Buyer Persona Insights

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! 

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. 

Buyer 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."