Buyer Persona Insights

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