Buyer Persona Insights

Buyer Persona Strategy Playbooks Introduced By Goal Centric

Announced today was Goal Centric’s official introduction of the Buyer Persona Strategy Playbooks series.  I have made reference to these playbooks in recent posts as well as our work with Hewlett-Packard.  My colleague Angela Quail and I have taken quite a journey of innovation with respect to the playbooks.  In collaborating with Kevin Hooper, VP of EMG at HP, we’ve been able to work with an innovator and pioneer in the use of buyer persona strategy development that provides insights for the creation of sales and buyer enablement strategies.  The press release can be found at:

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010buyerpersonastrategy/03goalcentric/prweb3663374.htm

Below it is printed for your convenience:

Buyer Persona Strategy Playbooks Introduced by Goal Centric

Goal Centric introduces revolutionary strategy, marketing, and sales playbooks based on buyer insights and buyer personas. HP incorporates use of buyer persona playbooks to develop winning strategies and gain marketshare in the mid-market space.

New York, NY (PRWEB) March 15, 2010 -- Goal Centric Management, Inc., a privately held strategy consulting firm and the leading experts on Buyer Insights and Buyer Persona Development since 2002, announced the introduction of their Buyer Persona Strategy Playbooks Series. The interactive Playbooks are designed to provide an insightful view of customers and buyers that will enable senior leaders to formulate effective strategies in sales, marketing, and customer experiences. Goal Centric addresses senior leaders’ need to gain critical market and buyer insight to inform strategies that result in top line revenue growth.

The Buyer Persona Strategy Playbooks Series will consist of four Playbooks aligned with strategy, sales, and marketing:

The Buyer Persona Strategy Playbook: designed to provide the foundational insight into an organization’s target buyers and their ecosystem of relationships, a detailed view of their buying processes, and strategic insight about how to best meet their goals.

The Buyer Persona Sales Playbook: designed to enable sales teams with the situational conversation guidance they need to anticipate buyer goals and to align selling processes with their buyers’ buying processes.

The Buyer Persona Marketing Playbook: designed to empower marketing teams with the insight and guidance they need to create marketing and sales-ready messaging that resonates with buyers.

The Buyer Persona Experience Playbook: designed to map a buyer’s journey through an organization’s touch points, providing leaders with the insight they need to uncover gaps and create new touch point experiences that improve customer loyalty.

“The Playbooks are revolutionary in that they are designed to help senior executives answer the questions of where to play, who to play with, how to play, and how to win in today’s dynamically changing buyer-centric marketplace,” said Tony Zambito, Founder and Principal of Goal Centric. “The Playbooks are designed to enable strategy, buyers, sales, and marketing in a way that creates alignment to best serve buyers’ goals.”

Buyer personas, archetypal representations of buyers and their buying processes, serve as guides to marketing strategy, sales strategy, customer and sales messaging, and content development. "We've often seen companies that just create a buyer persona profile as the end product, which is too insubstantial and misses the strategic value of buyer personas," said Angela Quail, Goal Centric Principal. "The Buyer Persona Strategy Playbooks Series result from an investigative process that gathers critical buyer insight designed to inform and deploy executable, top line revenue growth strategies.”

Hewlett-Packard Company, which mounted a 9,000 mid-market accounts mapping strategy with partners, utilized Goal Centric’s Buyer Persona Strategy, Sales, and Marketing Playbooks to gain the insight it needed to develop effective sales, marketing, and buyer enablement programs. “The Buyer Persona Playbooks provided us with the information we needed to win in the mid-market space. The Playbooks enabled our selling teams to anticipate buyers’ wants, needs and decision process at their level, using their language and terminology. They have been a key game changer and a component of our market share gains against the competition”, said Kevin Hooper, HP Vice President, Emerging Growth Accounts, Enterprise Business Sales. HP has developed vertical market strategies around buyer personas that align their sales and marketing organizations efforts to win at the mid-market competitive level.

About Goal Centric

Goal Centric is a privately held company based in New York, New York and Menlo Park, California. Goal Centric is a strategy consulting firm that provides Buyer Insight and Buyer Persona Development services to help companies understand their customers better and develop growth strategies. The company today is led by two noted innovators and experts in buyer persona development, Tony Zambito (author of the blog Buyer Persona Insights and Angela Quail (author of the blog Persona Creation), who together have nearly twenty years in persona development experience. The two principal partners have provided persona development advisory services to many of today's leading global companies, including FedEx, Reed Elsevier, Microsoft, HP, and IBM.

For more information, visit www.goalcentric.com.

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Buyer Persona 2.0 – Part 7 – Buyer Personas Segmentation

Over the past few years, our firm Goal Centric has engaged with high profile organizations that place a high value on performing market segmentation.  Where buyer personas fit in the scheme of segmentation has been a source of confusion since the early days of design personas.  There has been misconceptions about how buyer personas are either in opposition to or not useful to segmentation.  When we began bridging the gap between our origins in design personas to creating the practicum of buyer personas, we began to also bridge the segmentation divide.   

Buyer Personas Segmentation

In the B2B and buyer-centric marketplace of today, buyer personas can play a crucial role in segmentation efforts.  Buyer personas can effectively enhance large scope segmentation initiatives by providing the layered details and insight that if often missing from such efforts.  Whereby market segmentation can provide information at the 3,000 feet level or sometimes at even the 300 feet level, buyer personas can help selling and marketing teams to know what is going on at the 3 feet level.  Buyer personas bring a sense of equilibrium to the scientific quantitative approach used in market segmentation contrasted by the qualitative gathering of buyer insight needed to create buyer personas. 

Bring to Life

Without buyer personas, market segmentation has been a static and sterile exercise.  This form of exercise can become a marketing statistician’s dream of cutting, slicing, dicing, and correlating huge amounts of quantitative data.  The growth of CRM, Sales Automation, and Data Mining applications has provided a home for the numerous lists of market and company data.   Many sales teams today start their day by turning on such applications as Salesforce.com while marketing teams perhaps dig deep into report generators from CRM and Data Mining applications.  All in the search for that ever so elusive “gold mine” of revelations that will put the organization on top of it’s’ competitors, 

What buyer personas can do is bring to life the human side of the quantitative data housed in these applications.  Well investigated and crafted buyer personas can provide a means for understanding at the human level a real person with a set of real goals.  Most sales and marketing teams are working from lists of market segmentation data that is focused on markets, roles, company names, products, employees, and the list can go on and on – and on.  Unfortunately, oftentimes with little focus on the goals of buyers.

Humanistic

Buyer personas are adept at painting a humanistic picture of how as well as why a buyer is attempting to accomplish specific goals.  This picture can give the selling and marketing teams the badly needed context that the quantitative data cuts can sometimes lack.  It also can put into context where is the appropriate place to “go-to-market” in terms of who to reach with sales and marketing messaging.  For example, an IT services provider can mandate that “we are going to target the C-Level or C-Suite”.  Whereby the qualitative gathering of buyer insight needed to craft buyer personas would reveal that their products and/or services are best designed to meet the specific goals of mid-level managers. 

Goals Not Roles

In my previous post in this series –part 6, I emphasized how buyer personas are defined by goals.  One of the misconceptions that can plague buyer personas is that buyer personas are used to help bring to life specific roles – especially in a B2B setting.  This is also where the distinction between buyer profiling and buyer personas, as emphasized in part 6, can come in handy once again.  When buyer personas are misunderstood as just profiles, then it will be an exercise of profiling a specific role that is deemed as the target buyer.  Usually done from an internal data gathering exercise - the appropriate question of what are their goals as well as issues is asked but goals are not used as the defining premise.  However, creating buyer personas without a thorough investigative and qualitative gathering process can lead to “buyer persona profiles” being created for the wrong roles per se’ in the target market.  In the example already mentioned, if the C-Level is mandated and a role of CIO is targeted, a marketing team could build “buyer persona profiles” for the CIO.  The investigative process though would have revealed that the specific defining goals of an IT Director, with buying power, were a direct fit to the product and/or services being offered – and consequently a higher probability of success. 

How Many Is Too Many

The question of how many buyer personas is often asked in our client engagements.  But as is often the case, the question is asked in the context of the misconception of buyer personas being a “profiling” exercise only.  For instance, if the focus is on roles, it will be a temptation to build “buyer persona profiles” for each role.  Whereby an investigative process may reveal that multiple roles have an equivalent set of meaningful goals and that a single created buyer persona is appropriate for multiple roles in a market.  The question is best answered by reiterating that buyer personas are defined by goals and that if the goals are distinct from another, then a buyer persona should be created for each distinctive set of goals.  This is what makes buyer personas a powerful enabler to the process of market segmentation. 

The Future of Market Segmentation

As the exponential growth of increasingly complex variations of quantitative data begins to overwhelm organizations, more and more will look to buyer personas, as originally intended, to help shape distinctive segmentation efforts.  Making segmentation a more humanistic exercise and bringing to life realistic pictures of buyers at the 3 feet level versus the 3,000 feet level.   Thus enabling selling and marketing teams to engage with buyers on a “one-to-one” personal level with the focus where it can best serve buyers – on their specific goals.

Next: Buyer Persona 2.0 – Part 8

Buyer Persona 2.0 – Part 6 – Buyer Personas Are Not Just Profiles

Over the past few years, I have struggled with the use of the word “profile” or “profiling” when it came to describing buyer personas.  I have used the terms myself on occasion but never felt right about doing so.  My discomfort is arisen out of experience, what the terms fails to communicate about buyer personas, and how it is problematic in gaining adoption by senior leaders.  I believe the use of the word “profile” has led to some of the misconceptions that exists about buyer personas and has caused in many cases a significant departure from the “truisms” about personas established more than a decade ago.  We’ve seen buyer personas definitions that start out in such ways as:

· “A profile of your typical buyer….”

· “A brief description and profile ………”

· “A profile and short biography…….”

· “A description and profile of a specific person…”

· “A profile of your customer segment...”

What is common about these many attempts at defining buyer personas is that they are focused on profiling and descriptions only.  While profiling can be an element of buyer personas, they were not meant to be just profiles.

Buyer Personas Are Not Just Profiles

The concept of customer profiling has been a part of business practices for well over a quarter of century now.  Target marketing and the advances in the selling professions such as Consultative Selling, Conceptual Selling, LAMP, Key Account Selling, and the many more have all included an element of profiling your target customer.   Target selling and customer profiling called for asking the same level of questions that have been suggested for creating buyer personas, such as:

· What are your target’s goals and issues?

· How does your target go about making decisions?

· What professional magazines do they read?

· Who do they support?

· What motivates them?

· What are their pain points?

· And a host more of similar questions…….

These types of questions can help create an understanding of who the target buyer is and how best to approach from a selling and perhaps content marketing perspective.  Where this can become problematic in gaining senior leadership adoption of buyer personas is when these leaders have risen through the ranks and are experienced with profiling.  I have encountered conversations with CEO’s, SVP’s, and VP’s in both sales and marketing who have looked me straight in the eye and stated something to the effect of : “we’ve been profiling for a long time and I see buyer persona profiles as just another way of doing what should be done as standard practice.”  The issue here is that profiles, in terms of how they are constructed, do not fully represent the intended purpose of buyer personas established nearly ten years ago.

Buyer Profiles Are Different Than Buyer Personas

It is important to make a distinction between buyer profiles and buyer personas.  Buyer profiles tend to consist of what can be called static characteristics that can be derived from quantitative analysis and market research methods.  Buyer personas are detailed graphical narratives that represent the buyer in action and are derived from qualitative synthesizing of in-depth one-on-one buyer insight gathering.  In my first article in this Buyer Persona 2.0 series, I stressed the importance of buyer insight gathering and how this has been overlooked or presented as lightly needed.  Buyer personas were meant from its’ inception to provide detailed graphical and narrative stories which allowed for a rich robust understanding of the buyer’s goals and mental models that lead to the buying decision.  To accomplish this requires the investigative process to attain an accurate and insightful buyer persona portrayal. 

Buyer Personas Are Not “Made-Up”

In the late 90’s, Alan Cooper established the creation and use of personas for design.  Angela Quail and I were fortunate to have received as a by-product of working for him the first hand knowledge of several “truisms” about personas in general that has served as guiding principles for our own efforts in buyer persona development.  One of these is:

Buyer Personas are not “made up” and are derived as an outcome of a thorough investigative process

Buyer profiles can be “made-up” through the synthesizing of variables found through quantitative data from market research, segmentation analysis, CRM applications, and other sources. (Note: I do not use the words “made-up” in a negative sense – only to help make the distinction between buyer profiles and buyer personas.)  Buyer personas are distinct in that they are derived from a planned investigative process that involves direct face-to-face interviewing, in-depth conversations, direct observations, and use of other techniques associated with anthropological and/or ethnographic research which I have summed up previously as buyer insight gathering.   

Buyer Personas Are Goal Centric

Another of the “truisms” especially important for buyer personas is that they are defined by their goals.  In part 3 of this series I covered the types of buyer goals that exist with buyer personas.  Since the dawn of personas in general, goals has always been the crucial core element.  It is the primary reason the name of our firm is Goal Centric.  Attaining a deep insightful understanding of goals comes through the investigative process and goes beyond the stand alone question of – what are their goals? 

Buyer Personas are defined by deep understanding of buyer goals obtained through rigor and precision

Defining goals need to be done with much rigor and precision.  The investigative process can reveal insight into goals that can affect the buying process and decisions significantly.  What makes buyer personas distinctive from buyer profiles is that goals serve as the basis for the dynamic graphical and narrative story building that makes them more robust than static buyer profiles.   

Buyer Personas Represent Buying Processes and Behavioral Patterns

Identifying the workflow of the buying processes and what behavioral patterns are exhibited also make buyer personas distinctive from buyer profiles.  In the graphical narratives it is important to put buyer personas in action accomplishing goals through the buying process. 

Buyer Personas are representative of buying processes and behavioral patterns

Behavioral patterns offer clues to how the buyer engages with others and the buying process.  This can provide tremendous insight and background for sales and marketing teams on how to align their own processes with that of the buyer.  At Goal Centric, we have depicted buying processes and behavioral patterns through carefully constructed buying scenarios which show how the buyer engages with non-sales and sales resources during the buying process. 

Buyer Personas Are Meant To Provide Insight

Buyer profiles are based on predominantly quantitative data about known facts.  Buyer personas are distinctive in that the end goal is to uncover insight that can lead to a market edge.  There are three areas of insight that the investigative process should focus on:

· The Unarticulated: oftentimes deductions can be made as a result of identifying patterns in buyer insight gathering whereby goals and needs are expressed in such ways that their meanings and references are completely new.

· The Not Yet Discovered: through the investigative process of buyer insight gathering, new roles, markets, product needs, and etc. can be uncovered that no other resources had yet to uncover before. 

· Mental Models: identifying attitudes, beliefs, perceptions, and behavior can be encapsulated into constructs called mental models.  Portrayed in graphical narratives, they offer very powerful insights that can significantly change a course of action or provoke an emotional response. 

Buyer Personas offer insight into the unarticulated, the not-yet-discovered, and impactful mental models

As opposed to offering static profile information, the insights can significantly provide a powerful platform for sales and marketing organizations to engage with buyers like no other competitor can.  Allowing for more engaging and intimate sales conversations as well as relevant messaging that has meaning to the buyer. 

Buyer Personas Informs Strategy

When Alan Cooper made the use of personas prominent, its’ primary function is to inform design.  A “truism” similarly exists in the world of buyer personas.  Buyer personas need to be constructed with a means to an end of informing business and customer facing strategies.  This is of the highest importance to have senior leaders adopt Buyer Persona 2.0 as a core competency and business practice of their organizations. 

Buyer Personas serve as a communications tool to inform senior leaders on buyer centric strategies that serve buyers

At Goal Centric, we’ve had enlightening success with this endeavor in some cases.  One CEO in particular embraced the efforts enthusiastically and the unique uncovering that he scheduled an off-site executive meeting to review the buyer personas in detail.   The purpose being to determine how the revelations impacted strategic planning and how the organization can communicate to employees a charted course of direction through the use of buyer personas. 

Buyer Persona 2.0: A New Standard Definition of Buyer Persona

At this stage in the next generation of buyer persona modeling and development – Buyer Persona 2.0, it is my belief that a new standard definition of buyer persona is needed.  A definition that embraces the so called truisms about personas in general as well as ultimately becomes the accepted practice of informing senior leadership on strategic direction that best serves buyers in today’s buyer centric marketplace:

What Are Buyer Personas?

· Buyer Personas are richly detailed archetypal representations of real buyers

· Buyer Personas are derived from the investigative process of buyer insight gathering

· Buyer Personas are goal centric at their core and goals are defined through rigor and precision

· Buyer Personas are representative of buyers in action and engaged in the buying process

· Buyer Personas provide insight into the unarticulated, the not-yet-discovered, and affecting mental models of buyers

· Buyer Personas serve as a communications tool and inform senior leaders on executable buyer centric strategies to serve buyers

It is my hope that this new standard definition will allow for Buyer Persona 2.0 to take its rightful place as an essential discipline that informs on strategies to truly serve buyer goals.

Next: Buyer Persona 2.0 – Part 7 

Buyer Persona 2.0 – Part 5 – Who Buyer Personas Serve

B2B organizations represent a multitude of complex relationships.  These relationships all meant to help advance an organization towards profitability and in today’s buyer centric world – sustainability.  Buyer Persona 2.0, as a discipline, must factor in these complex relationships if it hopes to present an accurate portrayal of buying decisions that take place in a B2B context.  A misconception seen over the past few years is the creation of buyer personas in a one dimensional setting.  For senior leaders to embrace buyer personas, three dimensional views are critical to providing the buyer insight as well as market insight that senior executives seek.

Buyer Persona Relationships

A buyer persona, in a B2B context, is oftentimes serving others.  As previously reviewed, the career, business, and market goals of a buyer persona will have elements of contributing to the goals of others he or she serves.  Buyer Persona 2.0 calls for extensive development in this area for it holds the keys to successfully affecting the buying decision as well as creating effective buyer messaging.  As senior leaders seek to gain a market edge, they focus on developing teams that are adept at understanding how their products and services make an impact.  This impact is best understood through the lenses of a buyer persona as he or she serves three distinct groups:

User Personas

All too often, in creating buyer personas, the user has been forgotten.  There has been much written over the years about how user, or design, personas are different than buyer personas.  This is very true.  However, a distinction must be made in a B2B context.  Users must be viewed through the lenses of buyer personas in terms of what the buyer persona is attempting to accomplish for his or her team.  More the case than not in a B2B setting, the buyer is not the user of the product or service he or she is purchasing.  However, the buyer persona must see how a product or service will make his team of users more effective in accomplishing business and market goals.  Sales and marketing teams will benefit greatly from having this understanding in terms of utilizing sales-ready and marketing messaging. 

Stakeholder Personas

A buyer persona, in making buying decisions, is usually serving the agenda of his senior manager, division heads, committee members, board members, and etc.  As many seasoned B2B veterans in sales and marketing know, no buying decision is made in a vacuum.  Key stakeholders exert pressure on a buyer to make the right decision within a set of procedures or parameters.  Gaining insight through creating stakeholder personas is essential to obtaining the clear understanding of the buying process to make selling teams effective.  What has frustrated many senior executives, especially heads of sales responsible for forecasting, is gaining an understanding of sales opportunities that go proverbially “dark” in the sales process.  Developing a stakeholder personas perspective can shed light on what the buyer personas is adhering to in order to satisfy key stakeholders in his or her organization and how a sales and marketing team can be a part of this process versus sitting on the sidelines waiting for an outcome.

Influencer Personas

We’ve seen often in our engagements the need to develop a distinct set of influencer personas.  These differ from stakeholder personas by their nature of being third party influencers outside of the organization.  With the rise of social media, for example, this is becoming more prominent.  In complex regulatory environments, we’ve seen a heavy reliance on legal advisors and government advisors.  In the IT world, many IT people rely on other experts outside of their own organizations.  My advocacy of making the investment of time and financial resources to acquire the necessary in-depth buyer insight is based on, in part, first-hand discoveries of “influencers” who subtlety changed buying decisions – many times the selling organization having no awareness of this influence .  We have found in several of our engagements that influencer personas significantly “influence” the buying process and decision.  Not accounting for this factor could cause a company to miss a key critical element of how to succeed with a buyer. 

In this evolving buyer centric selling world, it is imperative for an organization to gain an insightful view of the relationships a buyer persona will have before, during, and after the buying process.  Knowing who he or she must serve and how can provide tremendous advantages to selling and marketing teams.  In a recent engagement, we developed Buyer Centric Selling Playbooks for both inside and field teams.  What was fascinating to hear and witness was how these selling teams, armed with knowledge of buyer, user, stakeholder, and influencer personas, became adept at conversing with prospective buyers about the impact of these personas on the buying process and how they can help facilitate the buying process.  Even more impressive was how marketing adapted its’ messaging efforts to meet the buyer where he or she was at in the buying process – which meant providing materials that helped the buyer communicate with his or her users, stakeholders, and influencers.

Buyer Persona 2.0, as a discipline, can be fully embraced by senior leaders if it can demonstrate real world application that achieves top line revenue growth.  Getting to know the relational personas that buyer personas must interact with and serve can go a long way towards accomplishing this embracing adoption by senior leaders.

Next: Buyer Persona 2.0 – Part 6

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 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

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

Sales 2.0 Conference Highlights Need for Buyer Personas

This September 10th, I attended the Sales 2.0 Conference in Chicago.  The conference focused on the changing environment of sales and paid particular attention to issues related to understanding buyers. One of the more notable speakers was Kevin Hooper, VP of TSG at Hewlett Packard.  Our firm, Goal Centric, was privileged to work with Kevin to address the need to create a sales enablement tool that would enable a neophyte sales force of 100 plus inside and field sales representatives engage in sales conversations with key executives in the Healthcare market.

At the conference, Kevin shared with the audience his use of a Buyer Persona Sales Playbook that was created as a go-to-market and selling guide for HP's Commercial Segment sales teams.  The guide included:

• A detailed description of an archetypal medical organization
• A review of executive personas 
• A target buyer persona 
• A detailed review of buying processes and scenarios   
• An in-depth insight into the issues and needs of the buyer personas   

These proved instrumental in helping Kevin's teams to significantly increase the percentage of deals over $100k and to increase the average size of each deal.  COnsidering the ecnomic times, this is a remarkable accomplishment!

 The take aways from Kevin's presentation, which also focused on sales measurements, can be as follows:

• Attaining a deep understanding of who your buyers are is critical
• Understanding what their buying processes are and aligning must be part of every sales organization's go-to-market plan 
• Creating innovative enablement tools that give your sales team's the insightful knowledge needed to hold a "conversation" with buyers is now a given 
• Increasing top line revenue growth is directly related to mapping to your buyer's buying processes and relevant issues at the time they need it the most  

Buyer personas and the innovative Buyer Persona Sales Playbook tool created in conjunction with HP portends how organizations must adapt to the new world of Sales 2.0.  One message was clear at the Sales 2.0 conference - companies who do not adapt will most certainly not survive.  

Enable Sales & Marketing with Buyer Persona Scenarios

In our new dynamic world, where nothing stays the same for any long periods of time, the difference competitively may be in the ability to anticipate.  Many successful corporations have stayed ahead of the pack due to their ability to read the market and anticipate how their customers will behave.  In sports, accuracy is tied to anticipation.  For example, an All-Pro quarterback is often touted for his pinpoint accuracy.  However when you review films of his throws, you see that uncanny ability to anticipate the exact spot when the receiver will arrive down the field to meet the football descending from the air.  Tiger Wood’s successes are partly due to his unprecedented power driving but also partly due to his ability to “read” the elements and anticipate the trajectory and the placement of the golf ball. 

 

Buyer personas, archetypal and fictional representations of actual buyers, are increasingly being used to attain a deeper understanding of buyers and customers.  Buyer personas give us a good snapshot of buyer background and attributes as well as relevant goals and motivations.  Alone though, they cannot provide the ability to anticipate how buyer personas may actually behave in a marketplace.  What is needed is to put buyer personas through buying scenarios.  Doing so provides the much needed insights into how buyers will behave in certain scenarios.

 

First, how do you get to these scenarios?  It takes some hard work and they usually cannot be created by conventional means such as culling data from sales forces.  Being a theatre buff, I liken scenario creation to seeing what goes on backstage while a production is underway.  Out in the audience, we are enjoying the actors and actresses as they are in character and perform.  What we don’t see is how each scene change is “anticipated” and how stage hands are awaiting the lighting or sound cue to put in motion the scene change.  Once the cue is heard, unbeknown to the audience, movement and action is taking place behind the curtain.    If internal data is only utilized in the theatre of sales and marketing, it will be hard to get a true sense of what is taking place “behind the scenes” when the buying process is in motion.  The only way to get a true depiction of what is taking place in a customer’s buying process scenario or series of scenarios is through rigorous qualitative field study that is complemented by skills in analyzing work flows and processes. 

 

Once scenarios are created, sales and marketing is enabled by their ability to anticipate the behaviors of their buyer personas.  When pain points are discovered, sales and marketing will have the ability to anticipate what particular process is set in motion “behind the scenes” by their customers.  In multiple product or services environments, there is a tendency to treat a customer in a homogeneous fashion.  With buyer persona scenarios, sales become enabled to understand the significant “cues” they are hearing and to anticipate the most likely scenario taking place within the customer organization.  This means sales will no longer have to rely on just one reference point for asking questions but have multiple paths of questioning that are more relevant and accurate.  And as previously mentioned being more accurate in your customer conversations is dependent on the ability to anticipate.  Marketing is also enabled by knowing at what critical junctures in the buyer persona scenario to deliver or have readily accessible messaging that is once again, relevant and accurate.  Accurate because it is based upon the ability to anticipate when the buyer persona will need the supportive messaging.

 

Buyer persona scenarios can go a long way towards giving an organization’s sales and marketing capabilities an edge over competition.  More importantly, they pay long term dividends because it is the ultimate “win-win” for the seller and the buyer.  What it allows is for sales and marketing to become stage hands in the buying process as opposed to just the audience that enjoys its conversation with the customer but never really knows what is going on behind the curtain.  And, if an organization can get buyer persona scenarios right, it will have its’ competitors in the audience on the outside looking in while they enjoy the favorable spot of being on the inside looking out!