Buyer Persona Blog

New Rules of Marketing Available Live

Marketers interested in online marketing, thought leadership and PR need to check out the recently announced Pragmatic Marketing seminar, the New Rules of Marketing. The seminar is led by David Meerman Scott, noted author and one of my favorite marketing experts. If you are looking for ways to reach your buyers directly using blogs, viral marketing, podcasts, video, search engine marketing and online thought-leadership, get yourself registered soon. David's book, the New Rules of Marketing and PR, is leading Amazon’s charts in the marketing category, and he's using the New Rules to get the word out about this seminar. So I’m expecting that these workshops (available in locations throughout the U.S. will be selling out rapidly.

Targeted messaging, segmentation, and personas

Marketers who are concerned about messaging and segmentation need to think about how the best sales people operate. Top performers succeed because they focus on a target audience and listen before speaking.  This is easier for sales than for marketers, as account reps enjoy a “market of one” on each call. But this goal is behind the decision to do market segmentation at all – marketers need a way to develop a strategy and message that will cause a market full of buyers to see our product, service or solution as an exact fit for their needs.

Most of the companies I know have invested in consultative sales training, teaching sales people how to gather information and tailor messages to the needs of an individual prospect. It strikes me as highly illogical that these same companies are satisfied with creating marketing programs and sales tools that deliver a single message to every buying influencer in every part of their market.

I'm worried about the companies that have added a layer of industry or solution marketing people as a way to address the need for segmentation. Most of these haven’t structured their new marketing groups to replicate the sales process at the level of a part of the market, i.e. to gather deep insights into targeted buying influencers, identify patterns, and then group/segment buyers based on similar pain points and buying processes. Rarer still are the segment marketers who have the authority and budgets to understand all buying influences and then customize program messages, sales tools, and go-to-market strategies to buying segments. In fact, most of the industry marketing people I meet aren’t marketers at all, but an extension of the sales organization that devote most of their time to helping the reps on prospect calls.

I once had a client who loudly proclaimed that “marketing doesn’t work.” My reply, “poorly executed marketing doesn’t work, and worse yet, it wastes more money than just about anything else you can imagine.” I’m afraid that segment marketing will have the same fate. Companies are making investments in these areas, yet most of the money is being wasted as the skills, goals and activities of these groups are misaligned with the rest of the go-to-market team.

Companies are staffing segment marketing groups with people who have been in the industry, which is a good starting point for thinking like the customers. But these people aren’t trained as marketers, and they rarely have the influence or budgets needed to improve the company’s go-to-market strategies.

Segment marketing people need to avoid too much reliance on their histories in prior jobs and their time with the sales people. Market segment experts need to get out of the office and meet people who aren’t currently evaluating the company’s offerings, identifying groups of buyers who share the same problems, buying criteria, information gathering process, and influence over the purchase decision. Depending on the company's offerings, there may not be “differences that make a difference” in how we should market to people based on demographics such as company size, industry, or geography. Segment marketers need to look much deeper, to really grok the people who influence buying decisions, being vigilant for new insights and patterns that will allow us to reach out to a group of people and create the experience that there is an exact match with our solutions.

Meet Chris, a Product Marketing Manager Persona

Here’s a buyer persona I’m developing for Chris a product marketing manager in a technology company. I'm hoping you'll let me know if I’ve grokked him.

Chris is 29 years old and recently married. He and Karen want children some day, but she’s also got a good job, and with the pressures of a big mortgage, they think they’ll wait a few years to start their family.  For now their baby is Logan, a two-year-old springer spaniel that they rescued from a shelter.

Chris has been in the tech industry for five years. He was a product manager until the most recent reorganization created a separate product marketing group. He willingly made the move to the new department, but that was more than a year ago and he is still trying to understand just how his job fits with those in product management, marketing communications, and sales. Chris is responsible for the go-to-market planning for several products, but he spends most of his time:

· Attending meetings

· Answering emails

· Writing content for sales collaterals

· Helping sales people with customer accounts

· Driving to and from work – the new house has resulted in a longer commute and the traffic is horrible

These pressures plus a tight travel budget have limited Chris's customer interactions to times when he helps sales people with demos or prospect presentations – definitely not what he had in mind when he took this job. He knows he’s not spending enough time listening to the market or working on strategic activities, but he doesn’t have time to get focused amid the daily frenzy of requests and emails. He keeps thinking that there is a more effective way to do his real job, but can’t figure out how to get there from here.

Does Chris sound familiar?

Free access to market-driven secrets

My colleagues at Pragmatic Marketing have just published a revealing new e-book about  what separates ordinary and failing companies from those that everyone admires. Pragmatic's founder and CEO Craig Stull, its President Phil Myers, and noted author David Meerman Scott collaborated to produce this free on-line book, The Secrets of Market-Driven Leadership, How technology company CEO's create success.

The background stories from the CEO's that Pragmatic interviewed for this book are interesting and entertaining, but the real value is that the authors have identified just seven rules that guide companies out of the mire of sales and development-driven, inside-out management practices. If you know anyone who could benefit from a blueprint for creating a market-driven culture, download The Secrets now (no registration required).

Customer focused is not market-driven

I polled my audience during a recent webinar, asking the attendees to choose the statement that best describes their company:

We are sales driven
We are development/engineering driven
We are working towards being market-driven
We are market-driven

Surprisingly, 24% said that they work in market-driven companies. Call me cynical, but I doubt it. I'm betting that most of these companies are actually customer-driven, an excellent format for the sales and post-sales aspects of the business when you need to satisfy the objectives of a single account. But allow one or even a selected group of customers to guide the roadmap for your product and don’t be surprised if a big part of the market doesn’t buy it. Base your marketing strategy on feedback from current customers and chances are good that you'll miss a larger, more receptive group of buyers. Try to gain support for a new strategy in a customer-driven company, and someone will point to a customer scenario that invalidates your plan.

Marketers need to get the company focused on the market, not a few customers. Start your next meeting by introducing your stakeholders to your buyer persona. Build agreement about the details of the persona before you move on to the strategic decisions. If the group gets stuck, bring the conversation back to the persona, the only individual whose opinion matters in a market-driven company.

Let’s say that your target audience is the CIO, and everyone in your company agrees that you want to reach people who hold this title. But you still participate in endless debates as internal stakeholders propose messages and strategies based on their varying opinions.

Rather than adding your opinion to this chaos, why not hold a meeting to evaluate the CIO persona, creating a fictitious person that is populated with as much insight and detail as you would have about a close friend. Try to get past the obvious demographic data, developing a story that allows everyone to anticipate the target buyer's reaction to various words and strategies. Now you have a focal point for a useful discussion about go-to-market strategies.

If you want to work in a market-driven company, grok your buyer personas and lead the way.

Persona experts have focus, that's all

I once believed that great marketers were gifted with rare creative genius and intelligence.  Then I got to know some of these “experts.” True, they are smart enough, but I meet a lot of equally talented people who are on a path that will never gain much recognition for them, their products or their companies.

I've recently realized that it’s a matter of focus rather than IQ that separates the marketing experts from those who toil away in relative obscurity. In whatever role they assume, experts seem to have a knack for choosing a high-value topic that is not well-understood. Then they take specific steps to achieve expert status. Initially, their 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 way of prioritizing their thinking. Every activity, however mundane, 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.

I’ve always believed that much of the information about buyer personas is readily available to marketers, and that a lot can be gained by simply collecting and communicating internal information. So I was motivated to write this post after listening to user-experience expert Tamara Adlin speak about personas in two great webinars hosted by Marketing Profs last week. If you are already a premium member of Marketing Profs or want join, you can view the archived Personas One and Personas Two webinars on-line in their Premium Library. While Tamara’s background is more focused on product design than marketing, she has developed a practical methodology for accumulating insights and building personas. She also has a book The Persona LifeCycle, that I just ordered and will be reading in the next few weeks.

One of the most important messages in Tamara’s webinar is that internally generated, or “ad hoc” personas, are a valid and useful first step in the process of bringing personas into the organization. Tamara and I have never met, but she was speaking for me when she told her audience that persona expertise can start informally and without a huge investment. With nothing more than focus and commitment, marketers can generate a lot of value by simply compiling and analyzing all of the company’s assumptions about each of the people who influences buying decisions.

The idea of building personas from internal data sounds like heresy to those of us who know the importance of listening to the market. But getting approval for the time and resources for external research can stop a good idea before it has a chance to prove its merits. Tamara made a great case for the value of ad hoc personas, noting that companies base their product and marketing strategies on unstated and widely varying assumptions about who they are targeting. Marketers who take the initiative to verbalize and agree on a common set of assumptions have a much better chance of building a product and message that resonates with someone. I’ve said it many times and heard it again from Tamara: strategies that target everyone resonate with no one. Plus the process of seeking internal alignment on the critical elements of a persona brings the ambiguous, conflicting details to light, building support for the external research initiative.

So are you an expert on a topic that, in your company, is perceived to be both rare and of high value? If you are stuck in a tactical role, consider how much focus you have given to an operational skill that can be readily outsourced or that no one really respects. 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 decisions within your target audiences. The role I call buyer persona expert describes someone who is both rare and valuable -- a marketer who can articulate the business goals and perceptions of the target buyers with such clarity that the company can predict the impact of product and marketing strategies before they are implemented.

Companies think they know the buyers because they listen to the sales people talk about the prospects. But ask a sales person to describe a persona and they’ll tell you that each account, each buyer is unique. Sales people are not paid to look for patterns. Their job is to learn about each account and to develop a strategy that is tailored to that prospect’s needs. Plus the sales people are only interacting with, and knowledgeable about, a fraction of the market, those buying influencers who are willing to enter the sales cycle and talk to them. Unless your sales people have saturated your market and sold something to each type of buyer in those accounts, there are many personas your sales people don’t know and may even be avoiding.

If you're reading this and you’re someone's boss, ask the marketers who work for you what they have learned recently about the buyers in the market and the issues they face. Within a short time, you’ll have marketers who listen to the market. Ask them how each of the target audiences makes a buying decision, and you'll get people who know what marketing tools and programs they should build to influence the buyers. Ask them what's keeping the sales people from moving deals into and through the sales process, and you'll get people who think about how to align buying and selling processes. Do all of this, and you will have buyer persona experts and a very competitive company.

Oh, and if you’re no one’s boss, become a buyer persona expert and let me know when you get your promotion.

Choose words carefully to reach personas

I spend a lot of time trying to convince people that a marketer's primary job is to develop buyer personas and think like the customer. Why is this so hard? Because personas are not included in anyone's job description. Nope, marketing is measured by how much stuff it produces and so that's what it does - developing endless data sheets, demos and presentations that talk about the product. Inevitably this manic activity misses the point -- that marketing is meant to motivate a buying influencer to take the next step in the decision process, and that we can't motivate people we don't know.

My two cents -- tech companies would save a bunch of time and money and be considerably more effective if it were someone's job to think like the customer and build buyer personas. With clarity about each influencer's buying criteria, product management and marketing communications would know which words inspire positive action and which are neutral or even negative.

I found an article in today's Seattle Times about word choices in real estate advertising and thought this might resonate, as most of us have bought or sold a house. Have you ever seen a print ad where the seller described himself as "motivated"? According to research on 20,000 Canadian home listings over 4 years, buyers are not impressed. In fact homes advertised with this word stayed on the market 15 percent longer and sold for 4 percent less than the benchmark. Words that were "superficially positive" such as "clean" or "quiet" had "zero or even a negative correlation with prices." I wonder how our target personas respond to pronouncements about our flexible, robust, interoperable solutions.  Or a perennial favorite, that the company is the market leader.

If you happen to be selling a house, read the Seattle Times article to learn more about words that work, especially if your house is in Canada. One of the frequently overlooked aspects of buyer personas is that people don't hear words the same way throughout the world. A Canadian advertising agency chose the word "brilliant" to describe a tech solution developed by a British company. The company loved it, but the target buyers, Americans, didn't get it at all.

If you're talking to someone you don't know, you are not communicating.

Seeking a market-driven employer

The beginning of a new year often inspires people to make big changes, and thus my email box is filling up with inquiries from marketers looking for new and better jobs. The key question -- how to find a company whose management is serious about being market-driven and thinking like the customer?

Today I received a message from a guy who quit his job because the company simply refused to consider the customer in any business decision. He asked me for a list of companies that send people to the Pragmatic Marketing seminars, thinking that this would be a good place to start to find market-driven companies. He somehow missed the irony in his question -- he knew me only because his previous employer had sent him to the Effective Product Marketing seminar. Hmmm.

Having fielded this question many times in the past, I've developed a short list of questions that I recommend to anyone who is interviewing employers for a marketing job. Note the emphasis on "interviewing employers." An interview is a mutual exchange of information to make sure that your expectations are compatible with the company's. Therefore you should be well-armed with questions that will help you to assess the company's  commitment to listening to their customers and acting on what they hear.

Here is the short version of my recommended questions. You can use these for a new position or when evaluating an internal transfer to a new marketing position:

1) To what extent will my job include time to interview people who are not customers and who are not in the sales pipeline, so that I can understand their business priorities?

2) What are the key performance metrics for my role? (If the metrics include product profit & loss you are on the right track, but you'll need the right answer to the first question or it will be hard to succeed)

3) What is the company's commitment to Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Marketing Automation tools, or other methods of measurement that evaluate overall sales process throughput and not just leads developed?

4) Is there a project management function in the development organization, or does the product manager perform this function? (if development expects marketing to do this job, you won't have the time to be strategic)

5) What influence will I have over the decisions about investing in particular sales tools and marketing programs? (If someone else owns these decisions, you don't want responsibility for product profit & loss outcomes)

Keep in mind that very few companies answer all of these questions as we would want them to. Thus you are often better served by helping your current employer to evolve the marketing role. But if you are on the search for a new marketing job, put these questions on your list.

Resolutions for a prosperous 2007

I wish you a new year filled with joy, prosperity, and successful marketing initiatives. For those who want a roadmap, here are the ten rules from the Effective Product Marketing seminar restated in the form of resolutions. Perhaps one or more of these will inspire you.

1.    I will never confuse efforts with results.
2.    I will know who I am talking to before I attempt to communicate.
3.    I will create marketing tools and programs that influence a targeted buyer or customer persona.
4.    I will not confuse product positioning with program messaging and strategy.
5.    I will develop support for my go-to-market plans by giving management a business case for their investment.
6.    I will develop web content and collateral that drives buyers into and through the sales process.
7.    I will write benefits statements that are succinct answers to a buyer's problems.
8.    I will give the salespeople clear insights into each persona's priorities, supported by persona-specific messages and tools.
9.    I will integrate product-oriented programs into a single strategic campaign for each type of persona I need to influence.
10.  I will avoid the checklist marketing trap by doing the Gather, Focus, Assess, Measure and Improve steps.

A great gift idea for sales people

Only two shopping days until Christmas . . . in case you're feverishly trying to find the perfect gift for those hard-to-please sales people in your company, Kristin Zhivago has the answer in her blog today  . . . free shipping is still available.