Buyer Persona Insights

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.

The "Personas" of Obama, McCain, and now Joe "the Plumber"

In more than any election in recent history, the pushing of the candidate's persona has become central to each campaign's messaging.  It has not been confined to only in what they wish to convey about themselves.  But also in what they wish to convey about their opponent.  Personas are meant to represent archetypal representations of a target person, albeit a product user, consumer, business customer, or voter.  In the political realm this usually gets stretched a bit whereby the choices of descriptive labels are meant to provoke powerful images.  The uses of powerfully descriptive words are intended to create a mental image in the minds of the voters as well as the media about each other.  What do these choices of words convey and create in mental images?

    calm, cool, collective, angry, fighter, professorial, paling around, erratic, impulsive, experienced, hero, maverick, patriotic, leader, change, dangerous, liar, judgment, elite, champion, terrorist, fraud, temperament, bail out, rescue, reformer, we, I, and you 

Among many other words, each word is calculated to help create a mental image as well as descriptive "persona" about each person.  In the third and final debate, we were introduced to Samuel Wurzelbacher now famously known as "Joe the Plumber."  The attempt by McCain here, in addition to making it relevant to criticizing Obama's tax policy, was to conjure up the mental image of being in touch with the "persona" of the average middle-class worker and business owner.  Now poor Joe (or correctly Sam) really does not even own a business yet and he has been thrust into the limelight unfairly to represent the persona of a small business owner who struggles yet makes $251,000 annually and thus does not qualify for Obama's plan to reduce taxes for those 95% of Americans making less than $250,000 per year (for joint filing; $200,000 single filing). 

Also interesting in this presidential election are the vice presidential candidates and the "personas" they are attempting to project.  In the case of Sarah Palin, you have the descriptive word labels of hockey mom, reformer, maverick, folksy, hunter, and executive being used to create a "persona" of Sarah the Barracuda.  Of course, Tina Fey has done more than the media or the Obama-Biden campaign to create a different "persona" of Sarah Palin in the minds of the voter than the McCain campaign had hoped for.  Joe Biden consistently harkens back to his roots in Scranton, PA to embrace a persona of being one of those hard working blue collar people who have struggled economically in their lifetime of living in Pennsylvania.  The stories of his dad telling him when a champ gets knocked down, he gets back up is meant to instill the image of the working class guy persona on your side.  Of course the McCain-Palin camp hopes to wrap Joe Biden in the persona of a Washington insider.

The recent financial crisis also offered up how each candidate's behavior is meant to elicit a mental "persona" in the mind's of voters.  John McCain's announcement to suspend his campaign and to charge into Washington appeared as an attempt to paint the mental persona of the fighter, the leader, the man who leads the troops on the front lines, and the man who can single handily save the day.  Sort of your political Jack Bauer of the day, meant to suspend the campaign for 24 hours and ride out of Washington as the hero who saved the country from imminent doom.  Obama on the other hand attempted to foster a mental persona of the leader who is calm under fire, a consensus builder, knows how to get people working together, can manage from afar, and can articulate principled plans and assurances to the American people. 

In past presidential campaigns, we have had downright comical behavioral attempts by politicians to fit into a persona they think will resonate with voters.  Who can remember John Kerry going hunting?  How about Michael Dukakis riding an army tank?  What about Bill Clinton hitting every donut shop and gaining 30 pounds that was parodied in a SNL skit?  And remember George H.W. Bush shopping in a grocery store and failing miserably at the check out counter?  This year, I think Obama learned the lesson of staying away from a bowling alley.

Body language and stature also have been used to help create a picture of a persona in the minds of a voter.  Obama has a more reserved body language that is meant to align with the calm leader under crisis persona.  McCain's body language has been to lean forward and to align with the image of a fighter. 

At times, both have let their guard down and displayed body language that is shall we say - out of whack.  In the third and final debate, McCain's body language of sighing and eyes rolling was eerily similar to that of Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election.  His body gestures caused voters to paint a mental persona of the "angry" man.  Obama, in an earlier debate with Hillary Clinton, smirked and made a comment that caused voters to paint a mental persona of one who is dismissive and arrogant. 

Since 1964, how many political aspirants have used the famous gestures of John F. Kennedy at press conferences and briefings to paint a mental persona of the thoughtful, articulate, and humorous leader with exuberated royal Camelot-like leadership?  Too many to count!

At each of their respective conventions, we saw the carefully staged drop backs and visuals to support the persona they wished to project for each candidate.  In the case of Obama at Mile High Stadium (I just can’t say Pepsi Center!), we saw the columns and the setting that may have been meant to evoke a Martin Luther King “I Have a Dream” moment in history.  With John McCain, the portrayal of the “war hero” was most evident.  The visual of McCain’s entrance on the extended stage may have been an attempt to project McCain in the same light as George C. Scott’s portrayal of General Patton in the movie “Patton.”   Whereby there is the famous scene of General Patton giving an expletive laced speech with a giant American flag as the drop back.

As I am positing here, the concept of calculating personas has become an ingredient of political campaigning.  If we were to imagine a group of advisors sitting around discussing personas, what rough sketches of personas might they come up with?  Let’s start with the McCain campaign:

Here is the “persona” they hope to project about Barack Obama (I am using capitalization to show what they may emphasize):

Now let’s see how they might create a McCain persona they want to project:

Now let’s take a look at the McCain campaign’s latest target voter, Joe the Plumber:

Imagine now the Obama camp of advisors, strategizing about personas.  Here is what they may be thinking of how to project a persona of John McCain to voters:

 Of course, they want to put the best foot forward for their candidate, Barack Obama:

 Imagine if you will, the Obama camp getting into an argument and saying that Joe the Plumber is not their target voter.  What might be Obama’s target voter?  Let’s take a look at a fictional persona, Susan Masten, from suburban Philadelphia:

Following some of the principles of persona creation, in this rough sketch Susan can easily be an independent voter who leans Democrat.  In contrasting Joe the Plumber with Susan, it is a little more obvious in how each candidate might be messaging to their base as well as independents. 

Undoubtedly, in this new technology age of presidential elections, the use and power of personas will become increasingly prominent.  There is an inherent danger in this premise that we must all be on guard.  That is, how candidates will shape their own persona as well as that of their opponent further and further away from what is real and truthful.  This is already a common problem in politics when we have 20 second sound bites and organizations like Fact Check to weigh in on the attacks and assertions of candidates.  However, there is a very big upside to political campaigns if they adopt persona-based research and creation into their efforts as have an increasing number of corporations in their design, sales, and marketing efforts.  (And I am not talking about focus groups that many of these same corporations have lessened their use of due to the lack of insight they provide.  I am talking about real qualitative research that yields profound insight.)  They will deepen their understanding of voters and constituencies.  Giving them the insight they need to connect better with voters and to deliver messages and platforms that are in tune with that of the voters.

Being in tune in this sense is the key.  Unfortunately, many people are “tuned out” on politics because they hear the same 4 or 5 point based messages from political candidates over and over ad nauseam.  Barack Obama seems to have captured the essence of this premise early in his campaign and it is one of the reasons he is on the verge of becoming the next president.  John McCain, at this moment in time, never seemed to have captured the connection to voters that was beyond the same rhetoric commonly heard from politicians. 

It is not an easy task to find that “nerve” that electrifies.  Adopting persona principles and understanding in political campaigns offers a promise that politicians will understand their constituencies better and connect with voters on a meaningful level.  Certainly, a process by which more people will become engaged in the political process.   

Speaking of which, make sure you exercise your civic duty and right to go out and vote!