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 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

 

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.

Bridging the Gap Between Marketing & Sales with Buyer Personas

The issue of sales and marketing alignment has been floating in the corporate hallways for several years now.  What I am finding most interesting is that the definitions surrounding the "sales & marketing alignment" conundrum are, to use the proverbial expression, all over the map.  What prompted me to think about this was Dave Stein's post, Marketing's Knowledge of Salespeople, on his Commentary on Sales Leadership blog.  The main tenet of his post is best said by Dave:

"What’s going on is that many CEOs, COOs, GMs, and other executives haven’t figured out that sales and marketing alignment is more about culture, philosophy and business orientation than it is about marketing providing sales with leads, marketing messages and sexy product brochures and sales selling enough so everyone, especially those in marketing, gets to keep their jobs."

I am sure some will find this to be quite a provocative statement.  One thing I can say is that there have been many undertones in recent webinars, blog posting, and articles about this gap in culture.  I use undertone because most of the discussions seems to be around marketing "placating" sales with leads and getting them to make more money - without really addressing what lies underneath the gap.  Yes, sales wants these things and marketing is more than happy to oblige because they need to see successes in their product marketing strategies. 

Dave's point that the gap is best defined through culture, philosophy, and business orientation gets to another crucial point.  That is, that these three variables create different prisms or lenses by which marketing and sales views the customer.  Marketing and sales, through their divergent cultures, can wind up with vastly different views of the customer.  The next time you are in a meeting with marketing and sales representation, perk up your ears and listen to the conversational tennis match of "what I think the customer wants" literally bouncing off the walls of the conference room.  Like Dave, I served as a VP in both sales and marketing.  The adjustment to the "culture" of each was pronounced.  What is unfortunate is that the gap has created an environment whereby each area doesn't garner a high opinion of each.  And both claim that the "other side" just doesn't "get it."   

How do we get sales and marketing to see through the same lenses and have a common view of the customer?  Buyer Personas offers the opportunity to create this common view and become the bridge that soars over the raging cultural waters running below.  Buyer Personas are archetypal or fictional representations of a company's buyer.  They are grounded in qualitative field work that helps to create a common view of goals, issues, motivators, needs, and insight.  More importantly, once they are created, they introduce the much needed objectivity into the discussions about customers. 

By creating and using buyer personas, organizations can begin to see real gains in the effectiveness of marketing and sales strategies.  Why?  Buyer personas can achieve alignment around a common view of the buyer.  One of the most influential books I have ever read was The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge.  In it, the author has a chapter about how to place a hotly contested issue in the middle of the conference room and create objectivity.  Buyer Personas offers a very tangible and literal way to make this happen.  Placing the buyer persona(s) in the middle of the conference room is an effective way to introduce objectivity and to have the focal point be about the common view of the customer.  This elevates the cultural and business orientation strengths of each area to a complementary level. 

Creating buyer personas is not as easy as it may sound and I cannot certainly give it the full treatment in this post.  Today, we are seeing smart thinking organizations that are now training and staffing buyer persona experts in their marketing and sales groups who can steer each department towards this common view of the customer.  These buyer persona experts truly offer the potential to bring to life the voice of the customer in a way that has not been achieved before. 

What Channel Convergence Means To B2B Buyer Personas

In more conventional terms, marketing has often thought of the "buyer" within a one dimensional framework.  Especially in B2B marketplaces where marketing and sales tends tend to think of the buyer as someone who sales "meets" with and sells to.  The definition between an offline customer and an online customer has also become fairly blurred in B2B markets yet many marketing departments tend to be concrete in categorizing customers in one of two segments.

When you contrast this with consumer markets, where consumers generally are more clearer about whether they are "click" or "motor" type customers, you see we have a dilemma in identifying buyer personas.  Unlike consumers who tend to lean more strongly one way or the other, the B2B buyer tends to now converge channels into an integrated buying cycle and process.  And, I bet confusing the heck out of many marketing departments. 

An example of this is the "buyer" of delivery services such as FedEx or UPS.  The buying process, even in just one day, could involve multiple contacts online and with a FedEx or UPS representative.  Sourcing online and in conversations with a person, a "buyer" is making a decision about services that fits his or her needs at that time.  On top of that, he or she may also be in conversations with third party channels who handle freight for FedEx or UPS.  Thus, in one day, a buyer could be interacting with three different channels in the buying cycle.

What does this now mean to the practice of identifying buyer personas.  It certainly means that the notion of just answering "who are our buyers" today is not sufficient.  Marketing Communications and Product Marketing must delve deeper into getting answers to:

A. How does the buyer engage in the buying process?

B. Why did the buyer make the decision to use our product or a competitor's product?

My partner Angela Quail and I have seen a rise in the advocacy of buyer personas over the past year.  This advocacy has called for identifying "who" your buyer personas are.  Which we could not be more ecstatic about!  On the surface, crafting a buyer persona may not look much different than doing that of a consumer persona.  Believe me, there is a significant difference.  There is also an unclear spectrum about the quality of personas that are being developed today.  Angela addresses this eloquently in her recent post, Beyond Fake Personas, on her Persona Creation blog. In essence, the degree of qualitative and ethnographic research affects the overall quality and usefulness of buyer personas. 

Given that buyers today are integrating and converging channels into their buying processes, what do Marketing Communications and Product Marketing do?  They must answer the two questions mentioned in this manner:

A.   Investments need to be made into identifying the buying processes of buyers.  What you may find is that segmentation along "channels" is no longer going to work.  Especially if your marketing department is organized by channels.  A scenario mapping of how the buyer flows through the buying cycle process needs to be derived.  This is so that all channel departments can see how a buyer engages and at which point in the buying cycle.

B.  To get at "why" a customer makes certain buying decisions, there is no room for guessing!  This will take the artful skill of engaging in qualitative conversations with buyers.  Whereas the "how" can be determined with ethnographic skills, the "why" is going to take some anthropological skills to understand the culture of organizations and how it affects buying decisions.  If it sounds tricky - well - it is!  Identifying the mental models by which buyers make decisions is a hard practice.  It is truly analogous to the anthropologist who digs a few shovels deeper and uncovers a chest filled with gold chalices.  The gold chalices in this case are the revealing insights that can lead to a market changing competitive advantage or innovation breakthrough.

The summation is that channel convergence means that the creation of buyer personas today cannot stop just at answering the "who" and having a profile of the buyer.  Answering the "how" and "why" to complete the buyer persona research and development is critical to gaining the maximum advantage of buyer persona insight. 

Angela and I will be launching a series of workshops and seminars this year to help companies learn about how to implement buyer persona creation and get at the who, how, and why of buyer persona research and development.  The first of these will be a Buyer Persona Creation Workshop in July in San Francisco.  There, we will cover not only how to create a buyer persona but how to do scenario mapping and how to identify the mental models of buyers that affect decision-making.   

One thing we are advocating is that every B2B organizations needs in-house buyer persona research and development expertise if it is to stay competitive.  So, we hope to see you at one of our future workshops or seminars! 

Personas Are All About Context

I recently met with the head of a fairly large consumer goods company.  We had an interesting discussion about how to interpret data and research.  As we conversed, I could see frustration building.  In essence, what he found frustrating was that the enormous mountain of data and research still was not telling him what he needed to know about his customers and buyers.  The market is changing and the data is telling him so however it is not telling a story of how it is changing and why it is changing.  It is not telling him how buying habits and patterns are changing and why now.  Equally frustrating was that although the organization had a sense of who their buyers were, they could not pinpoint much else  about the buyer other than what their data was telling them.  As we were talking, I couldn't help think of this cartoon:

How many of us in our career have sat around a table and poured over reams of data, market reports, research studies, and sales anecdotal reports to arrive at a target composite customer?  And we all leave the room with that uneasy voice in our head saying: "I'm not so sure if that is right but if everyone thinks so, I'll go along."

What he was missing most was the context in which all of the data could have meaning.  Personas, in particular to this situation, can help provide the context for which all of the data can sit and tell a story.  Often times, marketing and sales executives insert data as part of their presentations to employees about markets and customers.  Employees do gain insight into the customer but walk away with a more factual view and have no context in which to place the customer.   

Performing qualitative and ethnographic based fieldwork helps to identify the context in which buying decisions are made.  I suggested that to truly find out why buying patterns were changing, he was going to need to get in the "field" and have the heart-to-heart with buyers on why.  Good evidence for this need was that the sales anecdotal reports could not provide a clue.   

Since the buying process appeared to be changing amongst his customer base, he was in need of getting a view of exactly what that looked like.  Building various buying scenarios showing personas in action would help provide the context of how and why the buying process was changing.  In the end, providing the context to gain insight and meaning from the data mining the company exercises.  In cases like this, it is important to have a good sense of what the quantitative data is providing but also to recognize the limitations in terms of providing context.  The qualitative creation of buyer personas and buying scenarios gives context and meaning to what the data may be saying.

In the beginning of persona development back in the mid to late 90's, I can remember the concept of "context" was talked about heavily in relations to understanding users.  As buyer personas and buying scenarios make their way into being a useful process for sales and marketing, conversations about context should be in the forefront.  If we are left with just data and even just a persona profile alone, we'll be left with the famous words of Joe Friday in the venerable detective show Dragnet: "Just the facts, Mam.  Just the facts."

The heart of the matter for buyer personas: B2B Complexity

One of the most pressing issues that have surfaced in the last few years with the evolution of personas and with buyer personas in particular is how to address the complexity often found in B2B markets.  In fact, I believe it is the underlying issue that has prevented buyer personas from being more widely adapted.  We've seen this issue raised in several of the organizations we've worked with to create user and buyer personas (Goal Centric) and accompanied by anxious questions related to how to actually use the personas.  In one Fortune 100 company we worked with, we saw "personas" that were created but had little value for they did not address the issue of B2B complexity.  Thus, the significant investment made was all for naught.  My partner, Angela Quail, and I helped to address the situation however it did leave us shaking our heads at how some persona efforts done without the rigors necessary can do more harm than good.  As I mentioned in my previous blog entry, this misunderstanding and common pitfall of attempting to create a "single" user or buyer persona can be costly and result in little value.  And unfortunately give personas and buyer personas a bad name.

Before I became involved with Alan Copper's efforts with personas in 1999, I spent the majority of my career in sales and marketing.  One thing that I am sure any person in the B2B markets will tell you is that there is never just one "buyer" in these markets.  Back in the day as they say, some of the most successful sales managers and sales reps I hired were able to not only grasped this notion but also were able to devise plans to speak to the many buyers that would exist in an enterprise account. 

Reading Saeed Khan's On Product Management recent entry on the value of personas for developing enterprise administration software joggled memories of what perplexed me when involved with the likes of SAP in the early days of personas.  Although more than one user persona of an enterprise application was being developed, my instincts were telling me that they were not addressing the multiple buyers and stakeholders in the process.  Thus, the seed was planted on thoughts about customer personas, as they were first called, before the term buyer personas became more common. 

An individual buyer persona in a complex B2B market can prove to be of only marginal value if it stands alone.  Of course, I advocate even one individual buyer persona over doing nothing at all to improve a company's understanding of their customers.  To fully realize the potential of buyer personas today, they need to be part of an overall effort to integrate them with buying process scenarios and a view of the "ecosystem" that is relevant to a specific B2B market.  These views are essential to understanding the many roles that participate in the buying cycle and how as well as why buying decisions are made. 

Consider briefly the product development and buying cycle of an enterprise software application.  The likelihood that there will not only be many types of users but there will also be many types of buyers and stakeholders affecting the purchase and adoption on an enterprise level is quite high.  Thus, the degree of complexity is significantly greater than that of creating a user persona for a B2C product or that of a buyer persona for a small business. 

David Meerman Scott, who has a really neat blog called Web Ink Now, talks extensively through his new book The New Rules of Marketing & PR and speaking engagements about the new rules for B2B marketers.  A couple of rules do apply here.  One, that your audiences are no longer prospects but buyer personas.  Second, is that the old rule of sales cycles must give way to buying cycles.  Understanding not only who your buyer personas are but also how they engage in the buying cycle (and how the buying process is defined) is a "new rule" for the creation of buyer personas.  This deeper level of understanding will ultimately help an organization to address the B2B complexity they are confronted with and to realize the full value of buyer personas.