FAQs

If you have a question about buyer personas that isn’t answered here or in the Buyer Persona Blog, please let us know. We will update this page in response to the most popular and universally interesting questions.

Buyer Persona Interviews

How can we find people to interview?

The best buyers to interview for buyer personas are those who have just chosen to buy your solution, plus those who chose not to buy anything at all or those who bought from competitors. Because these buyers have just been through the buying process, they can be very specific about how they evaluated your solution and the others available to them. They will give you rich insights into their attitudes, both positive and negative, towards your solution and your competitors. Plus they can detail each step in the buying process and the resources they consulted to make a purchase decision.

Our sales people won’t allow us to interview customers, what can we do?

Sales people will frequently resist having marketing conduct these interviews, but persist. Win/loss interviewing is far and away the easiest, fastest way to get the information you need for buyer personas, especially the oft-overlooked Product Persona Connection

So don’t ask the sales people individually, get the senior executive in marketing to talk to the senior sales executive about the importance of buyer personas and your plan to use these insights to perfect your messaging, campaign and sales enablement strategies. Focus on your ability to deliver higher quality leads and marketing materials once you know what the buyers want to hear.

We have a customer council, can’t we get buyer persona information from them?

For buyer persona insights, the only customers you should interview are those who very recently purchased your solution. Once a customer has started to use your product, their focus will be on using criteria – the capabilities that impact their satisfaction with the use of the product. For buyer personas, we are interested in buying criteria – whatever impacted their decision to buy the product. The buyer’s ability to recall all of this information in detail, and their interest in telling that part of their story, fade quickly as they begin to use the product.

We absolutely cannot interview customers – is there another option?

When you have exhausted all attempts to get win/loss contact information from sales, the next step is to try to interview buyers who responded to marketing campaigns but abandoned the buying process. Marketing should never interview buyers who are currently in the sales pipeline. We might influence the outcome of the deal or be perceived by sales to impact the result. But if sales is not pursuing the lead or the buyer opted out of the buying process, these are viable interview candidates.

If you have a pre-sales consultant organization, or technical pre-sales group, you may choose a few of your more experienced, open-minded people to interview.

You can also interview non-customers whose names you acquire from a marketing database, from conference participation, or through social media networking.

How much time should we expect a customer to spend with me on an interview?

Your goal should be between 30 minutes and an hour for a phone interview, which is the typical format for these interviews. We usually schedule the call for 30 minutes, but we frequently find that it would be necessary to rudely interrupt people to end the call that soon – the buyer really wanted to share details about what worked and what didn’t.

Should we use the questions on the Core Buyer Persona or Product Persona Connection templates during buyer interviews? Or can you provide an interview script?

For discovery of buyer persona insights, it is ineffective to work with a structured interview. A survey -like approach, whether administered over the phone or online, limits our potential to uncover surprising or unexpected information.

Even more critically, buyers will disclose minimal information in response to direct questions. We recommend an approach that engages the buyer in telling their own story about the buying process, with the interviewer formatting questions to drill into responses of greatest interest. This approach builds rapport with the buyer, resulting in longer interviews and far more compelling revelations.

Should we compensate buyers who agree to be interviewed?

When the interview is not with a recent buyer we won or lost, we often compensate the buyer for their time. The compensation ranges from as little at $25 for a very junior person to $250 or more for senior executives. However, we rarely compensate people for win/loss interviews, as most are quite willing to share their experiences.

Will senior-level people agree to interviews?

You’ll find it easiest to interview whichever role invests the most time in the evaluation process. If your solution attracts a lot of the C-level buyer’s attention, you should be able to conduct that interview at that level. But for most products, most stages of the buying process are delegated to mid-level managers and that’s where the interviews will be conducted. However, you can get a lot of insight about the C-level buyer persona through these mid-level managers.

Should sales people participate in the win/loss or other persona interview?

We strongly recommend that interviews with buyer personas occur when a sales representative is not present. We know that this is a big cultural change for your company, but buyers are reluctant to fully express themselves when a sales person is present.

Should we use a third-party to conduct win/loss interviews?

There are benefits to using an outside company – they have staff that is already trained to do this work and the dedicated resources to rapidly complete a large number of interviews. However, there are several disadvantages:

• The information we seek for buyer personas requires qualitative, not quantitative research. Researchers need to be able to derive the questions spontaneously from the buyer’s responses. A third party will inevitably miss the relevance of some of the responses, missing opportunities to capture and investigate themes that are completely unexpected. Yet these “surprises” are typically the most valuable output of buyer interviews.
• The insights gained through the research are transferable through the written buyer persona tools, but no one will ever have the same level of insight into the buyer as the person who conducted the interviews.
• Third-party contracts eventually terminate, and win/loss should be a never-ending investment. We strongly recommend that the company conduct at least one win and one loss interview every month for each key product. There is always something new to learn as company and competitor strategies evolve and impact buyer perceptions.

Publishing personas

Can you provide a completed example of a buyer persona?

None of our clients would ever agree to allow their persona work to be published as it is a strategic asset that would have enormous value for their competitors. We’ve seen some examples published on the web, but we have never seen the detailed or specific content that we recommend, particularly in the all-important Product Persona Connection document, which captures the buyer’s positive and negative attitudes towards the company’s products, among other proprietary information.

How can we communicate the value of buyer personas to our colleagues, especially sales people?

First, we do not recommend that you talk to sales people about buyer personas. Personas are an example buyer. No example is good enough to fit every single situation, thus your persona will never match any given sales person’s experience with any single buyer. Add this limitation to the fact that sales people rarely believe that marketing knows more about the buyers than they do, and you should see why we avoid talking to sales people about buyer personas.

For the most part, the only people who need to see your buyer personas are the people in marketing who will use those personas to build message and program strategies, plus those who will be responsible for the tactical implementation of those strategies. Sales people don’t need to see the buyer personas. All they should see are the highly targeted, useful tools that marketing created to help them influence those buyers.

We suggest that you create a Wiki or Sharepoint “home” for each of your buyer personas so that all of the people in marketing can view the information about the buyers that are important to any given strategy or tactic. The wiki allows anyone who has an interaction with a buyer to upload their insights. Each buyer persona should have an “owner” who reviews contributions from other team members. The owner is responsible for keeping irrelevant data from creeping into the persona description and for investigating input that is new and critical.