Buyer Persona Insights

Buyer Persona Insights Joins B2B Marketing Zone

Last July Tony Karrer at Browse My Stuff and Tom Pick at WebMarketCentral created and launched the B2B Marketing Zone, a community collecting and organizing the best information on the web about B2B marketing.

Buyer Persona Insights is now privileged to be part of a selected group of B2B marketing experts covering such B2B relevant topics as lead generation, sales, content marketing, and several more.  Buyer Persona Insights is pleased to provide contributions covering the growing use of Buyer Personas as a strategic practice in B2B Marketing and Sales.

Tony and Tom have created a unique central resource site for B2B Marketers seeking guidance and the latest pracices in B2B Marketing and Sales.  Here you will find excellent blogs such as Savvy B2B Marketing, Marketing Interactions,B2B Lead Generation, Marketing Genius Blog, and several more. 

Thanks to Tony and Tom, B2B Marketers now have a resourceful site to learn and find the best practices in B2B Marketing and Sales.

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