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 quick, easy way to gather info for buyer personas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A persona for people who create personas

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bloggers miss the point of buyer personas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Building buyer personas bit by bit

Here's the gist of an email I just received from Jennifer, a product marketing manager at one of the oldest, largest technology companies in the world.

"I had a call with our team this past week to get started on a user video for one of our products. Except for me, the rest of the team was very product/engineering focused. I was the champion of the non-technical end user."

Prior to the call what I did was flush out a persona profile for the user and send it around to the team for their agreement and/or input. Everyone agreed to the persona.

Because we had already decided on the elements of the persona, we were able to decide what not to include in the user video."

Kudos to Jennifer. With a minimal investment in an "ad hoc" persona, she solved some of the problems that confound every tech industry marketer, namely:

1. She avoided the time and friction that inevitably accompanies a project guided by a team whose only reference point is deep knowledge of the product.

2. Given the circumstances, she created content that has the best possible chance of being relevant to the company's target buyers.

Persona purists may be distressed that I'm recommending such a "research-free" approach to persona development. But think about the alternatives available to Jennifer. If she had tried to delay the project and justify a full-fledged research project, what would have happened? She would have been turned down and the video would have been made anyway.

Note that the key to Jennifer's success is that she asked the group to collaborate and agree on relevant details about the persona before they met to discuss the video. Once the committee members approved the persona, it was a natural outcome for them to rely upon its details for subsequent decisions.

You'll get no argument from me about the value of in-depth interviews to support buyer persona profiles. But in the absence of time, budget or other resources, isn't it a good idea to identify and align around whatever data exists about the buyer? Aren't ad hoc personas a perfectly reasonable approach when the risk of being wrong is small?

Over time and with a bit of commitment, the validity and details about an ad hoc persona can be continuously improved. Messaging, segmentation and program strategies derived from personas can be monitored for insights that feed back into the persona profile itself.  We may not like it, but stealth mode is frequently the most pragmatic way to approach a strategically critical, non-urgent task.

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.

Product Marketing priorities are a mess

I wasn't surprised when I saw the title of a recently published Forrester report by analyst Tom Grant -- "Product Managers are Working on the Wrong Things." Based on a quantitative survey, Forrester put numbers to a set of problems I've seen for years. Pragmatic Marketing also does a survey on this topic each year, so I thought I knew what to expect.

But one part of the Forrester survey showed me that the situation is far worse than I thought. Through a series of questions, product managers were asked to compare their top five  "high frequency" activities to their top five "high priority" activities. Separate tables compare the results for inbound (product management) and outbound (product marketing) activities.

On the inbound rankings, the differences between the highest frequency and highest priority activities are just what I expected. While product managers are spending their time on short-term tactical work, they did a decent job of defining the strategic work that needs to be done. My takeaway -- inbound product managers understand their priorities and are trying to improve.

Turn to the outbound rankings, however, and the survey demonstrates that our industry has a completely dysfunctional view of product marketing. At a time when management is asking a lot of questions about marketing output, product marketers said that four out of five of their activities are aligned with their priorities. I don't think so. Those who were surveyed identified only one area of difficulty. They said that developing sales/marketing collateral is a "high activity" task that is not a priority. What appeared in its place on their list of priorities? Working with customer and partner advisory councils!

Don't get me wrong -- I wasn't expecting to see "buyer personas" in the survey responses. But I was dismayed that outbound marketers didn't regret that their activities prevent them from the high priority work to know their buying audiences -- arguably the most critical expertise needed to do the positioning, messaging and other external work that Forrester ascribes to this role.

I suppose I could be consoled that marketers want to work with customer advisory councils. At least this reflects a desire to listen to someone who doesn't work for the company. But this response tells me that marketers still don't know that current customers can't tell us what we need to do to influence non-customers -- the potential buyers who are spending their money elsewhere.

Customers are predisposed to doing business with us and talk about using criteria -- the aspects of the solution that became important once they started using it. To attract buyers we need to understand buying criteria -- the details that tell us what we need to do and say to bring non-customers into and through the sales process.

Small wonder that the survey reflected the desire to offload sales and marketing collateral on someone else. Without deep insight into the buyers who are not yet customers and not in the sales pipeline. what is the collateral supposed to talk about? Trying to make this stuff up is a thankless, brain numbing task, subject to endless revisions based on internal reviews.

Now I know why I get blank stares when I ask marketers to describe the buyers the collateral is meant to influence, or to tell me how it will help the salespeople to close more business.

The book on "Tuned In" companies

I have heard these questions hundreds of times over the seven years I’ve spent teaching Effective Product Marketing – which companies are market-driven? Or the one that's harder to answer – how can I convince my sales- and development-driven company that we need to change?

I can finally point to the book that answers both of these questions. Ten days from now, on Friday, June 27, bookstores will begin shipping “Tuned In: Uncover the extraordinary opportunities that lead to business breakthroughs.” The authors are my friends over at Pragmatic Marketing, Craig Stull (CEO/founder) and Phil Myers (President), plus David Meerman Scott, viral marketing strategist and acclaimed author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR. The result is excellent – they balance lots of stories with “pragmatic” advice about how successful companies tune in to the needs of buyers to create and market products and services that people want to buy.

For those of you who want to win over internal stakeholders about the importance of buyer personas, those practices are reinforced throughout Tuned In. Pragmatic also has a series of webinars on Tuned In practices, starting this Friday, June 20, with a session by Kristin Zhivago, author of Rivers of Revenue.

With all of these experts talking about buyer personas, I'm expecting lots of emails and comments about how your company is using them.