Buyer Persona Blog

A quick, easy way to gather info for buyer personas

For the last few weeks I've been helping a client conduct their win/loss calls, listening to recent buyers talk about how they made the decision both for and against my client's solution. Once again, I was amazed at the useful, surprising information we uncovered, and reminded that buyers actually want to share their experiences.

I thought I might inspire some of you to conduct your own win/loss interviews if I wrote about how this project went --how we set up appointments for the calls and what we learned from them.

Working with a list of recent wins and losses, I made a phone call and left this message --

"Hi (buyer's first name), this is Adele Revella, calling on behalf of (company). I'm hoping you will be willing to spend 15 minutes talking about your experience evaluating the (name) solution. No sales person will be on the call and this isn't a survey -- the company's product manager and I just want to listen to your candid feedback about what worked and what didn't as you went through the decision process. I realize that It may be easier for you to respond to a meeting request through email, so I'll send a follow-up message in a few minutes, or if you prefer you can reach me at (phone number)."

My tone of voice was important -- I'm very careful to avoid anything that sounds insincere or like I'm reading from a script. So please don't use my exact words, just get these basic ideas into your message.

When an assistant answered the phone (rarer all the time), I asked for his/her name, explained exactly why I was calling, and then used the assistant's name when I called back to see what the boss said.

After leaving the voice message I immediately sent an email with this subject "Voice message re the (company name) interview." The body of the email repeated the same info as the voice message, with a bit of detail about the people who would be participating from the client's side. I assured them once again that sales people would not be on the calls and provided times when we would be available.

Everyone who responded did so by email, but the phone call improved the probability that my email would be opened, especially since my email address was unfamiliar to them.

It was a bit easier to conduct win/loss calls when I did them alone in my role as a product marketer. I'd get the list of wins, losses, or inactive accounts and just try to catch people with a phone call. Many times I'd find that people were willing to talk to me at that moment, and if not, they almost always agreed to set up a specific time within the next few days. It was rare that anyone would say "no" to my request.

With this project I wanted to make an appointment so that my client could sit in on the call. You might want to do the same thing -- its always helpful to have two people listening, taking notes and thinking about how the client's responses create new opportunities for investigation.

We quickly secured interview appointments with several of the targets -- 5 of the 16 people met with us within 4 business days of the first call. Even though I initially requested 15 minutes, the shortest call lasted about 20. In most instances I would have had to rudely interrupt to end the call after half an hour. One buyer talked for so long that we had to apologize for ending the interview.

What did we learn? The details are confidential, of course. My client will use the insight to win more business for a solution that has lots of competitors. But I can tell you about the type of information we obtained:

• We know how the buyers we interviewed went looking for this type of solution and which factors had the most impact on their purchase decision (affects messaging and investment in marketing tactics)
• We learned that the buyers who are interacting with the company's sales people are not driving the deals -- that they are really a proxy for another buyer persona the sales team never meets (need messages, tools and programs targeted to the other decision-maker)
• We learned which information on the website was helpful to buyers (specific input about how to improve the conversion rate on the site)
• We learned that the demo experience had the biggest impact on the buying decision, and that this is the weakest part of the company's sales process (improve the demo and sales training)
• We learned that salespeople were not consistently communicating product capabilities that could have altered the outcome of a few of the deals (improve specific sales tools and training)

People frequently ask me if they should outsource their win/loss analysis to third parties. I tell them that this activity is too valuable to leave to others, and at a minimum they need to participate in the calls. Although I analyzed the results of this project and submitted a report, nothing compares to the value my client got through participation in the dialogue with a real buyer.

Another reason to do interviews internally -- win/loss should be qualitative (not quantitative) research, with a few topics outlined in advance but the actual questions guided by the buyer's responses. As a third party I never have enough intimacy with the product and company strategy to catch something surprising and pursue it fully. Towards the end of every call I asked my client to pose any questions that I should have asked. Without their involvement, I would have missed an important insight.

The best part of this recent project is that my client really "got" how easy it is to ask buyers to supply the useful information they need to win their business. I'm hoping that this short project hooked them on a business practice that will always be near the top of their priorities.

A persona for people who create personas

Here is a frequently asked question -- who should develop our buyer personas? For years I answered the question within the questioner's expected context -- I'd say that the people in marketing or, more specifically, product marketing, should own this responsibility. But that's not my answer now. It just wasn't working.

After years of observing the people who thrive in the role of persona creator, plus tons of feedback from people who have made no progress whatsoever, I've noticed that people who readily produce good personas may work in marketing, but they are just as likely to work in other departments. So I've decided to build a persona for the people who excel at buyer persona work.

This is not a well-researched persona, just the accumulation of a lot of years of observations. I'm writing this post to see if I'm on the right track

Let's call this guy Michael, the persona who thrives on buyer persona creation (note that I've found a 50/50 split between males and females for this persona). Michael is . . .

• Extroverted -- he gets energy from being around people, both socially and professionally
• Curious, open-minded -- he will take a position on a topic but also wants to hear from new sources to get input and other ideas
• Married with two children, having a family is important to Michael
• Is a life-long learner -- reads a lot, follows some blogs, loves to attend conferences when possible
• Empathic -- has a well-developed capacity to read between the lines and hear what others are not saying
• Confident -- he is happy to ask questions to clarify what he thought he heard, and to reach out to talk to people he doesn't know
• In Myers-Briggs, Michael is an ENFJ (although I've seen ENTJs who are also attuned to this work)
• Wants to influence others -- has a blog but feels that he doesn't spend enough time on it -- Michael is very busy
• Likes to work with the sales people and the sales people like him too -- he gets called into too many sales situations and struggles to get his other work done

What did I miss? Do you know anyone who loves to build buyer personas who isn't at all like Michael?

Bloggers miss the point of buyer personas

The most important component of buyer personas is missing from much of the discussion I'm seeing in whitepapers and blogs. Personas can't make a credible impact on sales and marketing strategies if their description is limited to information about demographics and pain points.

The most important insight about a buyer persona is the answer to this question -- what prevents this type of buyer from choosing us? We need to interview real people to capture information about the attitudes and beliefs that cause this buyer to walk away from the product, service or solution we hope to market to them.

Buyer persona interviews don't end when we hear an answer like "its too expensive" or "too hard to use" or "missing "X" capability". These are the answers that sales people are likely to pass along about why they lose deals, but personas need to go much deeper into what real people have to say about these issues.

If a feature is causing lost deals, I want to interview the types of buyers who are reporting this problem. If I can convince them that I'm not in sales and not trying to resurrect a lost sale, these interviews give me great information about what the buyer could do better if they had the missing capability. Those of you in product management may think I'm trying to impact the next release, but I'm only using this opportunity to get the buyers talking about the details of their problems and how they determined that we couldn't address them. I may find a different way to position the product to solve the problem, or may use the interview to gain deeper insights into the importance of the problems we can address with current capabilities.

If the buyers tell me the product is too complex I ask them to talk to me about how they assessed its ease of use. I want to learn about the buying process and what sales input or tools they relied upon to make that determination.

If they tell me it's too expensive, I ask about the outcomes they would expect to achieve with a product like this. I'm trying to get the buyer talking about the results they value most so that I can assess the tools we've built to communicate the impact we'll make.

The information gained through these interviews will not all be great news -- there may be some types of buyer personas we simply can't win over given the status of the product. But this is exactly what I need to know to improve the ROI on my marketing budget and my ability to train sales people to target the most receptive buyers.

I suspect the problem with much of the discussion on the blogosphere is that personas are a popular topic for web designers and others that focus on the early stages of the buying and awareness process. Perhaps the simple information they describe is enough for marketers who only focus on the top of the funnel. But this focus is dangerous in business-to-business marketing.  While many people believe that marketing is all about lead generation, even highly qualified leads won't result in revenue until the sales people have the training and tools to overcome the resistance they're going to face later in the sales process.

Marketers complain that sales people don't follow-up on their leads, even those that are highly qualified. But who can blame sales people who have various ways to make quota for choosing to sell products where they can anticipate the buyer's reaction at each step in the sales process. Marketing needs to step up its game, using buyer personas to deliver the training and tools that drive sales funnel conversions.

Survey reveals reasons buyers say no

I'm currently analyzing the results of an unusually effective web survey. The survey provides surprising insights into the reasons why people don't want to buy my client's solution online, or why they don't see any value in it whatsoever, irrespective of the sales channel.

With bad news so readily available at the moment, it might seem odd that anyone would go looking for more of it. But even in good times, I find very few companies that actively seek out information about the reasons that buyers say "no." This is unfortunate, as the potential for a buyer to drop out as the sales cycle progresses is one of the leading causes of poor marketing ROI.

When I know why a certain type of buyer is likely to start a deal but not complete it, I can prove to the sales people that there is a pattern to the issues that concern potential buyers, and that marketing has created the ammunition to win deals within targeted segments.

Those of you who know me should be surprised that I'm writing about the merits of a survey. I have always recommended qualitative techniques (mostly interviews) for real insights into buyer behavior. Surveys, by definition, only give me answers to the questions that I know to ask. Interviews allow me to change my questions based on any individual buyer's responses. This flexibility allows me to uncover new aspects of buyer concerns, delving deeper into topics that a particular buyer finds most compelling.

But this survey produced very useful results, primarily because of its unusual focus on the reasons that buyers would say no. So far as I know the company conducted only a single interview before launching the survey, adding only a few questions that were not in the first draft (it looks like that was a great addition though).

The survey was conducted through a website that is well respected among a wide array of the company's potential customers. A drawing with $1,000 in prizes encouraged more than 500 people to respond within just a few weeks.

We are still analyzing the results of this research. But this much is already apparent -- for a relatively small investment of time and budget, this company has identified:

- previously unexplored market segments where buying criteria (the high priority capabilities that buyers use to evaluate a purchase) appear to be well aligned with the company's capabilities.

- market segments that they should avoid altogether -- their offering is unsuitable for these buyers and any investment in marketing to them would result in poor sales conversion rates or dissatisfied customers

- building blocks for messaging and program strategies.

As it turns out a survey was probably the most efficient way for this company to begin the difficult process of choosing new market segments for their solution. Part of it was the site where the survey was offered -- a web-site well-trafficked by a people representing their potential market segments. But the most important component was that they sincerely wanted to hear the negative feedback about their idea.

CIO buyer persona needs new messaging

Just about everyone I know is working feverishly to update their messaging strategies. The abrupt downturn in the economy has caused most prospects to rethink their priorities and "buying criteria"-- the capabilities that a buyer ranks highest during the purchase process. For most of us, this means that any messaging we developed prior to September 2008 needs to be rewritten.

So I thought if might be helpful if I shared some insight into the new priorities of the Chief Information Officer ("CIO"), one of the buyer personas most frequently cited by attendees of the Effective Product Marketing seminar. 

Let's call this CIO persona Sam. Sam is on the executive team for a global, multi-billion dollar company that sells commodity products in a very mature market.

As a result of the economic downturn, Sam's budget for IT investments has been substantially reduced, causing him to re-evaluate every one of his plans for the IT projects he had slated for this year.  

Sam says that he looks for answers to these three questions to conduct that evaluation:

1. What does the technology do to support the company's strategy?
2. What is the business case?
3. How much risk is in the project?

In the past, Sam says that he could justify IT investments that helped the company make money. For example, last year he was able to recommend technology that made the people in his company more productive. But not now.

For the next year at least, Sam says that every IT investment will be evaluated for its ability to create predictable, measurable cost savings. Sam says it is just too hard to measure improvements in productivity and too risky to expect the company to make the changes needed to realize that benefit.

We asked Sam to give us more insight into this statement. He noted that people have grown accustomed to rapid improvements in relatively inexpensive, easy-to-use technology products in their personal lives. While Sam has different concerns with corporate technology, especially in the areas of security, support and compatibility, he faces major resistance if the solution is costly or requires changes in business processes.

Sam says that his priorities are single-threaded right now -- find places to reduce the IT budget -- even if that involves nontraditional ways of delivering IT. As much as Sam wishes that internal stakeholders would ask him for recommendations on what IT can do to make the company more productive, all anyone cares about is the budget.

In this respect at least, it should be easy for us as marketers to personally relate to Sam's pain. Most of us are in reaction mode with companies that have asked us to cut our budgets. If we simply cut out all of the wasted effort that wasn't going to impress Sam (or another buyer persona) anyway, we may be surprised at how easy it is to comply. In fact, this may be our best chance to eliminate the work that we always knew was a waste of time.

In search of simple, meaningful marketing

I found this quote on David Meerman Scott’s blog a few weeks ago:

Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.

The quote isn’t David’s – he was talking about one of John Maeda’s Ten Laws of Simplicity. John is a designer and thus his laws are aimed at visual communications, but I agree with David that this law should apply to all aspects of marketing.

So for the last few weeks I’ve been testing a hypothesis about why most marketing content is completely out of compliance with this law -- why it is almost always complex and meaningless.

I have a good benchmark for my test. For years now, I’ve been asking people who attend my seminars a simple question -- what does your company do? If the company is well known, I ask it differently -- which products do you market and what do they do? I almost never get a straight answer. In fact most people can’t look at me directly when they respond. They divert their eyes to the ceiling or floor, as if the words might be written there, sparing the speaker the agony of making them up on the spot.

Since I saw this quote I’ve altered my approach. Now I start by asking people to tell me who their buyers are, and only after I’ve heard their response do I ask which problems they are solving for their buyers.

I think I’m on to something. I’m noticing that there is a direct correlation between the level of detail in the description of a target buyer and the simplicity of the words someone uses to describe their solution. Marketers who know their buyers really well even look me directly in the eye when they talk, conveying confidence in the truth of their statements.

I mentioned this test near the end of my Effective Product Marketing seminar last week and finally learned why so many obvious, non-meaningful words appear on every website and corporate brochure. One of the participants said that he was told to read every competitor’s website and ensure that any descriptive phrase on any other site was also included in his own web content!

My preliminary conclusion (which will continue to be subjected to, ahem, intense qualitative and quantitative scrutiny) is that internally and/or competitively driven messages are pure rubbish and impossible to communicate. And if we could just develop persona-powered messages, we could convey simple, meaningful thoughts to real people.

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.

Stop selling and listen!

“We’ve been focusing on selling and just shooting ourselves in the foot.” That’s an exact quote from my phone meeting with Dave this morning. He and I have been working on a project to identify the most receptive market segments and buyer personas for his product. Here’s more of what he told me . . .

“The CEO and I spend a lot of time talking to customers during and after the sales process, so I assumed that we knew our audience. Now I realize that when we’re in sales mode we’re preaching our message. We don’t get to just listen and not take a position, so we haven’t been getting the right information.”

It was early morning when Dave and I talked, but I was suddenly wide awake. I grabbed a pen and tried to write down as many of his words as I could. Here are the other parts of my notes that I can read:

“First I listen to one person and they tell me something. When I get to the next interview I build on the points from the first meeting and I learn more. The more time I spend talking to people the more comfortable I get. I don’t even need to be creative. I just listen and see the same theme emerging over and over again.”

Dave started this project with a fairly typical problem – the company got started when the founder saw a need to solve a specific problem. More than a decade later, the company is up against a guerilla in that space. They have customers in other areas, but every sale is unique, and each new account results in a new set of enhancement requests. The company doesn’t know where it can effectively invest in selling and marketing with predictably favorable results.

Because Dave got out of sales mode and started actively listening, he knows that his horizontal (read scattered) solution can answer a pervasive, unsolved problem in the insurance industry. He still has meetings and phone interviews scheduled in one other segment -- I'll be anxious to hear how that goes. He also has a starting point for building the buyer personas that he will need to target through marketing programs, and has the core elements of his messaging strategy in the first industsry. He even has a new approach to developing highly qualified leads.

When I started working with Dave I sensed that he’d be good at this process. He is open-minded and curious, and is very knowledgeable about the value of his products. We spent some time together at the beginning of this project, getting to the heart of his distinctive competence, analyzing the aspects of the product’s current successes and failures, and applying that insight to potential market segments. Then it was up to Dave to listen and see what he could learn from the only people that matter – the target buyers.

Near the end of our phone call this morning I asked Dave the question that keeps ME awake at night. Why don’t more product marketers get out and listen to the people who aren’t their customers yet? At the risk of irritating him, I asked the question directly --You’ve been at your company for a couple of years now. Why didn’t you get this done until now? I wrote down his reply

“Sales people keep saying that they just need more leads, ROI calculators, and that sort of thing. We are so busy working on our marketing checklists, there is never enough time to get out. I always knew that my opinion was irrelevant,” (a reference to one of my favorite quotes from the Pragmatic Marketing training that he attended), “but I didn’t realize that the opinions of the salespeople were also irrelevant.”

I changed Dave’s name and carefully avoided saying anything here that might reveal his company or solution, but everything in this post is true, I promise. I’m keeping Dave’s secret about what he heard from the market -- the insights that he has about his buyer personas are now his company’s best competitive weapon.  But I'm going to tell eveyone who will listen how he got that information, hoping to inspire just one more person to stop selling and start listening.

Right-brained or left-brained marketing

I grew up thinking I’d be a fashion designer. My foray into the computer industry was accidental and (I thought) temporary. There’s a long story here, but the short version is that I came to appreciate the brilliant people and fascinating products in this industry. Tech marketing seemed like the perfect solution – keep my great paying job, work with interesting people, and if I went into marketing, I could spend my time being really creative.

These thoughts were triggered when one of my readers forwarded a paper published by Laura Ramos, Forrester Research’s analyst for B2B Marketing. The paper, entitled “Segmentation vs Personas, Where Should B2B Marketers Start?” reports that B2B marketers are way behind their B2C peers in developing effective messaging and marketing strategies, and that the source of our problem is that we don’t use both sides of our brain. I’m sure that Jonathan Asbell sent me the paper because Laura points to segmentation and personas as the answer. Thanks, Jonathan.

The Forrester report describes the typical B2B approach to segmentation, with marketers following the sales people's lead and utilizing industry, geography, or company size to identify target markets. B2C marketers start with this thinking but delve much deeper, seeking to understand and segment markets based on subjective differences in how customers approach decision making. In Laura’s report, she recommends personas as a way to capture and communicate these deeper insights.

Laura published her report in June 2006, but I haven’t seen much change. We’re still using the same left-brained thinking to develop marketing strategies, despite the fact that our markets are maturing. We’re not at B2C commodity stage yet, but we’re well beyond the time when we could successfully market and differentiate products based on the just-released features.

Since you’re reading my blog you may already agree with me, and are wondering what you can do to get your management to listen. I’m happy to recommend Laura’s report for those in your company who might be influenced by a Forrester analyst. Here’s one of my favorite parts of her report:

“Because segmentation defines who to target and personas describe what to say to them, B2B marketers should use both hard numbers and soft emotions to expand their customer understanding. They should delve deeper into prospect requirements and needs in exchange for handing out information like white papers or detailed product specs.”

Well said, Laura. We need to resist thinking like our left-brained companies. We need to abandon our personal preferences for right-brained, creative activities. It’s time for technology marketers to engage in some balanced brain utilization.