I love her music and was anxiously awaiting Adele’s post-surgery performance Sunday night. I was unprepared, however, for how surreal it would be to hear ‘my’ name spoken again and again, and under such auspicious circumstances!

But what really stood out was the contrast in the way Adele presents herself. Unlike my usual audio-only experience of her, it was easy to see so many other ways that she differs from the ‘typical’ star.

Am I the only one who thought her dress was a bit tacky? And while she is a beautiful woman, Adele lacks the movie-star attributes of Carrie Underwood or even the slimmed-down version of Jennifer Hudson (who knocked me out with her tribute to Whitney Houston).

The staging of Adele’s performance was unique, too. She just stood on the stage and sang, without all of the acrobatics and fancy staging that dominated performances by almost everyone else (Did you catch Katy Perry?).

In Adele’s acceptance of the biggest prize, the album of the year, she apologized for the “snot” as she wiped away her tears. Can you imagine Lady Gaga swiping her arm across her nose and making such a statement (note that Lady Gaga won nothing at last week’s Grammys!)

I’m hardly a music expert, but I see all “products” through a marketing lens, and I can’t help but think that Adele has absolutely nailed her buyer persona, and that a big part of her appeal is how well she has instinctively matched her presentation, and her story, to her target audience’s needs.

Every marketer knows that conflict and tension are central to engaging any audience. How could an Adele fan fail to notice when damaged vocal cords rendered her silent?

The tension grew as we waited to learn whether the surgery would work . . . whether her voice could possibly be as powerful afterwards. We’d seen enough press to anticipate a positive outcome, but still, when she sang on Sunday night, it was a thrill for all. No special effects needed.

Just as we were feeling some relief, we hear an announcement that we may lose her again, as she is thinking about taking the next few years “off” to focus on her personal life. Say it ain’t so, Adele!

Please don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that anything about Adele’s story has been staged or contrived to win awards or sell music. I am certain that she is the genuine person she appears to be, in absolutely every respect.

But I do think that those of us who are marketing more banal products can learn from her.

1)      Don’t take shortcuts. As I discuss in my e-book, The Buyer Persona Manifesto, it’s tempting to make stuff up about buyers. For example, it would be easy for us to guess that the music buyer persona is a 30-something who plays video games, multi-tasks constantly, and craves theatrics, staging and sex appeal along with his or her music.  But Adele’s success tells us something very different is going on.

2)      The power of story. However perfect your product, you need to build a story around it that resonates with your persona. Building conflict and scarcity into the story increases its appeal.

3)      Be real. All buyers are craving authenticity and humanity. Could it be that we actually get more credibility with our target audiences when we don’t pretend to be perfect?

I’ll talk more about the secrets of building and applying buyer personas at my MarketingProfs online seminar this week. Please join me Feb. 23, 2012, at 12 p.m. EST (9 a.m. PST) for How to Build Personas that Persuade Buyers and Increase Sales.

Experienced buyer persona users know that a well-researched buyer persona generates high confidence in marketing and business decisions, while transforming a marketer’s ability to impact buyer attitudes on solutions and brands.

In my upcoming MarketingProfs online seminar, I’ll talk about the insights that are needed to build buyer personas that deliver on these promises. I’ll talk about how they break down barriers between sales and marketing by enabling both groups to address buyer needs and visualize their respective contributions to revenue.

As companies learn to appreciate personas’ ability to predict buyer behavior with uncanny accuracy, marketers can find themselves awarded a place at the strategy table thanks to their insight on key issues influencing buyers, which, in turn, determine the company’s future. When all media channels answer the buyers’ exact questions in plain language, trust in that brand builds and competition melts away.

This ‘magic’ only happens when buyers see that a brand offers a solution that perfectly fits their definition of a problem.

The buyer persona value proposition

Although the value proposition for buyer personas is well understood, confusion still exists about what to include and how to build them. The concept is equally likely to be oversimplified or overcomplicated.

Marketers know that personas have the capability to deliver access to incredibly actionable, unambiguous information on how to reach and motivate target buyers through example buyers that are both real and persuasive.

Deep accurate buyer insights guide marketers, enabling them to gain in decision-making confidence in nearly every aspect of marketing, from content to product design, lead generation to business strategy and sales enablement to segmentation.

There have been many retweets about ‘eight personas that sales people need’, ‘four consumer buyer personas’ and ‘six ways to build your personas simply by observing their online behavior’.

If only it were that easy.

To be effective, personas need to be defined by more than demographics – marketers ultimately need buyer personas that are real and persuasive enough to allow internal stakeholders to be on first-name terms with each of them.

Creating effective buyer personas

Buyer personas are a tool and, like most tools, their attributes and the investment needed to create them vary dramatically depending on the marketing situation.

Always start the creation process with a specific goal that allows you to be practical about your investment.

It is important to impress stakeholders as quickly as possible to secure their support for the training and resources involved in broader persona implementation.

Planning your buyer persona initiative involves weighing up relevant insights and determining the required confidence level in persona performance.

Determine which buyer insights are relevant

The insights you include in your persona must be focused on a specific product, service or solution the buyer is considering.

It is highly unlikely that such insights will be the same for all your solutions.

Relevant insights vary according to the decisions you want to impact; for example:

• Content placement – Where does the buyer looks for useful information about this category of solution?
• Content creation and messaging – On what criteria will the buyer evaluate, how will that buyer measure success, what would interfere with their decision to buy from you?
• Leads/demand generation – Which of several buying influencers has a priority initiative that could be satisfied by your solution? It often is not the economic buyer!
• Sales enablement – Which buyer persona is most willing to meet with your sales rep (i.e. lead/demand generation)? What does each buyer persona need to learn at each stage of the buying process (i.e. message/content development)?
• Marketing budgets or strategic planning – All of the above…

Establish the required persona confidence level

It can be helpful to equate ‘confidence’ to the required ‘sharpness’ of the tool…….

The complete absence of a buyer persona means you are working with a very blunt instrument indeed – Making Stuff Up.

At the other extreme is a blade that’s been finely honed through extensive (expensive) qualitative and quantitative research on each one of the twenty or so buyers who impact every decision on every strategic marketing solution.

Deciding what confidence level you need in your persona is greatly influenced by the level risk involved in making the wrong decision.

Focusing on a given decision allows the team to make the best choices on both insights and confidence.

Start creating your personas

The general starting point for buyer persona creation is five-to-eight in-depth interviews with two or three different types of buyers.

These personas are typically key target segments in a critical launch or other important initiative where it is obvious that the old blunt tools are inadequate.

In especially critical or high-risk decision-making, the number of interviews should be expanded or a survey be used to validate the interview findings.

A final word of caution: “Move slowly.”

I’ve seen companies that try to accomplish too much too quickly. Personas can drive significant changes in culture, process and training and these changes evolve naturally in companies that right size their initial investments.

To learn more about how to build and apply buyer personas, please join me on Feb. 23, 2012, at 12 p.m. for my MarketingProfs  online seminar, How to Build Personas that Persuade Buyers and Increase Sales.

This blog post was also published on the Smart Insights blog for Better Marketing.

You’ve probably seen the default solution-level messaging: “We are the market-leading supplier of  enterprise-wide, best-of-breed, integrated solutions for  high-growth companies.”

Fortunately, marketers who are willing to accept that answer don’t seem to ask for my help. But the answer we did uncover was not what the client expected either.

How we approached the question

We talked to buyers who had recently evaluated each of the underlying products, including both wins and losses. Our agenda was to understand how the buyer evaluated each of the individual products, and how any single product purchase relates to the problems addressed by the other products.

As always, when we simply pick up the phone and have an agenda-driven, unscripted conversation with real buyers, we learn plenty. First, one of the four products was not even evaluated by the same buyer persona as the other three.  And more critically, none of the buyers saw any meaningful connections or synergies among any of the products. In fact, buyers confirmed that they would never evaluate even two of the products as part of a single buying decision.

We now know that there simply isn’t a suite value proposition that will resonate with buyers. I see this as a success story. Why, you may ask?

The marketing team was planning to present the solution message at an upcoming sales kick-off. They can now redirect that presentation, forewarned that a solution approach isn’t going to get the reps anywhere. Instead, they can present their new insights about how to influence buying decisions for the underlying products.

This reminds me of another project where the buyer research confirmed that a soon-to-be-launched product was so ill-conceived that the company decided to kill it outright. Incredibly, the client thought that the findings were good news, saving them the embarrassment and cost of launching a product that was destined to fail.

Before any launch…
Here are a few takeaways to apply to your own buyer persona research, messaging and product launches. Before you develop a message or introduce a new product, you need to:

1. Interview the target buyers to understand their definition of the problem and how they relate to the proposed approach.

3. Develop a messaging strategy that addresses the buyers’ needs and objections.

What do you think? Is it possible that bad news is actually good news? I also welcome your tips and comments about developing messaging and buyer personas.

“For too long, the trend has been towards separate marketing and sales,” said David Thorp, CIM’s director of research and professional development, in a new “Marketing and Sales Fusion” white paper. “We believe that, in the next decade, more and more companies will see reintegrating marketing and sales as a smart move that brings real rewards.”

Could it be true? I hope not.

Nothing in my three decades of experience in B2B technology marketing suggests that this notion has merit. And since I personally ran a combined sales and marketing organization for five years, I know firsthand that fusion of the teams creates more problems than it solves.

The reason is simple. The marketing function influences markets full of buyers. The sales function influences one buyer at a time. The skills and timing of activities that influence markets have nothing in common with those that influence individual buyers. Combine the functions under one executive, and the focus inevitably shifts to individual buyers for near term revenue. This is vitally important, but when the company’s ability to influence the market is lost, so is its future.

Admittedly, the problems between sales and marketing are real and deserve attention. However, I find it unconscionable that an organization like CIM, which is celebrating 100 years as “the world’s largest organization for professional marketers” would just throw in the towel.

I haven’t been able to get my hands on the full report yet, but the CIM report overview makes their position clear enough:

“Marketing as a discipline has its roots in sales. Over time, due to the ambitions of the new science of marketing, the two became separate and in many cases, estranged. In our centenary year, we believe it’s time for The Chartered Institute of Marketing to say mea culpa and to try and make amends… We feel there’s no time to waste in burying the hatchet so that marketing can evolve from a discrete, some sales professionals might even say elitist, discipline to reunify with sales. There is inescapable evidence why businesses will benefit enormously if we bring them back together.”

Inescapable evidence? This U.K. based organization can’t seem to send me a PDF of the report – I need to wait two weeks for a print copy. So I haven’t seen their “evidence” yet. But I can tell you that during the five years when I was SVP of Sales and Marketing at a technology firm, my marketing team suffered. Even as a career marketer, I found that the pressure to achieve 90-day quotas whittled away at my bone-deep commitment to strategic marketing.

Just a few weeks ago, a speaker at the Sales and Marketing 2.0 conference, Gerhard Gschwandtner (@gerhard20) of Selling Power, forecast that: “Of the 18 million salespeople in 2011, only 3.6 million will be needed by 2020.” This radical prediction resulted from a report by the Sales Executive Board that said that buyers are 60 percent of the way to a decision before they ever talk to a sales person.

I’m not sure that I agree with Gerhard’s prediction, but I do know that the shift reported by the Sales Executive Board is forcing companies to learn how to engage buyers on their own terms.

Engaging buyers requires a department or function to be the buyer experts – a feat that can be accomplished only by interviewing buyers, looking for patterns and trends, and grouping buyers into buyer personas according to their findings. Then, this function needs to develop marketing content that those buyers find helpful. I wrote about this role for marketers in my e-book, The Buyer Persona Manifesto.

Frankly, I’ve never met a sales person who wanted this job. That’s because it’s a marketing job.

Then, someone needs to be there to help the buyer travel the final 40 percent of the buying process, answering the questions that are unique to each account.

Now, that’s a sales person’s job.

What do you think? Should sales and marketing remain separate or become one department?

I invite you to follow me on Twitter @buyerpersona and join me on Facebook.

Recently, I was surprised to see several bloggers advising content marketers to do just that. If you follow my blog or participate in my buyer persona workshops, you know how strongly I feel about the dangers of making stuff up.

So when Jeff Ogden, the host of Mad Marketing TV, asked me to come back for a second episode about the most common buyer persona mistakes, I knew exactly what I wanted to say.

Here is the video of my interview with Jeff where I cover the typical mistakes that marketers make with buyer personas. I also provide some tips on how to ensure a successful buyer persona initiative.

See this video on YouTube: Mad Marketing TV Episode 2: The Mistakes That Threaten Your Buyer Persona Initiative. Link to episode 1 on You Tube: Mad Marketing TV Episode 1: Understanding Buyer Personas

In Episode 2 of my YouTube interview with Jeff, I share these common buyer persona mistakes:

#1  Using made-up information about buyers
If you just make stuff up about your ideal customer, your message and marketing content is likely to result in “preaching to the choir,” with content that’s generic and no more persuasive than anything you created without buyer personas. B2B marketing stakeholders have a right to expect a far better ROI on their investment.

The purpose of buyer personas is to learn something new, factual and insightful about your target buyer’s decision to solve the problem(s) you address with your product, service or solution. Your insights should be non-obvious, something that your competitors probably don’t know.

The only way to get non-obvious information is to have unscripted, probing conversations with the real people you want to influence – the buyers themselves. With a few hours of buyer persona training, marketers can learn how to have conversations with buyers that will uncover clear, unexpected insights. That information will help you develop targeted marketing campaigns and messages that persuade buyers that your approach is an ideal fit for their needs.

#2  Including irrelevant or trivial information
Some marketers make the mistake of including information about buyers that doesn’t help them with their marketing initiatives. Incredibly, I’ve seen B2B marketing teams get bogged down in debating whether their buyer persona is a man or a woman.

In my e-book, The Buyer Persona Manifesto, I urge marketers to short-circuit all of the trivia and focus on what I call the Five Rings of Insight™.  These five insights help us discover how to reach undecided buyers, addressing their priority initiatives, success factors, perceived barriers, buying process and decision criteria.

#3  Producing too many buyer personas
In my MadMarketingTV interview with Jeff, I talk about the pitfalls of producing too many buyer personas. Many marketers believe they should segment B2B buyer personas by job titles. Not so.

This mistake can get out of hand for any company, especially those that already segment by demographics such as industry or company size. One of my clients originally came up with 24 different buyer personas. But when we got into the work with them, we were able to pare that list down to 11, and we expect to reduce it even more soon, because the marketers are continuously conducting interviews that reveal new insights.

As I explain in the video, it’s better to group buyers according to the insights that we uncover during the interviews rather than on demographics or job titles. Because those insights drive messaging and content marketing strategies, it is only logical to use them to define the buyer persona segments.

These are just a few of the most common buyer persona mistakes that I see. I cover others in my workshops and my presentations to various groups. I hope you’ll have a look at the YouTube interview and share it with your colleagues.

What misconceptions or mistakes do you see? I’m interested in your thoughts on buyer persona best practices.

Now here’s the best part – in the inaugural interview, Jeff Ogden, host of MadMarketing TV and author of the Fearless Competitor blog, talks to me about buyer personas!

Jeff asked me to address four questions:

• Why buyer personas are getting so much attention
• What is a buyer persona
• How to use buyer personas
• When marketers should begin a buyer persona initiative

We’re hoping that people will get useful ideas from this roughly ten-minute overview on my favorite topic. Please check it out on You Tube and let me know what you think.

Jeff asked me back for Episode 2 to talk about how to avoid the four most common mistakes with buyer personas.  He’s got a whole new format planned so it should be really interesting.

The show will normally air every Thursday, but they’re skipping a week due to Thanksgiving. That means that Episode 2 will air on Thursday, December 1.

Please give me your thoughts on the first interview. Plus let me know if there’s a hot “mistake” that you want me to cover in the second interview.

I first met David in 2005 when he was a relatively obscure marketing consultant. At the time I was leading the seminar I built for Pragmatic Marketing and we had recently won a very large contract. I was overwhelmed with too much work, so I put the word out that I was looking for someone who could take on a few classes. Jon Bachman suggested his friend David.

A quick talk on the phone and we struck up an agreement. For the next few months, David and I traveled and taught the seminar together.  He frequently talked about his blog, but I was barely listening. The marketers in the seminar were not exactly engaged either. We had to work just to explain the concept and people fretted about whether it was a good idea for B2B marketers.

Then David released a little ebook entitled “The New Rules of PR”. Three months later, applying only his new rules to spread the word, more than 150,000 people had downloaded the book. A few months passed before Wiley Publishing asked David to write a “real” book that would expand on the ideas.

I thought that was very cool, but never anticipated the breakthrough that David was about to experience. A short six years later, The New Rules of Marketing and PR has sold over 250,000 copies, was recently released in its third edition, and is available in 25 languages. David is one of the industry’s leading keynote speakers, commanding a very impressive five-figure honorarium for a single hour’s work. CEOs and CMOs in the largest and most famous companies in the world meet with him and seek his advice.

And now David has published his 8th book, with another breakthrough idea that will soon be mainstream.

Watching David’s rise to fame and fortune has taught me a lot about the value of focus. In whatever topic they pursue, experts are always watching for a high-value issue that is not well-understood. Experts don’t wait around for anyone to tell them to solve the problem – they take the initiative before someone else can grab the opportunity.

Initially, the expert’s goal is to assimilate as much as they can from the information that already exists about their topic. This doesn’t seem to create more work for the emerging expert; it is simply a matter of prioritizing their thinking. Every activity is an opportunity to observe, to gain a fresh perspective or insight on the chosen subject. Every meeting is a chance to ask questions and listen. These people aren’t creating new ideas (yet), they are a central point of information for knowledge that is all around them but not aggregated, analyzed or appreciated.

Are you an expert on a topic that, in your company, is perceived to be both high value and rare? If you are in a tactical role, consider how much focus you have given to mastering a skill that can be readily outsourced or that few  people respect. Or maybe you have devoted your energies to product expertise, which is more valued but certainly not unique.

Whether your company has identified the problem or not, it needs (and lacks) deep insight into the motivations, preferences and influences that drive buyers to choose your solutions, your competitors’, or to maintain the status quo. The role I call buyer persona expert describes a marketer who can articulate their target buyers’ priorities and perceptions with confidence and clarity. Is anyone in your company focused on this expertise?  Can anyone predict, based on factual data, the likely outcome of a product or marketing strategy that has yet to be implemented?

David and his publisher know that his new book will be a huge success. David has so much focus on his buyer personas that winning is a foregone conclusion.

A: What color did you choose?

B: How did you choose the color?

C:There are great apartments for rent right now. Have you thought about moving?

Answers vary on this selection (more on that later). But it’s clear that the question needs to follow the woman’s lead, that we would never script our conversation in advance of the social interaction. Imagine the confused, annoyed or bored response from this woman if we asked “so what do you think about that new play that just opened?”

Most people are perplexed when I ask them to conduct unscripted buyer persona interviews. These are the same people who will happily show up in any social situation, listen for threads of topics that others find engaging, and guide the conversation to mutually relevant topics.

Why not take this same approach with buyer interviews?

While it is definitely more taxing to develop questions in real time, the pressure to do so keeps us listening intently. And each time we base a question on a point that the buyer has recently made, our rapport with the other person builds. The buyer might even tell me, a perfect stranger, something he hasn’t told anyone else.

Pre-defined questions can only address topics that we found interesting before we started listening to the buyer. Worse yet, we are unlikely to learn anything new, having missed the opportunity to probe deeply on an interesting point..

This approach is especially critical for win/loss interviews. We need to get buyers talking at length about their decision criteria and process. We aren’t going to discover any actionable insights by writing down the buyer’s short answer — that we lost the deal on price and features, or won it because our sales rep is such a great guy. We need much deeper insights into how and why the company made this decision.

For instance, if the buyer told us that one of the triggers for this decision was that our solution was easiest to use, we might follow up by asking the buyer to describe what, specifically, they found to be easy. Or we might ask what level of user would find it easy to use, and what training they expected that user to need. Another line of questioning might reveal details about how they assessed the solution’s ease-of-use.

Returning to your interaction at the party, if you selected question A (what color will she paint her apartment), you have just learned that your new acquaintance likes light yellow, which might be interesting if you are selecting colors of paint to carry in your store, or what colors to feature in a marketing campaign for paint.

Question B (how did she choose the color?) is a great follow-up question, or likely your best first question, as this should trigger a story about the way this person thinks and makes decisions. This question will probably get you the answer to the color too.

Question C (did you know there are some great apartments for rent?) is changing the subject, a terrible technique when you need to build rapport, and one of the major reasons that interviews should never be scripted.

Unless you’re marketing home improvement products, you shouldn’t care about anyone’s choice of paint – buyer’s decision processes vary dramatically based on the products, services and solutions they’re considering.  But we want to have an agenda, perhaps three-to-five topics that we hope to explore, and not a structured questionnaire, if we want buyers to tell us what really persuades them to make decisions about our category of solutions.

I replied by asking about the top three criteria that buyers evaluate while choosing this type of solution. James answered quickly — ease of use, market leadership, and cost.

A quick check of their competitors’ websites told me that each was focused on their market leading solutions, fabulous user experience (backed by customer quotes or case studies) and cost savings.

In a follow-up phone call James confirmed that discounting is a big issue for their sales people. I had expected this answer. When products and technologies are new, companies become accustomed to competing on unique features, functions and benefits. But almost every product eventually runs out of room to add capabilities that really matter to new buyers. Unless the company can find a premium-price position, the sales people will struggle for every deal through hand-to-hand combat and discounting.

It’s likely that nothing in the past has prepared this company to choose a strategic approach:

• succeed as the low-cost provider (rare in B2B tech companies like James’)
• sell the product to someone who can (IBM sold its PC business)
• leverage superior sales and marketing to justify premium pricing (IBM services)

I didn’t write about this aspect of the case study that’s featured in my ebook, but as competitors copied our offering in the software escrow market, delivering the same solution for half the price, we raised our prices. A larger market allowed us to increase our marketing investment, and premium pricing was an important part of our strategy to own the position as the market’s most trusted solution.

Here are a few of the insights that would give us a chance to identify a  premium-price position for James’ solution.

If ease-of-use is important,

• What exactly does the buyer expect to be easy about this solution?
• What level of user will need to experience this solution as easy?
• What steps does the buyer take during the buying process to determine which solution is easiest?
• What did buyers perceive to be superior or inferior about ease of use for this solution and each of the competitors?
• For buyers who didn’t purchase this solution, how did “ease of use” factor into their decision?

I’d be looking for similar insights on the other points – what level of cost savings does the buyer expect . . . how did the buyer assess the cost performance of each of the options?

James happens to work for the market leader in this category, so he might be tempted to just check that box. But this answer often masks the buyer’s concerns about the consequences of choosing a solution that doesn’t work. What exactly does this buyer see as reasons that she might not achieve the benefits she seeks (the Perceived Barriers insight)?

I don’t usually recommend that companies kick-off a buyer persona initiative by focusing on mature products. It takes skill to get buyers to disclose this information, and the company’s internal stakeholders are likely to resist new strategies for core products or markets they have long dominated.

But James saw the potential of this option, as well as the other dismal paths, and is taking on the challenge. I’m anticipating new insights that are both unexpected and clear.

How are you managing the positioning challenge for mature products?

Following is a true account of a recent interview . . .

The owner of a large printing company describes her need for an accounting system that can track her orders, from quotation through manufacturing and billing. She says the system would need to be customized with codes for the materials that are unique to her type of printing business. She currently has separate systems for bidding jobs, materials management, billing and accounting. Without an integrated system she can’t track the profitability of individual orders.

She doesn’t know where to begin. I suggest a web search but she doesn’t know what keywords to use. The websites she does find are talking about ERP, cloud computing and software-as-a-service. What does that mean, she asks . . .

Your target buyers may be far more astute than this example, but listen carefully to their stories and you’ll hear that they never trusted the vendors’ sales and marketing pitches. If we honestly consider the confusing array of options that confront our buyers, we might agree that it’s reasonable for them to default to the solutions their peers recommend, or live with the problems they already know.

Just imagine the buyer’s reaction upon learning about a solution that is a perfect match for his decision criteria. Think about the trust that would accrue to the vendor whose sales and marketing resources deliver unambiguous answers to the buyers’ questions at every step in the buying process.

Marketers who want to generate leads need to rethink their approach to targeting and messaging. Why debate the merits of email, social media, or other marketing tactics if we can’t ensure that our actions accurately address the target buyer’s needs, perceptions and concerns?

Aprimo is sponsoring a free webinar series on lead generation. They invited me to deliver the July 21 session, “Defining your Target Audience: Why demographics are insufficient — and how to succeed with a buyer-centric strategy.”  I hope you’ll join me to learn more about how to generate leads by discovering and answering your buyer’s questions.