Buyer Persona Insights

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

 

Harvard Gets "Ecosystems" for Building Customer Centric Organizations

Last week, my partner Angela Quail and I were chatting about business ecosystems.  We got involved with this concept last year in talks with IBM and later on began crafting persona ecosystems for clients.  IBM is a big proponent of establishing an ecosystem view of your internal organization and its connections to customers and markets.  Thus, we had some fairly robust discussions around this idea.  We were pleasantly surprised to see the following on Harvard's Executive Education web site:

"Attaining true customer centricity requires a fundamental, enterprise-wide shift in thinking and reorientation of your value proposition—moving away from a business organized around functions or products toward one aligned around the customer. This entails reconfiguring your firm's entire "ecosystem"—customers, internal stakeholders, and channel partners, along with organizational processes, structures, and systems. A well-developed understanding of the ecosystem can help your company achieve superior product and service innovation."

This is an extremely important viewpoint and offers a pathway for building customer-centric organizations.  Equally important, is this view not only offers understanding the ecosystem of your internal organization but also for translating the same perspectives of your customer's ecosystem.  For one of our clients last year, we exercised bringing their customer's businesses and markets into full view by creating a persona ecosystem of their buyers, users, stakeholders, channel partners, markets, and the ultimate end user of their customer's businesses.  It entailed the rigorous and deepest type of qualitative study we were ever involved in.  The revelations were profound.

Through persona ecosystems, you can achieve a more refined view of which roles are involved from a user and buyer perspective, which roles your customers interact with outside of their own organizations, and achieve refined understanding of your customer's organizational characteristics.  From a B2B vantage point, this is critical for the "customer" or the "buyer" is often times the company.  And, rarely is the buyer just ultimately one person.  In the true sense of the word, it is a company of people.  In fact, a recent study by Sirius Decisions showed that the average lengths of sales cycles have increased by 22% and that they involved 3.6 or more decision-makers to close a deal.  Note that is 3.6 or more decision-makers involved in closing a sale!  I would call that a company of decision-makers!

Previously, I wrote about B2B complexity being at the heart of the matter for buyer personas.  With B2B marketing and sales becoming increasingly more complex, persona ecosystems may be a requirement to fully understand how to improve the businesses of your customers.  This is an increasing buying criterion on the part of buyers today.  Understanding your buyer persona is one component.  Crafting buying process scenarios are another important component.  However, you will most likely discover that your buyer persona now has expectations that in complex environments, marketers must be fully knowledgeable about how to make an impact on the top-line revenue and bottom-line profits of their customers. 

Buyer personas have come a long way in the last couple of years.  Nevertheless, adoption by B2B companies with complex marketing and selling environs still appears to be relatively modest.  But for those who have adopted buyer personas, some are expanding the "science" aspects of persona development into the realm of ecosystems.  Persona ecosystems hold plenty of promise for organizations committed to building true customer-centric organizations.