Buyer Persona Blog

How many buyer personas can you afford to engage with unique messaging and campaigns?

That’s my answer when people ask me how many buyer personas they need. It probably isn’t satisfying when I answer a question with another question, especially when the expected answer is a number -- three, five, ten or whatever.

But I always caution that most companies create far too many buyer personas.

The marketers I meet are incredibly enthusiastic about buyer personas – who wouldn’t love to have deep insight into how buyers think. But a little restraint is needed. It’s counter-productive to create more buyer personas than the company can support with differentiated marketing activities.

I suggest listing the job titles of each of the personas that influence the decision to buy and then ranking their importance. This can be accomplished by considering the extent to which each type of buyer is:

• influencing decisions that significantly impact the success of an upcoming launch, revenue goal, or marketing campaign
• unlikely to be excited by something that is unique about the product, service or solution
• in an organizational role that the sales people do not currently engage for sales of other products or services

The tendency to create too many buyer personas starts when people simply layer them on top of their current view that messages, sales tools and campaigns need to be built for each product, service or solution. In large companies I’ve found product marketers working on personas for their products, service or solution marketers reproducing the effort for their solutions, and industry or regional marketers who are wondering how they fit into the puzzle.

The biggest payback from buyer personas occurs when the company starts with the most important buyers, and then assigns a single owner for each, regardless of what the company hopes to market or sell to them. These companies create a collaborative home (such as a wiki or Sharepoint site) and encourage people throughout the company to post their observations of real buyers. The owner has the final say about what is included in the persona, but the opportunity to contribute to the effort is distributed across the company.

I’m working with companies where it is standard operating procedure for marketers to rely on personas to see the problem and solution through their buyers’ eyes. These personas are the organizing principle for decisions about whom to target and how to build relevant messaging, content, campaigns, and sales tools. Many of these companies have the senior management buy-in to quickly adopt this culture, and the results are astonishing.

For those who lack top-down support, try using the ideas above to prioritize and create the fewest possible personas. Then rely on them to:

• identify and target the types of buyers who are most likely to be engaged by your product, service or solution
• Build messages and content that match the buyers’ criteria for choosing a solution
• Tell the sales people the buyers’ stories, proving that you know these buyers and that they need your solution
• Deliver the message in the places your buyer frequents

It won’t be long before someone notices the difference and asks you how you pulled it off.

A new year, a new decade, a new chance to help buyers find answers to their problems

Judging by the current interest in buyer personas, 2010 could be the decade when companies realize the competitive advantage that belongs to those companies that have the deepest insight into their target buyers.

Armed with a well-researched buyer persona, the newly competitive company would know that a technical buyer isn’t impressed when the company’s website or marketing materials simply state that a solution is “interoperable” or “scalable.” These marketers would have detailed knowledge about how the technical buyer has been struggling with specific scalability or integration challenges. Imagine the value of the marketing copy this team could create – connecting the buyer’s needs to the unexplored merits of the company’s approach.

Similarly, our competitive company would know that an economic buyer isn’t impressed by copy that simply announces that a solution will increase revenues or reduce expenses. This marketer has deep insight into what this type of buyer has been doing to manage the bottom line, including how the economic buyer persona perceives the alternatives. So the marketer can now communicate that another approach is available, beginning a relationship that continues when the sales people, who have been well-trained to understand how the economic buyer thinks about these issues, make the first sales call.

This will require real work on buyer personas, of course – not the fluffy stuff that is permeating the blogosphere. Maybe its helpful for some B2C companies to know their buyer’s hair color or hobbies, but for my vision to become reality for B2B companies, marketing needs buyer personas that provide deep insight into

• which problems the target buyers perceive as their highest priority
• the way each type of buyer is currently managing these problems
• why the problems persist in spite of current efforts
• how this type of buyer will respond to the company’s approach or solution

Most buyer personas fall far short of this level – what I call “grokking” – to the detriment of every subsequent step in the marketing process.

If buyer personas aren’t thoroughly developed, marketing activities are inevitably guided by the expectations of product-focused stakeholders. Buyer pain points are reverse-engineered from the capabilities of the solution. Marketing is frequently charged with the task of educating the buyers about the company’s version of their problem. 

B2B buyers obviously don’t derive any value from this form of marketing and there is no chance that it can create any competitive advantage for the vendors. Early in the buying process buyers are looking for written content, increasingly sought online, as a next step after a peer referral, or to help a mid-level manager produce a report requested by a senior executive. These buyers are looking for evidence of a close match between their view of the problem and the vendor’s solution, not lengthy explanations of the vendor’s view of “the problems in the industry today.”

With all of the emphasis on buyer personas, I’m looking forward to a year, maybe a decade, with increasingly powerful examples of content that simply and directly demonstrates the company’s ability to answer buyer problems. I’m looking forward to a new definition of competitive advantage where marketing plays a leadership role.

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.

Two surveys nearly miss key buyer insight

I just saw the results of yet another market survey that almost failed to ask what turned out to be the single most important question. Several people within the vendor's company, each with decades of experience in the target market, reviewed the survey questions. One of the reviewers had recently worked in the buyer's role. Each reviewer had been involved with the design of the product and knew every detail about the technology and the problems it could resolve.

So why was the most critical question not included in the original version of the survey? it related to a capability that was relatively unimportant to the internal stakeholders.

I have been worrying about this product launch. While the users were overwhelmingly positive about the pilot, we'd conducted phone interviews with several economic buyers and each had reported high levels of satisfaction with business-as-usual. It appeared we would have to either delay the launch or risk positioning against a problem that no one wanted to pay to resolve.

Then a relatively serendipitous review by an external industry expert produced a new question and market feedback that surprised everyone. This is only the second survey I've seen this year and in both cases the companies only barely added the most important question. They were about to launch a product without the key insight that would guide them to feature the capability buyers valued above all others.

I'm always concerned that we are overly dependent on industry experts whose internal role inevitably erodes their objectivity. Now I'm worried that easy web surveys may be the default step for market research. Surveys are great at confirming that the insights gained from a few buyer experts are pervasive. But because they can only provide answers to the questions their designers value, they can also be dangerous.

One of my client's industry experts sat in on just three of the interviews we conducted with the target buyers.  He was absolutely stunned by what he heard. Had those interviews not occurred, or had he opted out of those meetings to do something "more important" than listening to the buyers, the company's targeting and messaging strategy for this launch would have failed.

It is often difficult for a company to adjust its strategy to conform to the market's view. Inevitably a lot of stakeholder passion was poured into the original vision. Sometimes a market will evolve to value the developer's perspective (in this case I suspect that's highly likely). In the short term these companies should be comforted by the cash buyers will spend to solve their high priority problems.

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.

iPhone messaging misses its target

I often point to Apple when people ask me for examples of companies that do great marketing. But I just learned that Apple's launch of the 3G iPhone into Japan violated my most important rule -- Apple planned the launch without grokking the buyers in that market. 

The results are compelling. While demand for the iPhone exceeds supply in many parts of the world, in Japan, where 50 million cell phones are sold each year, inventory is stacked on shelves and only 200,000 have been sold. 

Apple was smart to skip Japan when it launched its first generation iPhone -- it didn't operate on the 3G wireless networks that had long been the standard there. One wonders, therefore, why Apple expected their target buyers to respond to a campaign that highlighted this capability.

Apparently no one stopped to think that the cell phone buyer persona in Japan is different than in the U.S. It would have been pretty easy to find out that Japanese buyers frequently use their phones to watch digital TV programs.  With a minimum of research, Apple could have anticipated the difficulty of competing in a market where many phones include chips for debit card transactions and train passes. After all, this is a place where trains are a part of daily life, credit cards are rarely accepted, and debit cards are the primary currency.

To compound the difficulty, the iPhone is more expensive than its competitors in Japan. Maybe Apple thought that the online software store would be valuable enough to justify the higher price. If only they had known that their target buyers are reluctant to shop online.

Analysts expect Apple to end this year with less than half of their projected volume for the iPhone in Japan, and I'm looking for a better answer to the question about which companies are great marketers.

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.

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.

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.