ‘six ways to build your personas simply by observing their online behavior’.
If only it were that easy.
To be effective, personas need to be defined by more than demographics – marketers ultimately need buyer personas that are real and persuasive enough to allow internal stakeholders to be on first-name terms with each of them.
Creating effective buyer personas
Buyer personas are a tool and, like most tools, their attributes and the investment needed to create them vary dramatically depending on the marketing situation.
Always start the creation process with a specific goal that allows you to be practical about your investment.
It is important to impress stakeholders as quickly as possible to secure their support for the training and resources involved in broader persona implementation.
Planning your buyer persona initiative involves weighing up relevant insights and determining the required confidence level in persona performance.
Determine which buyer insights are relevant
The insights you include in your persona must be focused on a specific product, service or solution the buyer is considering.
It is highly unlikely that such insights will be the same for all your solutions.
Relevant insights vary according to the decisions you want to impact; for example:
- Content placement – Where does the buyer looks for useful information about this category of solution?
- Content creation and messaging – On what criteria will the buyer evaluate, how will that buyer measure success, what would interfere with their decision to buy from you?
- Leads/demand generation – Which of several buying influencers has a priority initiative that could be satisfied by your solution? It often is not the economic buyer!
- Sales enablement – Which buyer persona is most willing to meet with your sales rep (i.e. lead/demand generation)? What does each buyer persona need to learn at each stage of the buying process (i.e. message/content development)?
- Marketing budgets or strategic planning – All of the above…
Establish the required persona confidence level
It can be helpful to equate ‘confidence’ to the required ‘sharpness’ of the tool…….
The complete absence of a buyer persona means you are working with a very blunt instrument indeed – Making Stuff Up.
At the other extreme is a blade that’s been finely honed through extensive (expensive) qualitative and quantitative research on each one of the twenty or so buyers who impact every decision on every strategic marketing solution.
Deciding what confidence level you need in your persona is greatly influenced by the level risk involved in making the wrong decision.
Focusing on a given decision allows the team to make the best choices on both insights and confidence.
Start creating your personas
The general starting point for buyer persona creation is five-to-eight in-depth interviews with two or three different types of buyers.
These personas are typically key target segments in a critical launch or other important initiative where it is obvious that the old blunt tools are inadequate.
In especially critical or high-risk decision-making, the number of interviews should be expanded or a survey be used to validate the interview findings.
A final word of caution: “Move slowly.”
I’ve seen companies that try to accomplish too much too quickly. Personas can drive significant changes in culture, process and training and these changes evolve naturally in companies that right size their initial investments.
To learn more about how to build and apply buyer personas, please join me on Feb. 23, 2012, at 12 p.m. for my MarketingProfs online seminar, How to Build Personas that Persuade Buyers and Increase Sales.
This blog post was also published on the Smart Insights blog for Better Marketing.
The Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) thinks it knows how to solve the problems with sales and marketing alignment. According to a just-released report, within 10 years, marketing will report directly to sales.
“For too long, the trend has been towards separate marketing and sales,” said David Thorp, CIM’s director of research and professional development, in a new “Marketing and Sales Fusion” white paper. “We believe that, in the next decade, more and more companies will see reintegrating marketing and sales as a smart move that brings real rewards.”
Could it be true? I hope not.
Nothing in my three decades of experience in B2B technology marketing suggests that this notion has merit. And since I personally ran a combined sales and marketing organization for five years, I know firsthand that fusion of the teams creates more problems than it solves.
The reason is simple. The marketing function influences markets full of buyers. The sales function influences one buyer at a time. The skills and timing of activities that influence markets have nothing in common with those that influence individual buyers. Combine the functions under one executive, and the focus inevitably shifts to individual buyers for near term revenue. This is vitally important, but when the company’s ability to influence the market is lost, so is its future.
Admittedly, the problems between sales and marketing are real and deserve attention. However, I find it unconscionable that an organization like CIM, which is celebrating 100 years as “the world’s largest organization for professional marketers” would just throw in the towel.
I haven’t been able to get my hands on the full report yet, but the CIM report overview makes their position clear enough:
“Marketing as a discipline has its roots in sales. Over time, due to the ambitions of the new science of marketing, the two became separate and in many cases, estranged. In our centenary year, we believe it’s time for The Chartered Institute of Marketing to say mea culpa and to try and make amends… We feel there’s no time to waste in burying the hatchet so that marketing can evolve from a discrete, some sales professionals might even say elitist, discipline to reunify with sales. There is inescapable evidence why businesses will benefit enormously if we bring them back together.”
Inescapable evidence? This U.K. based organization can’t seem to send me a PDF of the report – I need to wait two weeks for a print copy. So I haven’t seen their “evidence” yet. But I can tell you that during the five years when I was SVP of Sales and Marketing at a technology firm, my marketing team suffered. Even as a career marketer, I found that the pressure to achieve 90-day quotas whittled away at my bone-deep commitment to strategic marketing.
Just a few weeks ago, a speaker at the Sales and Marketing 2.0 conference, Gerhard Gschwandtner (@gerhard20) of Selling Power, forecast that: “Of the 18 million salespeople in 2011, only 3.6 million will be needed by 2020.” This radical prediction resulted from a report by the Sales Executive Board that said that buyers are 60 percent of the way to a decision before they ever talk to a sales person.
I’m not sure that I agree with Gerhard’s prediction, but I do know that the shift reported by the Sales Executive Board is forcing companies to learn how to engage buyers on their own terms.
Engaging buyers requires a department or function to be the buyer experts – a feat that can be accomplished only by interviewing buyers, looking for patterns and trends, and grouping buyers into buyer personas according to their findings. Then, this function needs to develop marketing content that those buyers find helpful. I wrote about this role for marketers in my e-book, The Buyer Persona Manifesto.
Frankly, I’ve never met a sales person who wanted this job. That’s because it’s a marketing job.
Then, someone needs to be there to help the buyer travel the final 40 percent of the buying process, answering the questions that are unique to each account.
Now, that’s a sales person’s job.
What do you think? Should sales and marketing remain separate or become one department?
I invite you to follow me on Twitter @buyerpersona and join me on Facebook.
If you want just a quick, easy way to “say” you’ve done buyer personas, make them up based on what the sales guy in the next cube tells you about the company’s ideal customer.
Recently, I was surprised to see several bloggers advising content marketers to do just that. If you follow my blog or participate in my buyer persona workshops, you know how strongly I feel about the dangers of making stuff up.
So when Jeff Ogden, the host of Mad Marketing TV, asked me to come back for a second episode about the most common buyer persona mistakes, I knew exactly what I wanted to say.
Here is the video of my interview with Jeff where I cover the typical mistakes that marketers make with buyer personas. I also provide some tips on how to ensure a successful buyer persona initiative.
See this video on YouTube: Mad Marketing TV Episode 2: The Mistakes That Threaten Your Buyer Persona Initiative. Link to episode 1 on You Tube: Mad Marketing TV Episode 1: Understanding Buyer Personas
In Episode 2 of my YouTube interview with Jeff, I share these common buyer persona mistakes:
#1 Using made-up information about buyers
If you just make stuff up about your ideal customer, your message and marketing content is likely to result in “preaching to the choir,” with content that’s generic and no more persuasive than anything you created without buyer personas. B2B marketing stakeholders have a right to expect a far better ROI on their investment.
The purpose of buyer personas is to learn something new, factual and insightful about your target buyer’s decision to solve the problem(s) you address with your product, service or solution. Your insights should be non-obvious, something that your competitors probably don’t know.
The only way to get non-obvious information is to have unscripted, probing conversations with the real people you want to influence – the buyers themselves. With a few hours of buyer persona training, marketers can learn how to have conversations with buyers that will uncover clear, unexpected insights. That information will help you develop targeted marketing campaigns and messages that persuade buyers that your approach is an ideal fit for their needs.
#2 Including irrelevant or trivial information
Some marketers make the mistake of including information about buyers that doesn’t help them with their marketing initiatives. Incredibly, I’ve seen B2B marketing teams get bogged down in debating whether their buyer persona is a man or a woman.
In my e-book, The Buyer Persona Manifesto, I urge marketers to short-circuit all of the trivia and focus on what I call the Five Rings of Insight™. These five insights help us discover how to reach undecided buyers, addressing their priority initiatives, success factors, perceived barriers, buying process and decision criteria.
#3 Producing too many buyer personas
In my MadMarketingTV interview with Jeff, I talk about the pitfalls of producing too many buyer personas. Many marketers believe they should segment B2B buyer personas by job titles. Not so.
This mistake can get out of hand for any company, especially those that already segment by demographics such as industry or company size. One of my clients originally came up with 24 different buyer personas. But when we got into the work with them, we were able to pare that list down to 11, and we expect to reduce it even more soon, because the marketers are continuously conducting interviews that reveal new insights.
As I explain in the video, it’s better to group buyers according to the insights that we uncover during the interviews rather than on demographics or job titles. Because those insights drive messaging and content marketing strategies, it is only logical to use them to define the buyer persona segments.
These are just a few of the most common buyer persona mistakes that I see. I cover others in my workshops and my presentations to various groups. I hope you’ll have a look at the YouTube interview and share it with your colleagues.
What misconceptions or mistakes do you see? I’m interested in your thoughts on buyer persona best practices.
At noon Eastern time today, a new web TV channel focused exclusively on practical content for marketers is going live with its first weekly episode.
Now here’s the best part – in the inaugural interview, Jeff Ogden, host of MadMarketing TV and author of the Fearless Competitor blog, talks to me about buyer personas!
Jeff asked me to address four questions:
- Why buyer personas are getting so much attention
- What is a buyer persona
- How to use buyer personas
- When marketers should begin a buyer persona initiative
We’re hoping that people will get useful ideas from this roughly ten-minute overview on my favorite topic. Please check it out on You Tube and let me know what you think.
Jeff asked me back for Episode 2 to talk about how to avoid the four most common mistakes with buyer personas. He’s got a whole new format planned so it should be really interesting.
The show will normally air every Thursday, but they’re skipping a week due to Thanksgiving. That means that Episode 2 will air on Thursday, December 1.
Please give me your thoughts on the first interview. Plus let me know if there’s a hot “mistake” that you want me to cover in the second interview.
Today David Meerman Scott launched his 8th book, “Newsjacking: How to Inject Your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage.” I’ve just read it and am confident that it will be another huge success for David, who is best known for the bestseller “The New Rules of Marketing and PR”.
I first met David in 2005 when he was a relatively obscure marketing consultant. At the time I was leading the seminar I built for Pragmatic Marketing and we had recently won a very large contract. I was overwhelmed with too much work, so I put the word out that I was looking for someone who could take on a few classes. Jon Bachman suggested his friend David.
A quick talk on the phone and we struck up an agreement. For the next few months, David and I traveled and taught the seminar together. He frequently talked about his blog, but I was barely listening. The marketers in the seminar were not exactly engaged either. We had to work just to explain the concept and people fretted about whether it was a good idea for B2B marketers.
Then David released a little ebook entitled “The New Rules of PR”. Three months later, applying only his new rules to spread the word, more than 150,000 people had downloaded the book. A few months passed before Wiley Publishing asked David to write a “real” book that would expand on the ideas.
I thought that was very cool, but never anticipated the breakthrough that David was about to experience. A short six years later, The New Rules of Marketing and PR has sold over 250,000 copies, was recently released in its third edition, and is available in 25 languages. David is one of the industry’s leading keynote speakers, commanding a very impressive five-figure honorarium for a single hour’s work. CEOs and CMOs in the largest and most famous companies in the world meet with him and seek his advice.
And now David has published his 8th book, with another breakthrough idea that will soon be mainstream.
Watching David’s rise to fame and fortune has taught me a lot about the value of focus. In whatever topic they pursue, experts are always watching for a high-value issue that is not well-understood. Experts don’t wait around for anyone to tell them to solve the problem – they take the initiative before someone else can grab the opportunity.
Initially, the expert’s goal is to assimilate as much as they can from the information that already exists about their topic. This doesn’t seem to create more work for the emerging expert; it is simply a matter of prioritizing their thinking. Every activity is an opportunity to observe, to gain a fresh perspective or insight on the chosen subject. Every meeting is a chance to ask questions and listen. These people aren’t creating new ideas (yet), they are a central point of information for knowledge that is all around them but not aggregated, analyzed or appreciated.
Are you an expert on a topic that, in your company, is perceived to be both high value and rare? If you are in a tactical role, consider how much focus you have given to mastering a skill that can be readily outsourced or that few people respect. Or maybe you have devoted your energies to product expertise, which is more valued but certainly not unique.
Whether your company has identified the problem or not, it needs (and lacks) deep insight into the motivations, preferences and influences that drive buyers to choose your solutions, your competitors’, or to maintain the status quo. The role I call buyer persona expert describes a marketer who can articulate their target buyers’ priorities and perceptions with confidence and clarity. Is anyone in your company focused on this expertise? Can anyone predict, based on factual data, the likely outcome of a product or marketing strategy that has yet to be implemented?
David and his publisher know that his new book will be a huge success. David has so much focus on his buyer personas that winning is a foregone conclusion.
