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
