Last week, my partner Angela Quail and I were chatting about business ecosystems. We got involved with this concept last year in talks with IBM and later on began crafting persona ecosystems for clients. IBM is a big proponent of establishing an ecosystem view of your internal organization and its connections to customers and markets. Thus, we had some fairly robust discussions around this idea. We were pleasantly surprised to see the following on Harvard's Executive Education web site:
"Attaining true customer centricity requires a fundamental, enterprise-wide shift in thinking and reorientation of your value proposition—moving away from a business organized around functions or products toward one aligned around the customer. This entails reconfiguring your firm's entire "ecosystem"—customers, internal stakeholders, and channel partners, along with organizational processes, structures, and systems. A well-developed understanding of the ecosystem can help your company achieve superior product and service innovation."
This is an extremely important viewpoint and offers a pathway for building customer-centric organizations. Equally important, is this view not only offers understanding the ecosystem of your internal organization but also for translating the same perspectives of your customer's ecosystem. For one of our clients last year, we exercised bringing their customer's businesses and markets into full view by creating a persona ecosystem of their buyers, users, stakeholders, channel partners, markets, and the ultimate end user of their customer's businesses. It entailed the rigorous and deepest type of qualitative study we were ever involved in. The revelations were profound.
Through persona ecosystems, you can achieve a more refined view of which roles are involved from a user and buyer perspective, which roles your customers interact with outside of their own organizations, and achieve refined understanding of your customer's organizational characteristics. From a B2B vantage point, this is critical for the "customer" or the "buyer" is often times the company. And, rarely is the buyer just ultimately one person. In the true sense of the word, it is a company of people. In fact, a recent study by Sirius Decisions showed that the average lengths of sales cycles have increased by 22% and that they involved 3.6 or more decision-makers to close a deal. Note that is 3.6 or more decision-makers involved in closing a sale! I would call that a company of decision-makers!
Previously, I wrote about B2B complexity being at the heart of the matter for buyer personas. With B2B marketing and sales becoming increasingly more complex, persona ecosystems may be a requirement to fully understand how to improve the businesses of your customers. This is an increasing buying criterion on the part of buyers today. Understanding your buyer persona is one component. Crafting buying process scenarios are another important component. However, you will most likely discover that your buyer persona now has expectations that in complex environments, marketers must be fully knowledgeable about how to make an impact on the top-line revenue and bottom-line profits of their customers.
Buyer personas have come a long way in the last couple of years. Nevertheless, adoption by B2B companies with complex marketing and selling environs still appears to be relatively modest. But for those who have adopted buyer personas, some are expanding the "science" aspects of persona development into the realm of ecosystems. Persona ecosystems hold plenty of promise for organizations committed to building true customer-centric organizations.
