Buyer Persona Blog

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.

Buyers can't find our best solutions

I love it when I find a simple answer to my problem. 

I couldn’t get my Stihl weed eater running this weekend, so I took it to the repair shop. I have this problem at least once each year and knew what would happen next. The guy at the counter easily starts the machine but agrees that something must be wrong if I’m having trouble. He tells me to come back in two weeks to pick it up. Now I feel like a pansy, I’m spending $60 to fix something that might not be broken, and the weeds will be rampant by the time I get it back.

Only it didn’t turn out that way. Rather than mutely passing the device across the counter, I told the sales person what was bothering me. First, I said, I’m doing everything you guys told me last time – setting the choke when it’s cold, pulling firmly on the starter cord, blah, blah, blah. But sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, and it is completely random! Plus when I get too near a rock the cutting line cuts off inside the spool.  I have to stop the machine and take the “head” apart, a fussy project that requires three ungloved hands and a screwdriver. Then I have to start the machine again (return to the first problem). I hate this thing!

The sales person was busy and just wanted to check in my machine, but I made him listen. Turns out he had the perfect solution – a trade-in on an “E-Z start model” plus an optional head that allows me to replace short pieces of cutting line without disassembling anything. Incredibly, this wasn't a brand new innovation -- when I asked he told me that these options have been available for a few years.

It seems that Stihl (and my repair shop) have at least two different buyer personas – "beefy guys" who use power gardening tools in their jobs, have no problem starting machines with pull cords, and want a full spool of line. Then there’s me, the part-time gardener who has a different idea about value. Stihl has had a great answer to a problem that has been driving me crazy, but I couldn't find out about it.

When the sale was complete everyone won – the repair shop made their margin on the new tool, they have a used tool that they can rent or sell to a buyer who doesn't want to pay full price, their overworked repair shop can fix something else, and the manufacturer sold another unit to a now happy customer. But it only worked out because I interrupted the sales person’s standard process and asked him to solve my problem.

I wonder whether the marketing people at Stihl have invested anything at all in identifying the process I just described and thinking about how to reach each of their buyer personas, or if they’re happily doing their “checklist” marketing. They must know about my problem since they built a tool that is meant just for me, but have they thought about the best approach to reach me and deliver their message?

If you think this doesn’t apply to you because you market a complex solution to B2B customers, consider this. According to Marketing Sherpa’s 2007-08 Technology Benchmark Study, 80% of technology buyers had a problem and went looking for a supplier (the remaining 20% responded to a marketing program). I hope they can find you without a lot of trouble.

When sales people don't pursue good leads

I generally don’t write about leads. But ON24 asked me to deliver a talk on “Getting Sales to Love Your Leads” in a webcast yesterday, and I thought you might want to know about the archived version. The webinar is not about generating leads or managing their quality – ON24 had already hosted a number of speakers on that topic, and frankly, most marketers devote so much energy in that area that they miss the critical next step. The question I was asked to address -- what can we do when we have generated really good leads and the sales people won't follow up?

If you take a persona-based "think like the audience" approach, the problem is simple -- the reps who don't work our leads believe that there is an easier way to make quota. We need to find out why they think that way and change their perception.

So my first question -- is it true – is it actually easier for the rep to close other business? If we agree that marketing's job is to drive profitable revenue growth, the product marketing role is about a lot more than lead generation. We need to take responsibility for influencing both the buyer persona and the sales people. Within each of these audiences, we need to find a leverage point and eliminate whatever obstacles we can.

The webinar goes into some detail about how to analyze the problem and begin to resolve it. I focused on marketing’s role in assessing the sales process and overcoming the five obstacles that cause sales resistance. Here’s the short version.

Answer this question. If I want the sales people to work these leads, what will they have to do differently? Will they need to (1) build a relationship with a new type of buying influencer, (2) learn how to communicate about new product details or technologies, (3) work on deals with a lower overall value, (4) manage a different level of product or market maturity, or (5) engage in a more or less complex sales process?

If I am asking our sales people to make changes in these areas, I am headed for trouble with lead follow-through. Why should the reps take that risk? If my job depended on my timely arrival at a distant destination, wouldn’t I want a well-traveled highway -- not a roughly hewn path with unknown obstacles?

If I am a marketer responsible for profitable revenue growth, I want to map out and facilitate the entire trip – the full sales process, not only the first steps in that process. I need to really, really know the buyers who will influence each step (hint: build personas), and then give the reps the messages, tools and programs they can use to win the favor of each of the buyers they will encounter along the way. The old product-focused stuff isn’t going to work here – I need to personally interact with people who represent the target buyers, gathering the insights that will make everything we do real. It is only then that I am in a position to gain the trust of the reps and convince them that the road is clear.

A different version of the same problem was posed by Patrick - one of the attendees on the webinar - he asked: how do we get the reps to develop “net new” customers when they only want to call on the installed base? My question in reply -- why do your reps believe that is easier to make their number with current customers? Have you fully analyzed what you need to do to make it easy for the reps to sell to new customers? And just as critically, do you have a plan to change the sales people’s perceptions about how easy it will be if they follow your leads?

Although I devote most of my posts to the buyer persona, it is common that the most important part of a company's go-to-market process involves winning the minds and hearts of the sales channels. I hope its still apparent that you can't do that without first grokking the buyers.

Personas generate some controversy

There’s an interesting discussion going on in the blogosphere about the merits of personas. In late January the Cranky PM did a rant about the “crap detail” in personas, complaining that they don’t “include the facts that really matter.” A few days later, Saeed Khan jumped into the fray with a post at On Product Management. Like the Cranky PM, Saeed expressed disdain for the prevalence of so much useless, irrelevant information.

Now this week’s post from Kristin Zhivago says that personas can create trouble. Her concern -- that sales people might use personas to forget everything they were ever taught about consultative selling. It appears that she’s also seen websites with misguided persona practices, since she references web copy that describes a persona rather than answering her questions. From those two vantage points, it’s no wonder that Kristin's raising a red flag.

Those of us who do understand personas need to know that there is a lot of misinformation going around. Before we launch a persona project internally, we need to be familiar with these concerns and make sure we don't do anything to reinforce them.

The first step is to make sure that our personas accurately reflect the real needs of a target set of buyers. I did a webinar last week that outlines seven ways to gather good persona information. If you want a refresher, or if you are new to persona development, you can view the webinar here.

Then we need to consider the needs of each of our internal audience personas and deliver only the information that makes sense. If I want to communicate with a developer about the capabilities that drive buying decisions, I'm careful to stick to the facts. Developers want Data. Anything that could conceivably be perceived as fluff will only discredit everything else I have to say.

When I talk to sales people about a new persona I want them to reach, I tell them a story about the process the buyer will go through to make a decision. Sales people want Stories. I make sure that my story illustrates the sales tools we built to answer each persona’s questions throughout the stages of the buying process. I don’t generally use the "persona" word when I talk to sales people. Instead I talk about someone with a specific job title in a target industry. I tell them who I talked to in a particular role, and what I learned from these conversations. Here’s a recent post I wrote on this subject.

If my target is a web designer, I tell them to use the persona information to think about who will visit the site, which stages in the buying process they are completing online, and what questions we need to answer if we want to move the process forward. In most cases, it should not be apparent to the web visitor that personas were utilized by the designer. The persona simply communicates the needs of the buyer(s) so that the developer knows how to enable a satisfying  buying process.

And if the internal audience is an executive, read yesterday’s post on the Tuned In Blog by Phil Myers at Pragmatic Marketing. Phil talks about using personas to distribute leadership responsibilities and align different parts of the company around the needs and concerns of the market. You might also think about whether your senior executive is really a developer or sales person at heart, and utilize the ideas in the relevant paragraph above.

The good news is that personas are generating a lot of discussion and notoriety. But fame often exposes an idea to criticism, so we all need to stay grounded in the facts and the importance of the problem we’re trying to solve. Keep reminding everyone that market-driven companies need to implement practices to understand and communicate internally about the needs of different segments of the market. Tell them that we will use personas to avoid all of the wasted effort on messages, programs and tactics that speak to no one. Those are goals that won't generate any controversy.

Sales people say every buyer is unique

One of the seven ways I start to build buyer personas is to talk to the company's salespeople. For starters, sales has some insight into which roles will influence the buying decision. Further, the really good reps know quite a bit about the criteria the various influencers use to make a decision. Veteran sales people have discovered that visibility into each of their buyer’s perceptions, success metrics and resistance points could result in a winning account strategy. Gathering this information can kick-start my project.

But I'm also cautious about how I collect and use sales input, which is why it is only one of the seven methods I use. Salespeople may not be calling on the very buyers that I most need to understand, and the nature of the sales job means that salespeople have a relatively narrow view -- they think about only a few deals at any given time. Some recent interactions reminded me of another problem -- many salespeople think that personas can't be done -- that every single individual is unique. Hmmm. I guess that means that the folks behind the 1992 presidential campaigns were wrong about the "soccer mom" persona. All moms are unique, aren't they? 

So if you think your reps will resist the idea, you don't need to talk about personas per se. Personas are a tool, and no one really needs to know that much about tools except the experts who use them.  Focus instead on the result. My husband is all excited about the new table saw he bought -- some outrageously expensive thing that replaced another table saw that seemed fine to me. He says that he loves the sound it makes and cites all sorts of details about it that I can’t even remember. Seems like the old one also managed to cut boards in half. What would impress me? If he could complete some of the projects on my honey-do-list.

When I want to get a persona project going I look for a new initiative, goal or launch that the sales people and their management really want to make work. It helps if the project is already perceived to be difficult. Examples of this might be a new market segment we need to enter, a competitor we want to overtake, or a merger where cross-sale of the acquired products isn’t happening as anticipated. Then I find a rep who has had some success and I start asking questions – which type of buyers were involved in the deal, what were their priorities, what have you said or done that got their attention? If this is a new product or service and no one has sold it yet, I find a rep who has been selling to the target buyer and ask the same questions.

If the salespeople are resistant to the idea of personas, there is no need to mention the “p” word. Think of it this way –- buyer personas may need a beta test and a success story before we introduce them to people who are suspicious about whether they will work.

Meeting very interesting people

People sometimes ask me why I have a blog. What possible value does anyone get from sitting at a computer, writing down their thoughts, and publishing them on the Internet? Like the people who ask me this question, I don't have the kind of readers that advertisers are lining up to reach, so we can't expect our blogs to generate revenue. And it takes time, doesn't it?  (The answer is yes.) Who has time to spend on stuff that doesn't impact revenue?

I know a few people who have blogging in their DNA -- I can assure you that I'm not one of them. I don't have a NEED to blog. I don't get any personal gratification from writing down my thoughts. But give me a microphone or a telephone and I'm in my element. My favorite past time is talking to people who care about eliminating the waste in marketing and doing work that has a measurable impact on their target audiences.

Thus the primary reason that I blog is that it leads to conversations with very interesting people, people like Jill Konrath of Sellling to Big Companies. Jill's emphasis is on reaching sales people, not marketers, but she and I work on different aspects of the same challenge -- getting companies to stop talking about themselves. (Here's one of Jill's great posts on this topic). Because I have a blog, Jill found me and asked me to deliver one of a series of four seminars that she is doing for Marketing Profs.

Here's a one-paragraph shameless promotional plug -- the seminar is Buyer Personas: The Smart Way to Align Sales and Marketing, and it's tomorrow, Thursday, January 17 at noon Eastern time. Marketing Profs charges $129 for the seminar, or you can pay $249 and see as many seminars as you want for one year. This includes the other three parts of Jill's series -- two have already happened but all seminars are archived for later viewing. Note to anyone who has attended my Effective Product Marketing seminar -- I won't be presenting anything you haven't heard before.

Jill is just one of many people I've reached through this blog. Yesterday I got an email from Amy Lively, who says that she develops personas for retail stores, helping her customers to identify their most effective merchandising and promotional strategies (sorry, I don't have her website yet). Even though Amy and I work in different markets we have a lot in common. and through this connection we may find a way to help each other.  She ended her email with a question that plagues me too -- why don't more marketers use personas to think like their target customers?

Which brings me to best reason to have a blog. Besides people like Jill and Amy, professionals who may have resources I can leverage or answers to my questions, my blog reaches many of my past, current and potential customers. A blog post may not seem like an activity that is directly tied to revenue generation, but in fact nothing is more important than optimizing every chance I have to start a conversation, see what resonates, and truly listen.

Stop selling and listen!

“We’ve been focusing on selling and just shooting ourselves in the foot.” That’s an exact quote from my phone meeting with Dave this morning. He and I have been working on a project to identify the most receptive market segments and buyer personas for his product. Here’s more of what he told me . . .

“The CEO and I spend a lot of time talking to customers during and after the sales process, so I assumed that we knew our audience. Now I realize that when we’re in sales mode we’re preaching our message. We don’t get to just listen and not take a position, so we haven’t been getting the right information.”

It was early morning when Dave and I talked, but I was suddenly wide awake. I grabbed a pen and tried to write down as many of his words as I could. Here are the other parts of my notes that I can read:

“First I listen to one person and they tell me something. When I get to the next interview I build on the points from the first meeting and I learn more. The more time I spend talking to people the more comfortable I get. I don’t even need to be creative. I just listen and see the same theme emerging over and over again.”

Dave started this project with a fairly typical problem – the company got started when the founder saw a need to solve a specific problem. More than a decade later, the company is up against a guerilla in that space. They have customers in other areas, but every sale is unique, and each new account results in a new set of enhancement requests. The company doesn’t know where it can effectively invest in selling and marketing with predictably favorable results.

Because Dave got out of sales mode and started actively listening, he knows that his horizontal (read scattered) solution can answer a pervasive, unsolved problem in the insurance industry. He still has meetings and phone interviews scheduled in one other segment -- I'll be anxious to hear how that goes. He also has a starting point for building the buyer personas that he will need to target through marketing programs, and has the core elements of his messaging strategy in the first industsry. He even has a new approach to developing highly qualified leads.

When I started working with Dave I sensed that he’d be good at this process. He is open-minded and curious, and is very knowledgeable about the value of his products. We spent some time together at the beginning of this project, getting to the heart of his distinctive competence, analyzing the aspects of the product’s current successes and failures, and applying that insight to potential market segments. Then it was up to Dave to listen and see what he could learn from the only people that matter – the target buyers.

Near the end of our phone call this morning I asked Dave the question that keeps ME awake at night. Why don’t more product marketers get out and listen to the people who aren’t their customers yet? At the risk of irritating him, I asked the question directly --You’ve been at your company for a couple of years now. Why didn’t you get this done until now? I wrote down his reply

“Sales people keep saying that they just need more leads, ROI calculators, and that sort of thing. We are so busy working on our marketing checklists, there is never enough time to get out. I always knew that my opinion was irrelevant,” (a reference to one of my favorite quotes from the Pragmatic Marketing training that he attended), “but I didn’t realize that the opinions of the salespeople were also irrelevant.”

I changed Dave’s name and carefully avoided saying anything here that might reveal his company or solution, but everything in this post is true, I promise. I’m keeping Dave’s secret about what he heard from the market -- the insights that he has about his buyer personas are now his company’s best competitive weapon.  But I'm going to tell eveyone who will listen how he got that information, hoping to inspire just one more person to stop selling and start listening.

Resolutions for a prosperous 2007

I wish you a new year filled with joy, prosperity, and successful marketing initiatives. For those who want a roadmap, here are the ten rules from the Effective Product Marketing seminar restated in the form of resolutions. Perhaps one or more of these will inspire you.

1.    I will never confuse efforts with results.
2.    I will know who I am talking to before I attempt to communicate.
3.    I will create marketing tools and programs that influence a targeted buyer or customer persona.
4.    I will not confuse product positioning with program messaging and strategy.
5.    I will develop support for my go-to-market plans by giving management a business case for their investment.
6.    I will develop web content and collateral that drives buyers into and through the sales process.
7.    I will write benefits statements that are succinct answers to a buyer's problems.
8.    I will give the salespeople clear insights into each persona's priorities, supported by persona-specific messages and tools.
9.    I will integrate product-oriented programs into a single strategic campaign for each type of persona I need to influence.
10.  I will avoid the checklist marketing trap by doing the Gather, Focus, Assess, Measure and Improve steps.