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.
