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







