Buyer Persona Insights

Buyer Persona 2.0 – Part 4 - Business Persona Context

In the B2B marketplace, many organizations struggle with how to view their customers.  What has been traditional is that the “customer” has usually been identified by company name.  This is very commonplace for pipeline reviews for example.  Therein lays a critical element in the adoption of buyer personas by senior leaders of B2B organizations.  When the conventions of reporting, analysis, segmentations, and etc. have all been around the “business” or “company”, many senior leaders can tend to overlook the power of buyer personas.  In this segment of Buyer Persona 2.0, we look at how to reconcile this dilemma as well as misconception:

The Business Persona

For several years, buyer personas have been seen as an effort to identify an individual buyer.  Many different descriptions have arisen but they boil down to developing a profile or a description of your typical buyer.  Later in this series I will cover how this may be out of synch in the B2B marketplace but for this segment it is important to note that buyer personas oftentimes need context to truly be effective. 

As is typical in the real world, buyers operate within an organization that is characterized by its’ own set of norms, behaviors, and cultural phenomenon.  Target buyers assimilate themselves into the organization dynamics which in part will shape how they behave with other organizations that represent suppliers or partners.  Not presenting buyer personas within this business context creates challenging adaptive as well as believability issues – especially among senior leaders. 

At Goal Centric, we began to explore this issue a few years ago.  Having a long term background as a senior leader for B2B entities, it struck me as we were developing buyer persona practicum that something was amiss in the focus of buyer personas.  I can recall seeing the puzzled look on senior managers as they tried to fit buyer personas into their built-in view of target companies and pipeline reports.  My colleague, Angela Quail, and I began to explore this issue on an in-depth level.  Although the concept of organizational personas had been around since the early days of design personas, they were descriptive in nature only.  What was lacking was a true view of the intersection of cultural, business, and market goals that businesses implicitly or explicitly develop over time in addition to the descriptive aspects.  Thus, we began to focus on the business persona that buyer personas are a part of daily. 

In the previous segments of this series, I touched upon several times the need to conduct sufficient qualitative efforts in acquiring buyer insights.  Gaining perspective into the set of business and market goals a business will develop makes it even more important to gather buyer insights.   Equally important to this perspective is gauging the affect of cultural phenomenon on buyer behaviors and decisions.  They can have an enormous impact on buying decisions and oftentimes are not articulated when surveyed directly. 

Here is a simple example:

 

In one of our engagements, we uncovered a significant unarticulated cultural insight that was affecting buying decisions.  The industry our client served placed a high value on professional development.  Beset by dynamically changing environmental and regulatory legislation, it was important to put in contextual view how this shaped business culture as well as how it shaped business and market goals.  Armed with this insight, our client created a series of professional development programs to augment their support services.  In essence, creating new criteria for buying decisions in which they were the forerunners. 

For senior leaders, this view is extremely important as they must answer to board members, investors, and shareholders who think in the context of what other “businesses” do they have a relationship with and are doing business with.  By developing business personas that are robust contextually, it will provide for even more insightful buyer personas that can be embraced by senior leaders.  Buyer Persona 2.0 as a discipline must show contextually how buyer personas not only are a part of a business persona but must also show how they are affected by business dynamics. 

Next: Buyer Persona 2.0 – Part 5

 

 

Buyer Persona 2.0 – Part 3 - Understanding Buyer Goals

In this segment of the Buyer Persona 2.0 series I would like to talk about an often overlooked aspect of buyer personas.  When it comes to finding the disruptive edge in B2B sales and marketing, understanding and leveraging buyer goals is paramount.  Previously in Buyer Persona 2.0 – Part 1, I reviewed the importance of buyer insight.  Without a rigorous effort in buyer insight, getting at the root of buyer goals will be extremely difficult. 

The third key tenet of Buyer Persona 2.0 is that there is a confluence of goals by which buyers operate from and use as the basis for making decisions:

Buyer Goals

As a starting place, it is important to note the differences in goals related to design personas as opposed to buyer personas.  When Alan Cooper first introduced personas for design through his landmark book, The Inmates are Running the Asylum in 1999, he described three categories of goals:

· Life Goals: what someone hope to achieve in life

· Experience Goals: what someone may hope to experience

· End Goals: what someone may hope to accomplish as an end result

When designing a product or service, gaining insight and leveraging these types of goals can lead to a well designed product.  However, how well they translate to buyer personas and are they sufficient are essential questions.  In it of themselves, just focusing on these goals will not lead to the disruptive edge sought when creating buyer personas.  They can be helpful but will seem out of context in a buying environment.  These types of goals are significant when the focus is on product usage and understanding the end result a user is attempting to achieve.  Perhaps of critical importance is that senior leaders, many who may come from sales and marketing will not be able to grasp the strategic aspects of buyer personas and will relegate their use to the “product” area.

In our world of buyer personas, the intersection of three areas of goals can lead to the disruptive insight that can help propel a business entity to gain the competitive edge.  These being:

· Career Goals: this is the place to encapsulate the pertinent goals related to design whereby they are framed in a career and B2B context

· Business Goals: the goals of the organization play a major role in shaping an understanding of goals related to buyer personas

· Market Goals: whether stated implicitly or explicitly, the goals of the market are a driving force which, if not grasped, can lead to poor decisions in sales and marketing operations

The converged intersection of these goals allow for the disruptive insight that companies can achieve through Buyer Persona 2.0:

 

On the surface, these categories may seem simple.  However, these goals often can be unarticulated in an understandable and insightful way.  There have been many times whereby we’ve read strategic documents and found that the disparity between the written word and the articulated expressed in interviews were miles apart.  As noted in Buyer Persona 2.0-Part 1, it takes a skillful set of attributes and experience to decipher the peeled back layers of these goals.  A simple example may help illustrate:

In an interesting engagement we undertook, we found a convergence of business and market goals that related to research and development.  The importance of R&D spending in shaping buying decisions was an unarticulated insight that did not show up in any written documents from the buyers themselves as well as our client’s own sales and marketing.  Nor did it show up in the company’s extensive use of customer satisfaction surveys as well as win/loss analysis calls that were made.  In fact, the company made a decision a few years back to deemphasize R&D in their marketing messaging.  This directly correlated to a loss in revenues for buyers had business goals specific to innovation and there was an implied market goal of maintaining a high standard of R&D investments.  The newly crafted buyer personas and the associated insights surrounding R&D spending provided the company a means for reorienting sales and marketing efforts to portray their focus in this area - leading to a reversal of losses and recapturing of market share.

One of the misconceptions or rather misinterpreted use of buyer personas I have found in the past few years is in putting a buyer persona “face” on existing selling models and methodologies.  While this can be helpful, I believe this approach misses the point about how buyer personas can find a seat in the board room.  Putting a buyer persona “face” on existing understanding and terminologies such as pain points, needs, value propositions, selling propositions, solutions, and etc. can create a dangerous mix of accelerating the bad.  While this approach can improve sales and marketing effectiveness and understanding of buyers, it does not pave the way to the disruptive buyer insights that leads to a quantum leap in competitive advantages. 

Understanding and leveraging buyer goals can help an organization achieve unmatched organizational as well as market advantages.  In the example provided, thousands and thousands of dollars were spent on marketing literature and campaigns.  Much of which was going to waste for they did not address a crucial aspect of the buying process as well as attitudes – R&D spending.  Leveraging a deep understanding of buyer goals portrayed through well crafted buyer personas can help companies to develop highly efficient as well as targeted efforts that map back to buyers precisely. 

Next: Buyer Persona 2.0 – Part 4

Buyer Persona 2.0 – Part 2 - The Buyer Ecosystem

In Part 1 of this article, Buyer Persona 2.0, the importance of Buyer Insight was presented as one of the key tenets of Buyer Persona 2.0.  This portion of the series on the next generation of buyer personas will focus on one of the truths of the global economy we live in – the interrelationships between buyers, their end customers, and their suppliers is wired like never before.  Since 2001, when Angela Quail and I became the first tandem ever to craft buyer personas as opposed to user personas, we realized that we were not going to be of much help to Fortune 100-500 organizations if we didn’t tackle this prevalent issue.   

The second key tenet of Buyer Persona 2.0 is acknowledging that buyers do not exist on an island to themselves; that they interact with others internally and externally to make buying decisions:

Buyer Ecosystem

Excelling in a buyer-centric world calls us to achieve a unique and deep understanding of the buyer ecosystem in which the buyer revolves his or her world around.  If, in a simple manner of speaking, we are to help buyers to achieve their goals and to succeed, it is prudent that we understand the interdependencies in which they rely on.  Every day, buyers attempt to achieve their specific goals through interaction with others.  Suppliers support buyer goals and their efforts to serve their end customers.  In our experiences thus far, we’ve come across some profound insight as we painted this view for clients. 

Let’s face it, when organizations “target” a buyer, they often can put a buyer in a box.  That box contains their self-referential view of how their product is going to help the buyer do their job better or receive those touted benefits that appear on glossy marketing literature.  They can become oblivious to the ecosystem that exists outside this box and how a buyer functions to achieve goals.  Let’s look at an illustration from an actual engagement we were involved in a few years ago:

Our client provided the medical community with testing materials and equipment.  Much of their selling and marketing messaging efforts were “targeted” at the doctors who use the tests to make the proper diagnosis as well as to prescribe the necessary recuperative therapy.  What our buyer insight interviewing and crafting of buyer personas uncovered was that third party technicians actually administered the tests in a clinical or hospital environment.   Thus, the doctors only saw the results of the tests and oftentimes they were accompanied by recommendations from the technician.  This was a change from previous years whereby the doctor both administered and interpreted the tests.  Our client redesigned both selling and marketing strategies to account for the relatively new intervention of a technician into the doctor’s world of patient care.

In this specific case, the buyer’s ecosystem went through a transformative change.  It now included the use of an additional third party as well as it changed the supplier and buyer relationship.  Additionally, it changed the doctor and patient relationship.  Previous efforts such as win/loss analyses, sales reports, and even annual conferences failed to reveal this subtle yet important transformation.  For well over a quarter of a century, the doctors had been the sole focal point of all sales and marketing strategies and tactics.  Technological advances caused the buyer ecosystem to change yet our client had a blurry vision of what had taken place.  Simply stated, the inertia of this built-in doctor focus was hard to overcome.

This helps to illustrate how important the first two tenets of Buyer Persona 2.0 are to succeeding in the next generation buyer centric universe.  First, this client invested in the third party use of gathering important buyer insight that shed light on why sales were down and how their market had changed.  Secondly, by exploring a buyer ecosystem view, the client was able to uncover an important new supplier of services doctors relied on as well as were influenced by.  This new supplier also represented a new buyer persona for our client and an important new source of top line revenue growth. 

Next: Buyer Persona 2.0 – Part 3

Buyer Persona 2.0 - Power of Buyer Insight

During the previous decade, we’ve seen a growing acceptance for the use of buyer personas to help guide effective product, sales, and marketing planning.  The basic premise of their importance to the new world order of 21^st century marketing has certainly taken root and is sprouting.  As we enter into this new decade, it is prudent to enter into the next generation of buyer persona concepts.

One of the dilemmas that the buyer persona concept faced in the previous decade is that, like any new concept that comes along, it had its fair share of misconceptions.  To address misconceptions and to evolve, a crucial cocktail mix of art and science must come together to create the next generation practicum and discipline - Buyer Persona 2.0.  This mix has to come together in such a way that senior leaders in corporations today are able to rely on the buyer persona discipline as an essential ingredient that informs on strategic means of meeting the buying needs of their customers.  What does this brew look like and what misconceptions need to be dispelled?  Here is one basic tenet, one of several I hope to write about in a series on Buyer Persona 2.0, that we have learned firsthand through working with Fortune 100 clients since 2002:

Buyer Insight

Over the past few years, there have been many who have written about or mentioned buyer personas in various sources.  Espoused is the notion that all that is needed is to have a few people sit back and think about whom your buyer is, come up with a picture, and viola’ – a buyer persona has been created.  Or, we have witnessed the debate whether marketing should talk to sales when crafting buyer personas.  Some have written that all you need to do is go to a few of your best sales people and have them come up with a buyer persona composite you can use.  Unfortunately, this has created a misconception that buyer insight is not essential to crafting buyer personas.  In part, just the mere omission of mentioning some level of insight gathering has made this key tenet missing in action.  It also has caused senior leaders, rightfully so, to be dubious about the value of buyer personas. 

What then is meant by gathering Buyer Insight?  To gain a deeper understanding of buyers and their buying processes, an understanding that yields insight, companies need to engage in a level of qualitative interaction with their buyers.  The goal of buyer insight is to reach the deep layer of the unarticulated and the not yet seen.  Crafting user personas for the design of products require a significant degree of observational and ethnographic based research.  Buyer personas require the same significant degree of insight gathering however the focus is different than that of user personas.  In many ways, the insight gathering is anthropological in nature.  Meaning there is an emphasis on attitudinal perceptions, causal relationships, and organization cultural phenomenon.   

At hand, is the quandary of who should be doing the Buyer Insight gathering?  First, let’s establish that it takes a set of attributes, skills, and experience to be effective at garnering profound insight.  Someone adept at “connecting the dots” and formulating a visual mental picture is crucial.  Often times, the very people who possess these set of competencies may be in positions of leadership internally and are not ideally suited to do the actual insight gathering.  It is my belief that in order to achieve the unvarnished insight that can lead to innovation as well as a competitive upper hand, organizations should utilize experienced 3^rd party expertise for gathering buyer insight and crafting buyer personas.  Over the past decade, we’ve learned several reasons why this is important:

· Authenticity:  In the many interviews with buyers we’ve conducted, my colleague Angela Quail and I have seen a very consistent result.  When buyer’s know that we are representing a specific company or are under the impression we are from the company, the discussions are filtered though a lens of guarded precepts that hinder the insight gathering.  Time after time, when we’ve gone into various markets to interview buyers and made it clear we were objective 3^rd party interests; we have been able to gain significantly more insights.  There is an expressed promise of confidentiality exercised, thus freeing the buyers interviewed to be candid and forthcoming.

· Product-centric:  There are still very many organizations that have not made the transition to a buyer-centric model of engagement.  Buyers today are even more stringent in their gate keeping efforts to keep product-centric sales people at bay.  This includes keeping product managers and marketers gated as well.  Product-centric communications will make it difficult for any member of the organization to remove the barrier of a perceived ulterior motive, right or wrong, to “sell more products” in an attempt to gather insights.  To echo one buyer we interviewed on behalf of a client – “I don’t care who calls or leaves a message, it’s all the same to me – they are just calling to push an x on me.  I don’t have time for that.” 

· Expertise:  As mentioned above, there is a degree of attributes, skills, and experience needed to gather buyer insights.   The challenge is making capable the many marketers with the right set of competency to do it right.  Not doing it right is akin to walking through a field of landmines.  Stepping on one could result in a very disgruntled buyer.  A 3^rd party also can be an effective means for building in-house competency as they work alongside qualified individuals to teach on the qualitative nature of gathering buyer insight.   

· Forest and Trees:  There have been many occasions whereby we’ve seen patterns replicated across several industries.  In working with senior executives, this has proven to be of tremendous value in gaining their acceptance of buyer persona methodology as a means for informing strategic direction.  Effectively lending credence to the discipline by showing related relevance to other industries and what profound insights were yielded.  More importantly, how companies responded to the insights and the results attained.  Even in gathering buyer insights, tunnel vision can be prevalent if done in-house.  Alan Cooper who founded the use of personas for the design of digital products and who introduced me to the concept of personas, used to talk about the risk of a product designer being self-referential in their design as well as interpretation of user feedback.  I believe this can be true, not in all cases, for organizations as a whole in interpreting buyer feedback.

The more complex the sales and marketing environment, the more I advocate for 3^rd party intervention in gathering underlying buyer insight that will help to shape the future direction of an organization.  Insight that will lead to buyer personas that are believable and real.  Buyer Insight is the essential starting point and the most crucial of the tenets for Buyer Persona 2.0.   

Next: Buyer Persona 2.0 Part II

 

The Origin of Buyer Personas

As we begin a new decade, it is amazing to think how the term buyer persona has become part of the lexicon of business language.  I am often asked by clients, colleagues, friends, and family – where did the idea or the term buyer persona come from?  Like most watershed moments in life, there is an origin that exists which can sometimes get lost in the timeline of progress.  In the use of the term buyer persona, I believe such is the case. 

Before a focus on the origin of the term and concept, it is important to grapple with how we have reached this point.  The term and concept has grown through actual work on the part of leading edge organizations and some terrific writing as well as teaching on the topic of buyer personas.  There are four people in my opinion who have contributed the most to the awareness of buyer personas in companies today.  Through our firm Goal Centric, my colleague Angela Quail and I have been involved in over 20 engagements during the past few years where we have focused on the “how” of buyer personas.  Each engagement pushed us to innovate and to continue to evolve the concept of buyer personas as an important component of strategic sales and marketing discipline.  In addition, we have written and presented on the topic of buyer personas.  The Buyer Persona blog written by Adele Revella of Pragmatic Marketing has also made the term much more visible and Adele has written very thought provoking postings on why buyer personas are important to product managers as well as sales and marketing professionals.  In his bestselling book, The New Rules of Marketing & PR, David Meerman Scott (also of Pragmatic Marketing heritage) devotes considerable space on buyer personas and their importance to the new rules of the 21^st century.  The fact that his book has become a best seller has undoubtedly propelled the term buyer persona into widespread recognition. 

Though each of us has contributed to the awareness of buyer personas, none of us can claim the exact origin.  It resides with one man and one man only – Alan Cooper.  Alan is considered and revered by many as the founding father of personas and their use for the interaction design of digital products and mediums.  My colleague Angela Quail and I had the privilege of working with Alan Cooper, through his esteemed Cooper Interaction Design firm (now called Cooper), and to learn firsthand about personas.  In March of 1999, Alan published his highly acclaimed first edition of The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, a provocative look at how software programmers and engineers were in charge of designing products and services that were by and large – non-user friendly.  It is in this book that Alan first describes the use of personas to design very user friendly digital products.  On page 135 of this landmark book, Alan begins to point out that personas are “user personas and not buyer personas” when referencing the use of personas in the design of digital products.  Essentially making the case personas should be used to design for the user as opposed for the buyer.   Hence, we can mark the exact origin of the term buyer persona in the annals of modern business history. 

I was fixated on that passage line.  Being a student of Peter Drucker, I asked the important question Mr. Drucker stated must be solved at reaching sound decisions – why not?  As in -why not create buyer personas?  As a former Vice President of Sales and Marketing for three organizations, I couldn’t help but think – now if I only had information, via personas on buying customers, what successes could we have achieved?  This was a gravitational pull on my thinking in the time I helped out at Alan’s design firm.  This also served as the genesis for Angela Quail and I to ponder the “why not” question with full force.  (A little known footnote to this story happened in 2000-2001.  Both Pragmatic Marketing and Forrester Research solicited from several people at Cooper, including myself and Alan, information on personas.  Personas have become a staple component of Pragmatic Marketing’s course offerings while Forrester has used personas extensively in its web design analysis offerings.)   

After the dot com bust that took place in the early 2000’s as well as the after affects of 9/11, Cooper Interaction Design was not immune to the need to scale back considerably and go into survival mode.  They have survived to this date and are the preeminent design firm in the country in my humble opinion.   In 2002, I formed the firm Goal Centric, stumbled out of the gate, ruffled some feathers inadvertently, and then found footing with my colleague Angela.  We’ve crossed the great divide so to peak – from user persona methodology to carving out a specific methodology related to buyer personas.  It has taken some courageous organizations, such as FedEx, HP, and Reed Elsevier, to be pioneers evolving buyer personas into a strategic component of sales and marketing planning.  We’ve come a long way in answering the question – why not buyer personas?   

I have purposely used the above titled heading out of respect for Alan’s definitive article The Origin of Personas written in August of 2003.  Although I haven’t spoken to him in several years, I hope he will not mind being called the Grand Daddy of all personas.  His invention was brilliant and all those using personas today should pay homage to the man who started it all.  We would not be able to utilize the concept of personas had it not been for Alan Cooper giving us its origins and the basic persona building structure.

Next: The future of buyer personas

Sales 2.0 Conference Highlights Need for Buyer Personas

This September 10th, I attended the Sales 2.0 Conference in Chicago.  The conference focused on the changing environment of sales and paid particular attention to issues related to understanding buyers. One of the more notable speakers was Kevin Hooper, VP of TSG at Hewlett Packard.  Our firm, Goal Centric, was privileged to work with Kevin to address the need to create a sales enablement tool that would enable a neophyte sales force of 100 plus inside and field sales representatives engage in sales conversations with key executives in the Healthcare market.

At the conference, Kevin shared with the audience his use of a Buyer Persona Sales Playbook that was created as a go-to-market and selling guide for HP's Commercial Segment sales teams.  The guide included:

• A detailed description of an archetypal medical organization
• A review of executive personas 
• A target buyer persona 
• A detailed review of buying processes and scenarios   
• An in-depth insight into the issues and needs of the buyer personas   

These proved instrumental in helping Kevin's teams to significantly increase the percentage of deals over $100k and to increase the average size of each deal.  COnsidering the ecnomic times, this is a remarkable accomplishment!

 The take aways from Kevin's presentation, which also focused on sales measurements, can be as follows:

• Attaining a deep understanding of who your buyers are is critical
• Understanding what their buying processes are and aligning must be part of every sales organization's go-to-market plan 
• Creating innovative enablement tools that give your sales team's the insightful knowledge needed to hold a "conversation" with buyers is now a given 
• Increasing top line revenue growth is directly related to mapping to your buyer's buying processes and relevant issues at the time they need it the most  

Buyer personas and the innovative Buyer Persona Sales Playbook tool created in conjunction with HP portends how organizations must adapt to the new world of Sales 2.0.  One message was clear at the Sales 2.0 conference - companies who do not adapt will most certainly not survive.  

Enable Sales & Marketing with Buyer Persona Scenarios

In our new dynamic world, where nothing stays the same for any long periods of time, the difference competitively may be in the ability to anticipate.  Many successful corporations have stayed ahead of the pack due to their ability to read the market and anticipate how their customers will behave.  In sports, accuracy is tied to anticipation.  For example, an All-Pro quarterback is often touted for his pinpoint accuracy.  However when you review films of his throws, you see that uncanny ability to anticipate the exact spot when the receiver will arrive down the field to meet the football descending from the air.  Tiger Wood’s successes are partly due to his unprecedented power driving but also partly due to his ability to “read” the elements and anticipate the trajectory and the placement of the golf ball. 

 

Buyer personas, archetypal and fictional representations of actual buyers, are increasingly being used to attain a deeper understanding of buyers and customers.  Buyer personas give us a good snapshot of buyer background and attributes as well as relevant goals and motivations.  Alone though, they cannot provide the ability to anticipate how buyer personas may actually behave in a marketplace.  What is needed is to put buyer personas through buying scenarios.  Doing so provides the much needed insights into how buyers will behave in certain scenarios.

 

First, how do you get to these scenarios?  It takes some hard work and they usually cannot be created by conventional means such as culling data from sales forces.  Being a theatre buff, I liken scenario creation to seeing what goes on backstage while a production is underway.  Out in the audience, we are enjoying the actors and actresses as they are in character and perform.  What we don’t see is how each scene change is “anticipated” and how stage hands are awaiting the lighting or sound cue to put in motion the scene change.  Once the cue is heard, unbeknown to the audience, movement and action is taking place behind the curtain.    If internal data is only utilized in the theatre of sales and marketing, it will be hard to get a true sense of what is taking place “behind the scenes” when the buying process is in motion.  The only way to get a true depiction of what is taking place in a customer’s buying process scenario or series of scenarios is through rigorous qualitative field study that is complemented by skills in analyzing work flows and processes. 

 

Once scenarios are created, sales and marketing is enabled by their ability to anticipate the behaviors of their buyer personas.  When pain points are discovered, sales and marketing will have the ability to anticipate what particular process is set in motion “behind the scenes” by their customers.  In multiple product or services environments, there is a tendency to treat a customer in a homogeneous fashion.  With buyer persona scenarios, sales become enabled to understand the significant “cues” they are hearing and to anticipate the most likely scenario taking place within the customer organization.  This means sales will no longer have to rely on just one reference point for asking questions but have multiple paths of questioning that are more relevant and accurate.  And as previously mentioned being more accurate in your customer conversations is dependent on the ability to anticipate.  Marketing is also enabled by knowing at what critical junctures in the buyer persona scenario to deliver or have readily accessible messaging that is once again, relevant and accurate.  Accurate because it is based upon the ability to anticipate when the buyer persona will need the supportive messaging.

 

Buyer persona scenarios can go a long way towards giving an organization’s sales and marketing capabilities an edge over competition.  More importantly, they pay long term dividends because it is the ultimate “win-win” for the seller and the buyer.  What it allows is for sales and marketing to become stage hands in the buying process as opposed to just the audience that enjoys its conversation with the customer but never really knows what is going on behind the curtain.  And, if an organization can get buyer persona scenarios right, it will have its’ competitors in the audience on the outside looking in while they enjoy the favorable spot of being on the inside looking out!

Why Companies Must Invest In Sales And Marketing During An Economic Downturn

It’s not looking good.  We have been rocked by dismal and fearful financial and economic events that have rippled through the global economy leaving no company feeling the ill effects.  Credit is harder to come by and hibernation is setting in.  There are dire predictions that our economy could be faced with a severe recession over the next 12 to 24 months – maybe even 36 months.  Causing companies to drastically cut budgets, implement painful layoffs, and to disband growth investment plans.  Not a pretty picture.

 

Typically, in an economic downturn, there is the natural impulse to cut sales and marketing budgets.  We see retractions of sales forces, sales territories, marketing programs, and marketing support.  Is this really wise?  There are three reasons why companies need to invest more into sales and marketing during a downturn while streamlining costly operations:

 

Solving Customer Challenges

 

Many companies today will be faced with unexpected and new challenges as a result of the downturn.  This is the very time companies need to be engaged in collaborative efforts to solve problems and challenges through creative means.  If sales forces retract and these conversations cannot take place then opportunities will be missed.  Opportunities that involve solutions to weather the storm together and to help companies become more efficient. 

 

Buyer Behavior and Processes Will Change

 

Undoubtedly, buying behavior and buying processes will change as a result of the economic downturn.  The buying process cycle will become longer and the cast of buyer personas will increase.  How?  Let’s say for example that your product and services typically cost $100,000.  At this level, a Senior Director may currently be the decision maker and it fits into his or her budget.  The evaluation, decision, and purchasing process take typically four weeks.  Now consider that a company reacts to the downturn by implementing new purchasing guidelines.  These new guidelines call for more layers of approvals from Vice Presidents for any expenditure over $25,000.  In addition, all purchase orders must be reviewed by a committee and justified with data which must come from the supplier and outside third party sources.  The purchase order accompanied by supporting paperwork then must go to the CFO with a no or yes recommendation from the committee.  The change in the buying cycle has now gone from 4 weeks to 10 weeks.  As you can see, there will be a significantly longer buying cycle, new buyer personas, increased demand for supporting data, and a new set of drivers which have to be met.  Without actively engaging with customers and learning about these changes, opportunities will be lost because of the inability to adapt to new buying processes. 

 

Nurturing the Upturn

 

With the economic downturn cementing into place, lead and client nurturing will become more important than ever.  At some point, an upturn will happen.  It may be in 6 months, 18 months, or 24 months.  However long it lasts, companies will remember who their friends are!  Sales and marketing especially have to work in a concerted effort to provide the right level of messaging and communications that engages the lead and the client in an ongoing dialogue.  Sales must make investments in long term relationships by truly being the trusted advisor during difficult times and offering periodic advice without the precondition of a sale.  Meaning also those organizations will have to revaluate current compensation plans and adapt to the economic downturn not only to allow for nurturing but to ensure they keep in their brightest and best people in place for the long term.  If nurturing takes place effectively at the lead and client level, both the supplier company and the client company will be poised to act when the upturn takes hold.

 

Organizations today who act impulsively and go into hibernation mode with their sales and marketing functions may be doing themselves irrevocable long term harm.  Allowing competitors to gain entry and a strong footprint into their customer’s businesses.  They will also present themselves with a real risk that exceptional talent will leave and mediocrity will become part of their company DNA.   What are four actionable steps that organizations can take today to invest in heir sales and marketing during a downturn?

 

Customer Insight

 

The downturn will have a cataclysmic effect on buying behaviors and processes as aforementioned.  Organizations will need to gain insight into these changes and identify how hey must adapt.  This is exactly the time to actively engage in customer insight research that allows for buyer persona profiling, buying process scenario building, and getting at the core insights driving buying behaviors and decision-making.  The outcome will be a more targeted and effective identification of how to connect with buyers and how to navigate the changes in buying processes.

 

Training Correlated to Customer Insight

 

Once insight into buyer personas and buying processes has been achieved, organizations should invest in training and education of their sales and marketing forces on how to understand buyers, meet their goals, and help facilitate the buying process.  It is important to make a distinction here between sales training and education correlated to customer insight.  Sales training will always be a prudent means of improving sales effectiveness but it will be less fruitful in an economic downturn unless it is tied to understanding of real-time shifts in buying behaviors and buying processes.  It is critical that sales and marketing have education on these important insights and how they must adapt.  This type of education will not only maximize return on conventional sales training but will also produce the type of effectiveness that reduces wasted dollars in chasing improperly vetted opportunities.  In addition, continued and refreshing education will help to keep the talent pool stocked with dedicated winners.

 

Customer Messaging

 

Marketing efficiency is determined by its ability to connect with customers and buyers with resonance.  Based upon buyer persona profiling and gathered customer insight, Marketing will need to adjust customer and sales-ready messaging that connects with buyers on a level that appeal to their drives and goals.  Web strategy will need to be evaluated so that customer interaction points are aligned with the buyer’s needs during the buying cycle process.  Armed with insight, Marketing will need to align messaging and supporting data with that of the buyer’s process.  In the hypothetical example provided previously, marketing will need to insert an interaction point whereby it makes it easier for buyers and buying committees to pull down third-party supporting data such as analyst reports.  In an economic downturn, it becomes doubly important for Marketing to support Sales with sales-ready messaging that is on target, purposeful, and useable.  Primarily for the reason that in a downturn, you have fewer chances to get your message across to potential buyers and clients.  There is little room for error in getting your message right.

 

Sales and Marketing Alignment

 

An organization can gain significant efficiency in sales and marketing strategies if they are aligned.  Again, with fewer opportunities to get a story in front of potential and existing customers, discord or discrepancies will be magnified if sales and marketing are out of synch.  Having a deep understanding of the buying process, sales and marketing can be aligned around providing the buyer with the critical messaging and information needed at the right moment.  Potential and existing customers are fairly astute at knowing when a “fire drill” is on in order to meet a specific request during an interaction point.  Too many of these “fire drills” will seed doubt into the minds of buyers about the company’s ability to serve them after the sale is made.  In effect, introducing “buyer’s remorse” early into the process and causing the buyer to perhaps flee.

 

The organization that can focus on these four areas during the economic downturn will find itself in a stronger position when an upturn is starting to take hold.  In tough times, companies are afforded the opportunity to sharpen their sales and marketing prowess, tighten their focus on customers and messaging, and gain efficiencies in alignment. 

 

An economic downturn is without question tough for both suppliers and buyers.  Measures must be taken to streamline and reduce expenses.  All too often though, sales and marketing can be seen as the easy target for the amplification of dropping numbers is most felt in these areas.  Good and smart organization fight the impulse to scale back their sales and marketing dramatically under the false pretense that customer(s) are not buying at the moment.  Understanding the reasons why this is the precise moment you must invest in sales and marketing and what actionable tactical efforts can be made will prevent companies from making this fatal mistake.  And buyers, at those moments of upturn, will remember who their friends were during those rough days.

Buyer Persona Profiling and the Importance of Insight

Over the past year, experts have emphasized the importance of knowing who your buyers are. As a means to this, the art and science of buyer persona profiling has been advocated to help marketing and sales functions better know who their buyers are and what needs they must attend to.

An archetypal representation based upon real customers, a buyer persona profile consists of relevant information on backgrounds and goals. Those companies engaged in developing such profiles have very realistic outlines of who their target buyers are and as such should have an advantage over their competitors. However, many companies are not quite sure how to maximize the value of the buyer persona developed. So what is missing?

The key ingredient to maximizing the use of buyer personas is that of insight. Without some valuable insight, senior executives will wind up questioning the point of the whole exercise - "Our best sales person could have come up with that profile.” If you hear this, then you know you have got something wrong!  Unfortunately, some organizations find themselves so driven to get to 'know' their customer or buyer, they believe that the end means is the buyer persona profile itself.

In the case of marketing, for example, a tremendous amount of expenditure goes into market research, taking the form of focus groups, research reports, surveys and the myriad of CRM applications promising valuable customer data mining.  However, for many companies, real customer insight continues to remain elusive.

An argument can be made that this is primarily due to the inability of these methods to get at the underlying motivations, drivers and goals that provide the insight into customer buying behavior. This internal processing of market research and data 'crunching' leads to a false belief that a buyer persona profile can be created - a buyer persona, in particular, that can be justified by the data.

So how do we gain insight from buyer persona profiling?

Qualitative research

Certainly there is a strong correlation to the amount of qualitative research to the amount of insight received. An example is helpful in demonstrating this.

I recently worked with a client which, after experiencing falling sales, decided that getting a more robust picture of their buyer persona would help marketing and sales to reverse the trend. It was confident that the products and services were solid and that the organization simply needed to do a better job selling. Fortunately, we had been granted ample time to do extensive qualitative work.

At first, customers we visited heaped praise upon the company. But as we dug deeper, we discovered some interesting findings. Recently, the industry had been rocked by new legislation that affected almost every facet of the relationship between buyer and supplier. We discovered that two behavioral insights were taking place. Firstly, the buyers were uneasy about how to adapt to the new legislation. Secondly, they were placing value on the marketing and sales representatives of those suppliers who became conversant in the new legislation.

Sales were declining for our client because the buyers did not believe the marketing and sales representatives of the company were as conversant as those of its competitors, despite the company's superior products and services. This turned out to be profound revelation for the organization and it significantly changed how a buyer persona should be constructed. More importantly, the insight maximized the life value of the buyer persona.

As we shared the buyer persona in conjunction with the key insights, the organization quickly recognized the deficiency and began to mobilize around the content of the new legislation and provide their customers with guidance - thus, helping to reverse the trend.

Unarticulated meaning

Let’s take a brief look at what happened in this example.

At first, the buyer was reluctant to share their unease about the new legislation. Many customers had long tenured experiences with our client and were not comfortable admitting they were a little perplexed by how to adapt. This was compounded by the fact that it is human nature to be indirect with company representatives when it comes to expressing what they really think.

In our qualitative interviews, they heaped praise on the organization at first, since the company had provided superior products and services that helped to create a sound reputation in the marketplace. It became evident, however, that they were not getting what they believe they needed from the organization’s marketing and sales representatives.

Over a series of qualitative interviews, we began to pick up a pattern of hints about these inadequacies, even though they were naturally reluctant to be critical about an organization with which they had enjoyed a long-term relationship. This is referred to as searching for the 'unarticulated' meaning - where customers will either have a conscious difficulty, a lack of understanding, or are unaware of articulating a goal, motivation or drive that is lying beneath the surface.

Digging deep

We dug deep into this unarticulated pattern. In this example, the pattern we uncovered was the belief that marketing and sales representatives were not knowledgeable or conversant enough in the new legislation to be of help to them and alleviate their unease about how to adapt.

The inherent danger for an organization is that if these unarticulated notions are left to fester for too long, they can harden into what we call mental models - attitudes, beliefs, perceptions and assumptions that form. Specifically for this organization, the danger was that a mental model would form that the company was not keeping up with new legislation and that it could not rely on its marketing and sales representatives. Allowed to firmly cement in the minds of customers, the company would be faced with a very difficult task of convincing its customers that this was no longer true.

Without these valuable insights, the organization could still have easily created buyer persona profiles based on customer data and perhaps other research means. However, their value would be diminished if they were created without profound customer insight as the central component.

The end means is not the buyer persona profile itself but the journey by which we arrive at the buyer persona profile. In that journey, we uncover meaning and insight into how we can meet the goals and needs of customers in a way that provides a competitive advantage. The buyer persona profile then becomes the vehicle used to communicate to marketing, sales and product management deep 'insights' into customers - and how best to formulate strategies that create an electric connection with buyers.

The "Personas" of Obama, McCain, and now Joe "the Plumber"

In more than any election in recent history, the pushing of the candidate's persona has become central to each campaign's messaging.  It has not been confined to only in what they wish to convey about themselves.  But also in what they wish to convey about their opponent.  Personas are meant to represent archetypal representations of a target person, albeit a product user, consumer, business customer, or voter.  In the political realm this usually gets stretched a bit whereby the choices of descriptive labels are meant to provoke powerful images.  The uses of powerfully descriptive words are intended to create a mental image in the minds of the voters as well as the media about each other.  What do these choices of words convey and create in mental images?

    calm, cool, collective, angry, fighter, professorial, paling around, erratic, impulsive, experienced, hero, maverick, patriotic, leader, change, dangerous, liar, judgment, elite, champion, terrorist, fraud, temperament, bail out, rescue, reformer, we, I, and you 

Among many other words, each word is calculated to help create a mental image as well as descriptive "persona" about each person.  In the third and final debate, we were introduced to Samuel Wurzelbacher now famously known as "Joe the Plumber."  The attempt by McCain here, in addition to making it relevant to criticizing Obama's tax policy, was to conjure up the mental image of being in touch with the "persona" of the average middle-class worker and business owner.  Now poor Joe (or correctly Sam) really does not even own a business yet and he has been thrust into the limelight unfairly to represent the persona of a small business owner who struggles yet makes $251,000 annually and thus does not qualify for Obama's plan to reduce taxes for those 95% of Americans making less than $250,000 per year (for joint filing; $200,000 single filing). 

Also interesting in this presidential election are the vice presidential candidates and the "personas" they are attempting to project.  In the case of Sarah Palin, you have the descriptive word labels of hockey mom, reformer, maverick, folksy, hunter, and executive being used to create a "persona" of Sarah the Barracuda.  Of course, Tina Fey has done more than the media or the Obama-Biden campaign to create a different "persona" of Sarah Palin in the minds of the voter than the McCain campaign had hoped for.  Joe Biden consistently harkens back to his roots in Scranton, PA to embrace a persona of being one of those hard working blue collar people who have struggled economically in their lifetime of living in Pennsylvania.  The stories of his dad telling him when a champ gets knocked down, he gets back up is meant to instill the image of the working class guy persona on your side.  Of course the McCain-Palin camp hopes to wrap Joe Biden in the persona of a Washington insider.

The recent financial crisis also offered up how each candidate's behavior is meant to elicit a mental "persona" in the mind's of voters.  John McCain's announcement to suspend his campaign and to charge into Washington appeared as an attempt to paint the mental persona of the fighter, the leader, the man who leads the troops on the front lines, and the man who can single handily save the day.  Sort of your political Jack Bauer of the day, meant to suspend the campaign for 24 hours and ride out of Washington as the hero who saved the country from imminent doom.  Obama on the other hand attempted to foster a mental persona of the leader who is calm under fire, a consensus builder, knows how to get people working together, can manage from afar, and can articulate principled plans and assurances to the American people. 

In past presidential campaigns, we have had downright comical behavioral attempts by politicians to fit into a persona they think will resonate with voters.  Who can remember John Kerry going hunting?  How about Michael Dukakis riding an army tank?  What about Bill Clinton hitting every donut shop and gaining 30 pounds that was parodied in a SNL skit?  And remember George H.W. Bush shopping in a grocery store and failing miserably at the check out counter?  This year, I think Obama learned the lesson of staying away from a bowling alley.

Body language and stature also have been used to help create a picture of a persona in the minds of a voter.  Obama has a more reserved body language that is meant to align with the calm leader under crisis persona.  McCain's body language has been to lean forward and to align with the image of a fighter. 

At times, both have let their guard down and displayed body language that is shall we say - out of whack.  In the third and final debate, McCain's body language of sighing and eyes rolling was eerily similar to that of Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election.  His body gestures caused voters to paint a mental persona of the "angry" man.  Obama, in an earlier debate with Hillary Clinton, smirked and made a comment that caused voters to paint a mental persona of one who is dismissive and arrogant. 

Since 1964, how many political aspirants have used the famous gestures of John F. Kennedy at press conferences and briefings to paint a mental persona of the thoughtful, articulate, and humorous leader with exuberated royal Camelot-like leadership?  Too many to count!

At each of their respective conventions, we saw the carefully staged drop backs and visuals to support the persona they wished to project for each candidate.  In the case of Obama at Mile High Stadium (I just can’t say Pepsi Center!), we saw the columns and the setting that may have been meant to evoke a Martin Luther King “I Have a Dream” moment in history.  With John McCain, the portrayal of the “war hero” was most evident.  The visual of McCain’s entrance on the extended stage may have been an attempt to project McCain in the same light as George C. Scott’s portrayal of General Patton in the movie “Patton.”   Whereby there is the famous scene of General Patton giving an expletive laced speech with a giant American flag as the drop back.

As I am positing here, the concept of calculating personas has become an ingredient of political campaigning.  If we were to imagine a group of advisors sitting around discussing personas, what rough sketches of personas might they come up with?  Let’s start with the McCain campaign:

Here is the “persona” they hope to project about Barack Obama (I am using capitalization to show what they may emphasize):

Now let’s see how they might create a McCain persona they want to project:

Now let’s take a look at the McCain campaign’s latest target voter, Joe the Plumber:

Imagine now the Obama camp of advisors, strategizing about personas.  Here is what they may be thinking of how to project a persona of John McCain to voters:

 Of course, they want to put the best foot forward for their candidate, Barack Obama:

 Imagine if you will, the Obama camp getting into an argument and saying that Joe the Plumber is not their target voter.  What might be Obama’s target voter?  Let’s take a look at a fictional persona, Susan Masten, from suburban Philadelphia:

Following some of the principles of persona creation, in this rough sketch Susan can easily be an independent voter who leans Democrat.  In contrasting Joe the Plumber with Susan, it is a little more obvious in how each candidate might be messaging to their base as well as independents. 

Undoubtedly, in this new technology age of presidential elections, the use and power of personas will become increasingly prominent.  There is an inherent danger in this premise that we must all be on guard.  That is, how candidates will shape their own persona as well as that of their opponent further and further away from what is real and truthful.  This is already a common problem in politics when we have 20 second sound bites and organizations like Fact Check to weigh in on the attacks and assertions of candidates.  However, there is a very big upside to political campaigns if they adopt persona-based research and creation into their efforts as have an increasing number of corporations in their design, sales, and marketing efforts.  (And I am not talking about focus groups that many of these same corporations have lessened their use of due to the lack of insight they provide.  I am talking about real qualitative research that yields profound insight.)  They will deepen their understanding of voters and constituencies.  Giving them the insight they need to connect better with voters and to deliver messages and platforms that are in tune with that of the voters.

Being in tune in this sense is the key.  Unfortunately, many people are “tuned out” on politics because they hear the same 4 or 5 point based messages from political candidates over and over ad nauseam.  Barack Obama seems to have captured the essence of this premise early in his campaign and it is one of the reasons he is on the verge of becoming the next president.  John McCain, at this moment in time, never seemed to have captured the connection to voters that was beyond the same rhetoric commonly heard from politicians. 

It is not an easy task to find that “nerve” that electrifies.  Adopting persona principles and understanding in political campaigns offers a promise that politicians will understand their constituencies better and connect with voters on a meaningful level.  Certainly, a process by which more people will become engaged in the political process.   

Speaking of which, make sure you exercise your civic duty and right to go out and vote!