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.

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.

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.

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.

Marketers need to get proactive

Given this economic crisis, its highly probable that management is worried about sales forecasts and thinking about marketing budget cuts.

There are three ways for marketers to respond.

1. Shorten "the list" -- Eliminate selected marketing activities until spending does not exceed the new budget.

2. Go into "sales support mode" -- Do whatever it takes to help a few reps close a few deals. 

3. Reassess the "marketing strategy"-- Ensure that the company is targeting the market segments that are most likely to invest in its solutions during this economic downturn. Then weigh every marketing investment against its potential to influence sales effectiveness in that segment. Reject any activity that doesn't have a high score and submit a revised plan to management. Finally, show management how you will measure the effectiveness of their investment.

The first two responses appear safe and might buy enough time to survive a short-term reduction in business activity. But if the pundits are right about the severity of the current economic situation, marketers who choose to do what's asked rather than what's needed are putting their jobs and companies at risk.

We can cancel all of the marketing activities we want -- when times get tough internal stakeholders will still question the value of whatever remains. And when a marketer stops to help one sales person close one deal, he's trading the value of a single sale against the work he could be doing to improve the performance of the entire sales force.

Marketers frequently ask me how often they need to revise their insights into their buyers. I always reassure them that buyer's problems don't change that often. While vendors are frequently focused on the potential of their latest new product, their buyer's big concerns haven't changed a bit. In fact, it takes a significant external event to change a buyer's priorities and challenges.

I sometimes mention Enron and the subsequent enactment of Sarbannes-Oxley as an example of an event that impacted priorities for a whole lot of buyers. Fortunes were made by the companies that altered their segmentation, messaging, and program strategies to address these buyers' problems.

It looks like I've got a new and far more potent example of a problem that marketing can resolve. It will be nice when the details of this financial downturn can be retold as a story that happened once upon a time. But we're not there yet. Marketers have a choice to make about how this story impacts their own careers and companies. Those who are proactive internally and grounded in their buyers' realities have the best chance to create a happily-every-after ending.

Technorati Tags: marketing budget,market segmentation,sales support

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.

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.

In search of simple, meaningful marketing

I found this quote on David Meerman Scott’s blog a few weeks ago:

Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.

The quote isn’t David’s – he was talking about one of John Maeda’s Ten Laws of Simplicity. John is a designer and thus his laws are aimed at visual communications, but I agree with David that this law should apply to all aspects of marketing.

So for the last few weeks I’ve been testing a hypothesis about why most marketing content is completely out of compliance with this law -- why it is almost always complex and meaningless.

I have a good benchmark for my test. For years now, I’ve been asking people who attend my seminars a simple question -- what does your company do? If the company is well known, I ask it differently -- which products do you market and what do they do? I almost never get a straight answer. In fact most people can’t look at me directly when they respond. They divert their eyes to the ceiling or floor, as if the words might be written there, sparing the speaker the agony of making them up on the spot.

Since I saw this quote I’ve altered my approach. Now I start by asking people to tell me who their buyers are, and only after I’ve heard their response do I ask which problems they are solving for their buyers.

I think I’m on to something. I’m noticing that there is a direct correlation between the level of detail in the description of a target buyer and the simplicity of the words someone uses to describe their solution. Marketers who know their buyers really well even look me directly in the eye when they talk, conveying confidence in the truth of their statements.

I mentioned this test near the end of my Effective Product Marketing seminar last week and finally learned why so many obvious, non-meaningful words appear on every website and corporate brochure. One of the participants said that he was told to read every competitor’s website and ensure that any descriptive phrase on any other site was also included in his own web content!

My preliminary conclusion (which will continue to be subjected to, ahem, intense qualitative and quantitative scrutiny) is that internally and/or competitively driven messages are pure rubbish and impossible to communicate. And if we could just develop persona-powered messages, we could convey simple, meaningful thoughts to real people.