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
