Buyer Persona Insights

Apple iPad Hits Mark With Business Buyer Persona

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

While much attention has been paid to the consumer use of the Apple iPad, lost in the noise has been the business user and buyer.  I noted with much interest an article distributed by Bloomberg News and authored by Olga Kharif entitled IPad Wins Following Among Business Users for Work Outside Office.  Covered and touted has been the iPad’s design for eBooks, video, web browsing, and Apple iPhone like capabilities for apps.  It looks like Apple will be tapping into a distinctive buyer persona, the business professional, which may be the real winner in the introduction of the iPad.

Charlie Wolf, an analyst at Needham & Co. in New York, finds that companies are placing orders for the iPad for business-related communications, such as email.  “Clearly, the iPad has a role to play in the business market,” said Wolf.  In a survey conducted by Zogby International, over half of the respondents said they would use an iPad-like device for work.  I had previously noted how Plastic Logic’s Que, an eReader, was designed specifically with a business buyer persona in mind.  It is clear that there is some thinking going on with respect to tapping into the value of meeting the needs of a business buyer persona. 

Apple, while fanning the flames of their admirable consumer marketing, has been silently at work designing features and tools that make the iPad suitable for work-related activities.  Included will be Apple’s iWork suite that offers word processing, spread-sheet capabilities, and a presentation application.  What does a business buyer persona for the Apple iPad sound like?  Here is what Dan Donofrio, a New York-based IT executive in the publishing industry, had to say about his plans to use the iPad to create graphics, “In my work, I draw a lot of workflow charts and I like the idea of being able to sit in a meeting and draw.” 

Paul Carton, Vice President of Research at ChangeWave, predicted that: “You can see everyone carry it in their briefcase in two or three years.”  Apple may very well have recognized that the true early adopters of the iPad will be the business buyer persona.  Research is bearing this out.  TechRepublic’s recent survey found that nearly 70% of CIO’s surveyed believed there was a business case for the iPad while ChangeWave’s research with consumers found that 13 percent of the anticipated top uses for the iPad would include working away from the office. 

No doubt, Apple has been taking a look at its ability to create splash and fanfare on the consumer end while quietly going about designing portability for the business end.  By not forgetting the business buyer persona, Apple may have another winner in the iPad.  Once again, revolutionizing an industry and having everyone else playing catch-up.    

Roger That: Developing Meaningful Buyer Persona Relationships

Image by Emmanuele Contini via Flickr

Every once in a while, we come across an article that just seems to nail it on the head ever so profoundly.  Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto authored such an article in the Harvard Business Review entitled The Secret to Meaningful Customer Relationships.  For quite some time, in fact the last ten years, I have made the point about buyer personas being based on qualitative insights that lead to a deeper understanding of customers and buyers.  I should have just called Roger.

Roger states: “If our understanding of customers is based entirely on quantitative analysis, we will have a shallow rather than deep relationship with them.”  This does run against the “prevailing view of customer understanding” as Roger notes and it also runs counter to how buyer personas are viewed at times.  When static data is used to create buyer persona profiles, it is an exercise akin to just looking at the quantitative analysis.  Getting at the unarticulated and not-yet-discovered is the art and science of buyer personas because as Roger puts it: “customers often struggle to put into words their feelings about products, services or providers, we can watch them do what they really do, rather than what they say they do — and may not actually do. This all enables a much more nuanced view of our customer.” 

The success of buyer persona development initiatives to inform strategy lies in the ability to translate the unarticulated into meaningful insights.  These translated insights then leading to the creation of meaningful representations of buyer personas and the portrayal of their buying processes.   Roger puts it very clearly this way: “But all of that is subject to qualitative judgments on our part. The quality and depth of our relationship with the customer will be a function of the quality of our interpretative eyes and ears. However, unlike with quantitative research where we really have no chance, with qualitative research we have a fighting chance of attaining a deep understanding of our customers.”  The interpretative ability requires a set of attributes and judgmental skills that makes it worth using outsourced experience and expertise to get the quality interpretation as well as the quality relationships with our buyer personas. 

Attaining a deeper understanding of customers and buyers does not mean throwing out quantitative analysis.  What qualitative insight in a buyer persona development imitative can do is help illuminate existing quantitative analysis.  Additionally, qualitative insight can uncover new market opportunities that quantitative analysis can further illuminate and validate.  Buyer persona development is the means of communicating the translation and interpretation that leaders can use to rally an organization to act upon.  Very much counter to the prevailing view of buyer personas being a profiling process only.

The qualitative and investigative process of buyer persona development do give us “a fighting chance of attaining a deep understanding of our customers” as Roger elegantly states.    If we want to develop meaningful buyer persona relationships, we need heed Roger Martin’s final words in this article: “if you want a deep relationship with your customers don't spend your time talking to them through the vehicle of quantitative research tools.”

I say – Roger that!

B2B Marketers Can Learn From Starbucks How To Get Back In Touch With Buyer Personas

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

You have to love the rebound Starbucks has been able to achieve over the past couple of years.  Even more impressive in the midst of the economic environment that plagues us still.  The return of Howard Schultz as CEO has led to the announcement that Starbucks will pay out it’s first-ever dividend. 

Troy Alstead, Chief Financial Officer for Starbucks, was quoted in the New York Times Dealbook blog as saying: “From what we can see, and also the research we do, I think the consumer sporadically feels a bit better about themselves than a year ago,” Mr. Alstead said. However, he added, Starbucks is expecting continued high unemployment and “a slow, slow recovery.” 

Now to be fair, part of their rebound can be attributed to the closing of many locations and laying off thousands of employees in a brutal cost cutting endeavor by Schultz.  However, you cannot miss the reference to “the research we do” by Alstead.  One thing Schultz did prior to his departure and now in his return was emphasize the need to understand customers – and not just at a cursory level.  Understanding the customer is interwoven into the DNA of Starbucks.  Researching and actually getting out there and talking to customers are not just talk. 

What people and employees alike lost during the years of aggressive expansion of locations by Starbucks was the watering down of the experience they came to love.  Let’s face it, if you are willing to pay 2 to 4 bucks for java – it better be good and it better mean the “place” is something you want to frequent.  What Starbucks gets is that their “buyer personas” want more than coffee and they want the social experience that comes with it.  Starbucks will contribute 5 cents for every cup of Starbucks Red Africa sold to a Global Fund to help people living with HIV.  For education, they are partnering with MSNBC show Morning Cup of Joe and donating the same to an Education Fund.  These efforts provide people with the experience of social responsibility while offering a good cup of coffee. 

What I love that’s happening here is that Starbucks is finding their inner self again and getting back in touch with customers in a way they came to endear.  I suspect there are many B2B companies trying to find their inner selves again.  One way to find it is to get back in touch with your buyer personas.  Not at just the cursory level but also spending the time – and yes money! – to understand your customers in a way that it bleeds into the DNA of the organization.   

What Intel Can Teach B2B Marketing About Strategy

Thanks to a tweet from Paula Gray, Anthropologist-in-residence at AIPMM, I was made aware of an article that appeared in the Harvard Business Review.  The article, Ethnographic Research: A Key to Strategy, was written by Ken Anderson, a well respected anthropologist at Intel Research.  Although it is written from the viewpoint of using ethnography for understanding consumer behavior, there is applicability to the transformation underway in B2B Marketing and Strategy.

“Informs Functions Such As Strategy and Long Range Planning”

Mr. Anderson makes the assertion from the start that ethnography is not just for innovation anymore but now plays a role in informing strategy and long range planning.  Similarly, I have made assertions that the buyer persona development process is about informing strategy.  I also make this same point in an interview with Stephanie Tilton on her blog Savvy B2B Marketing. 

The Connection

There is a strong connection between persona development and ethnography when it comes to informing design strategy for users.  Intel has been a forerunner in this area and Ken notes how Intel has now over two dozen employed anthropologists and ethnographers.  Ken states: “by understanding how people live, researchers discover otherwise elusive trends that inform the company’s future strategies.”  In my recent definition of buyer personas, now in a Buyer Persona 2.0 context, one of the key components of buyer personas is this focus on the unarticulated and the not-yet-discovered which can be truly elusive if only an analytical approach through customer data is used.  In the B2B Marketing and Strategy context, companies must now adopt capturing an anthropological view of their markets.  Making use of anthropological methods to gather important customer and buyer insights that inform B2B Marketing Strategies may very well become a key difference maker in the years ahead.  The “investigative process” I’ve referred to in previous posts is the term used to capture the essence of what Ken describes as: “anthropological researchers visit consumers in their homes or offices to observe and listen in a non-directed way. Our goal is to see people’s behavior on their terms, not ours.”  The investigative process applicable to buyer personas is very much about visiting buyers, talking with buyers, and listening in non-directed ways to capture insight about buying and decision-making processes.   

The Translation

Essential to informing B2B Marketing Strategies is translating as well as communicating the implications of the customer and buyer insights gained.  Ken describes their role as: “our job as anthropologists is to understand the perspective of one tribe, consumers, and communicate it to another, the people at Intel. Our experiences in both worlds make this translation possible.”  Buyer persona development is about understanding the “perspectives of buyers and communicate it to others.”  The buyer persona development process becomes the translation and communications medium for customer and buyer insights as well as how they inform strategies.   Thus, making buyer persona development, defined in the context of informing B2B marketing strategies, profoundly more than just a profiling tool. 

The Lesson

 What Intel teaches B2B Marketing is that to stay ahead in your market, you must do as Ken prescribes: “truly understand customers and adapt to fast-changing markets.”  While the Internet air waves are filled with many how-to prescriptions on social media marketing, content marketing, sales enablement, and etc. for B2B Marketing, the informing of these “how-to” aspects for each organization starts with understanding buyers and keeping up with the fast-changing environments in their markets.  One of the aims of Buyer Persona 2.0 is to develop the best practice of applying anthropological methods to gathering customer and buyer insight and to help inform B2b Marketing strategies.  Paving the way for senior leaders in B2B Marketing and Sales to not only be informed on which strategies to apply but to also use buyer personas as the communications method to help their organizations to be informed about as well as to understand their customers at the deepest level possible. 

Buyer Persona 2.0 – Buyer Personas Inform Strategy and Innovation

In conclusion of the Buyer 2.0 series, what must be examined is the glue that binds the previous tenets that have been reviewed.  Otherwise, we can end up what may be viewed as disparate and disconnected uses for buyer personas.  Thus, diluting the essence of how they can help an organization receive the game-changing affects from investing in Buyer Persona 2.0 best practices.  

Buyer Personas Inform Strategy and Innovation

The binding purpose for the tenets discussed as well as for the next generation of Buyer Personas is that Buyer Persona 2.0 serves the purpose of informing senior leaders on strategy and innovation.  Buyer Personas provide senior leaders with qualitative-based insights that helps bring to life the quantitative-based, and sometimes often over-emphasized, analytical insight. 

Visual Thinking

I recently finished reading Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaccson and what surprised me profoundly is how Einstein relied on first pondering a visual of the problem before he dove into the analytical aspects of physics and math.  He essentially viewed the problem and tried to solve it in his head first.  For example, he pondered the visual of what it would be like to travel alongside a light beam.  Buyer Personas, as defined in my previous posts, can provide senior executives with the visual view of the market that helps them to acquire the necessary insight needed to shape business strategy (inclusive of sales and marketing) and to discover paths of innovation the organization can pursue. 

Insight into the Unknown

For many executives, especially those who have tenured years of experience, entrance into a buyer-centric world could feel like entering the Twilight Zone.  Strategies, tactics, practices and knowledge of buyers once predictable now appear as a discomforting unknown.  Outcomes once explainable are no longer explainable.  Buyer Persona 2.0, as defined with all of its elements of the investigative process, can provide senior strategists with a window to the changing world of buyers.  Allowing executive to take a qualitative view necessary to understand and assess the implications of the dynamic changes happening before them.

A Roadmap

Over the past few years, we’ve seen the growing use of GPS systems in automobiles today.  They’ve evolved from purely directional navigation to offering very colorful guidance that will get you to where you want to go.  Buyer Personas has evolved over the past decade by paying adherence to the fundamental principles of persona creation while at the same time evolving into an effective guide for senior executives to gain the critical buyer insight needed to navigate in a buyer-centric world.  By providing the qualitative overlay to the analytical, organizations can be informed on strategies and paths to innovation that can be difficult to roadmap just on an analytical approach only.  Buyer Persona 2.0 is a roadmap for organizations to develop strategies that will give them a competitive advantage by getting closer to the customer and their buyers.

Puzzle Pieces

What senior executives strive for and are held accountable for is their ability to predict and anticipate.  Have you ever tried to put together a puzzle without having the picture on the puzzle box?  Not an easy task but possible.  It is bound to take you at least two or three times longer than if you had the picture to begin with.  In many ways, this is how senior executives, selling organizations, and marketing organizations operate today.  Continuously using existing as well as building new puzzle pieces of strategies yet not having a very clear picture of how and why they fit together.  I am sure creating a bevy of sweaty palms as they prepare to provide a forecast of future earnings before a senior management team, board of directors, and some very nervous investors.

Buyer Persona 2.0, as a discipline and practice, can help senior executives and organizations to navigate the turbulent waters of an unstable marketplace.  This navigational power is where competitive advantages can be gained and breakthrough strategies and innovations can occur. 

Three Components Of A Buyer Persona Game Plan That Inform Executives

Today’s executives, particularly in sales and marketing, are facing increasing pressure to come up with game plans to engage the buyer.  The challenge post-Great Recession is how to engage with buyers in meaningful ways to drive demand and top line revenue growth.  Drawing up game plans, especially in the B2B space, is made more difficult by the evolving new channels of buyer engagements.

Buyer Persona Development Process = Game Plan

Sales and Marketing executives are continuously faced with having to come up with a new game plan or altering a game plan that constitute a series of strategies.  The investigative customer insight and buyer persona development process can provide the means to help executives answer three major components of an overall game plan.

Where To Play

Figuring out where to play can be a perplexing proposition.  It can have geographic implications.  It can come to mean a sub segment of an overall market.  Or it can mean a specific vertical market.  The investigative process of gathering customer and buyer insights can yield a compass on where to play.  Take the case of FedEx right now.  They recently reported their first year-over-year profit increase in five quarters.  In part due to insights that led them to focus on growth strategies for their commercial end of the business.  Realizing that consumers would retract in spending, FedEx began to look at their commercial business as well as beef up their sales efforts in the manufacturing and distribution sub segments.  A global business, FedEx also went into gear to think globally.  FedEx spotted opportunities in the Asia market and put in place growth strategies to grow their commercial business presence in Asia.  By figuring out where to play, FedEx is weathering the storm and is proving once again to be a bellwether of recovery.

How To Play

Just getting to the playing field oftentimes is not sufficient in of itself.  Once there, sales and marketing executives have the challenge of determining how to play.  The investigative process of identifying target buyer personas can illuminate how an organization can best play in the market.  Let’s take the case of the Que proReader from Plastic Logic.  This past Christmas shopping season saw a push for eReaders on a mass scale for the first time.  The Kindle faced new competition from the Barnes & Nobles Nook and the Sony Reader. Plastic   
Logic decided that where to play and how to play was to design and market their eReader for business.     Making a much larger eReader and optimizing it to fit the business world of reading PDF, Word, and Excel documents for business meetings and transactions.  In addition, Plastic Logic optimized the Que for magazines and newspapers– knowing that business customers would find this appealing. 

How To Win

 The dividends paid back from going deep in the investigative process can yield insight into how to win in a specific market.  By attaining the deep understanding of how and why people and businesses buy, sales and marketing executives can put into place strategies that provide an edge over competitors.  Much like a football team that has a balanced game plan between running and passing plays.  After studying reels and reels of film on their opponent that showed a weakness in pass defense over the middle of the field, coaches then map a game plan to call more passing plays and routes over the middle of the field.  Determining how to win has strategy relevance to pricing, selling structure, content marketing, and etc.  Let’s take the case of HP and IBM as they battle it out in the midmarket space. Each is investing significant dollars in their marketing and demand generation programs to attract medium sized businesses.  In addition, both are recognizing that how to win is through their channel partners.  So each organization is making considerable investment in leading with partner-led solutions backed up by their own sales and marketing efforts. 

Sales and Marketing executives who make the investment in gathering customer and buyer insight through a buyer persona development process – with rigor and precision – can develop an overall game plan that gives them the edge in knowing where to play, how to play, and how to win.  Three components of a game plan that increase the odds of winning in today’s highly competitive marketplaces. 

(Author's Note: An excellent primer to this post is Roger Martin's Harvard Business Review blog article, Why Most CEO's Are Bad At Strategy, where he overviews how CEO's have trouble combining where to play and how to win strategies.)

Buyer Persona Strategy Playbooks Introduced By Goal Centric

Announced today was Goal Centric’s official introduction of the Buyer Persona Strategy Playbooks series.  I have made reference to these playbooks in recent posts as well as our work with Hewlett-Packard.  My colleague Angela Quail and I have taken quite a journey of innovation with respect to the playbooks.  In collaborating with Kevin Hooper, VP of EMG at HP, we’ve been able to work with an innovator and pioneer in the use of buyer persona strategy development that provides insights for the creation of sales and buyer enablement strategies.  The press release can be found at:

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010buyerpersonastrategy/03goalcentric/prweb3663374.htm

Below it is printed for your convenience:

Buyer Persona Strategy Playbooks Introduced by Goal Centric

Goal Centric introduces revolutionary strategy, marketing, and sales playbooks based on buyer insights and buyer personas. HP incorporates use of buyer persona playbooks to develop winning strategies and gain marketshare in the mid-market space.

New York, NY (PRWEB) March 15, 2010 -- Goal Centric Management, Inc., a privately held strategy consulting firm and the leading experts on Buyer Insights and Buyer Persona Development since 2002, announced the introduction of their Buyer Persona Strategy Playbooks Series. The interactive Playbooks are designed to provide an insightful view of customers and buyers that will enable senior leaders to formulate effective strategies in sales, marketing, and customer experiences. Goal Centric addresses senior leaders’ need to gain critical market and buyer insight to inform strategies that result in top line revenue growth.

The Buyer Persona Strategy Playbooks Series will consist of four Playbooks aligned with strategy, sales, and marketing:

The Buyer Persona Strategy Playbook: designed to provide the foundational insight into an organization’s target buyers and their ecosystem of relationships, a detailed view of their buying processes, and strategic insight about how to best meet their goals.

The Buyer Persona Sales Playbook: designed to enable sales teams with the situational conversation guidance they need to anticipate buyer goals and to align selling processes with their buyers’ buying processes.

The Buyer Persona Marketing Playbook: designed to empower marketing teams with the insight and guidance they need to create marketing and sales-ready messaging that resonates with buyers.

The Buyer Persona Experience Playbook: designed to map a buyer’s journey through an organization’s touch points, providing leaders with the insight they need to uncover gaps and create new touch point experiences that improve customer loyalty.

“The Playbooks are revolutionary in that they are designed to help senior executives answer the questions of where to play, who to play with, how to play, and how to win in today’s dynamically changing buyer-centric marketplace,” said Tony Zambito, Founder and Principal of Goal Centric. “The Playbooks are designed to enable strategy, buyers, sales, and marketing in a way that creates alignment to best serve buyers’ goals.”

Buyer personas, archetypal representations of buyers and their buying processes, serve as guides to marketing strategy, sales strategy, customer and sales messaging, and content development. "We've often seen companies that just create a buyer persona profile as the end product, which is too insubstantial and misses the strategic value of buyer personas," said Angela Quail, Goal Centric Principal. "The Buyer Persona Strategy Playbooks Series result from an investigative process that gathers critical buyer insight designed to inform and deploy executable, top line revenue growth strategies.”

Hewlett-Packard Company, which mounted a 9,000 mid-market accounts mapping strategy with partners, utilized Goal Centric’s Buyer Persona Strategy, Sales, and Marketing Playbooks to gain the insight it needed to develop effective sales, marketing, and buyer enablement programs. “The Buyer Persona Playbooks provided us with the information we needed to win in the mid-market space. The Playbooks enabled our selling teams to anticipate buyers’ wants, needs and decision process at their level, using their language and terminology. They have been a key game changer and a component of our market share gains against the competition”, said Kevin Hooper, HP Vice President, Emerging Growth Accounts, Enterprise Business Sales. HP has developed vertical market strategies around buyer personas that align their sales and marketing organizations efforts to win at the mid-market competitive level.

About Goal Centric

Goal Centric is a privately held company based in New York, New York and Menlo Park, California. Goal Centric is a strategy consulting firm that provides Buyer Insight and Buyer Persona Development services to help companies understand their customers better and develop growth strategies. The company today is led by two noted innovators and experts in buyer persona development, Tony Zambito (author of the blog Buyer Persona Insights and Angela Quail (author of the blog Persona Creation), who together have nearly twenty years in persona development experience. The two principal partners have provided persona development advisory services to many of today's leading global companies, including FedEx, Reed Elsevier, Microsoft, HP, and IBM.

For more information, visit www.goalcentric.com.

# # #

 

How CEO’s Can Get A Hit With Buyer Insights

In baseball, some of the greatest hitters in the game had the God-given talent to see pitches coming at them 90 plus mph as if they were in slow motion.  And so I presumed that that was the key to it all. So I thought.  I recently listened to an interview with Joe Morgan, the great former Cincinnati Reds slugger talk about his days as a baseball player.  Most revealing was how Joe Morgan talked about studying films of pitchers and how he studied pitches in general.  He was looking for insight into how a pitcher prepares to deliver a pitch.  Based on what he learned, he would make slight adjustments to his stance and swing based on who he was facing.

Buyer Insights

What amazed me about Joe Morgan’s story was how he could see, in the pitcher’s wind up, where the fingers were on the baseball.  And that he could tell by how the seams were positioned and how the baseball rotated out of the pitcher’s hands, what kind of pitch it was.  Based on that insight, he would know if he was going to try for a home run or aim for a hit. 

Similarly, CEO’s today need to have keen buyer insight into today’s markets and buyers.  Without it, it will be a struggle that results in wasted, and precious, dollars disappearing into the catcher’s mitt of campaigns and initiatives gone awry. 

Not Always A Home Run

Buyer insight and insights as a term suffers from potential symbolism issues.  Talk to a group of people in a business setting, and most likely 6-8 out of 10 will have the idea that insights mean the grand “ah-ha” moment.  This can certainly be true.  However, buyer insights don’t always have to be characterized as the home-run that forever changes the game.  It can be something of a genuine nature that is equivalent to a base hit or even a double and yet advances the momentum of the company as the winner in its market space. 

Here’s an example.  One organization we conducted buyer insight gathering and buyer persona development for embarked on a well-intentioned effort to make it easy for their customers to reach them and to place orders.  They created four toll free 800 numbers depending on the type of product and service you wished to order.  Since the four products and services were distinctive enough and potentially reach different types of market segments, this approach seemed to make sense.  When you think about it, who can really argue with the idea that you want to open up more lines of communications for your customers?  Right?  Well, so we thought.  Our buyer insights revealed that when it came down to the moment of making a decision on who to place an order with, there was buyer confusion on which toll free number to call.  This invariably caused, for expediency sake, them to call the closest competitor instead.  Leaving the CEO and the organization scratching their heads on how could revenues decline when they were doing even more to make it easier for their customer base.  The insights also revealed “why” this was happening.  Most of the orders were placed at the end of the day and thus buyers saw this as potentially causing delays that might not allow them to leave their offices when they needed.  The organization quickly reverted back to a single number but based on this insight, expedited the ordering process as well as improved their web capabilities – knowing that their buyers just plain and simply didn’t want to be delayed leaving on time to get to their kid’s little league baseball game.

Revealing Insights Can Prevent 3 Strikes

For CEO’s, buyer insights can be important for three areas that keep them up at night:

Finding out what is not working:

When revenues are supposed to be growing and they are not, it is bound to keep you up at night.  Executives pour over reams and reams of customer and buyer intelligence, crunch numbers endlessly, and query the sales team like the old KGB looking for that secret dossier.  With a thorough investigative process and usually through the use of third party expertise, the how and the why of what is not working can be revealed.  You might not always like the answer but it is better to know than not to know.

Validating an idea:

We all have some great ideas.  Let’s face it, what initially sounded great, turned out to have some holes in it once we received more input from trusted colleagues and friends.  Senior executives must be conscious of the fact that not everyone is comfortable offering reasons on why their idea or suggested strategy might have holes in it.  Courageous senior leaders and CEO’s have the will to use buyer insights to validate ideas – knowing that it just might not validate their idea as a good one. 

Making a discovery:

Some senior executives, wisely so, are kept up at night thinking about what they do not know.  What changes have taken place in their market space that they do not know about?  What new processes have been implemented that has an impact on our solutions?  What better ways can we meet the needs of buyers?  What is the competition doing that we are not?  The questions can be endless.  Good insight leads to good strategies.  Done consistently enough, then one day there just may be that grand slam home run “ah ha” moment that is a game changer. 

As in the game of baseball for a masterful hitter seeking insight into the nuances of a pitcher, insights can lead to sound approaches that can help CEO’s to win in his or her market.  And just as in baseball, insights need not always be of the home-run variety.  Like the urging on of a good baseball manager to practice your swing and base running consistently, so must a CEO urge his or her organization to practice the art and science of buyer insights consistently to stay ahead of the game of who can best serve its customers and buyers. 

Why CEO’S Should Focus On Buyer Enablement

As a buyers’ marketplace takes hold in the 21^st century, it is becoming increasing clear that the mindset of CEO’s and senior executives need to undergo some significant alterations.  Some of the hard and fast rules of strategic planning are no longer true and figuring out what to do next is no easy task.  CEO’s today faced the enormous challenge of disrupting the inertia of a seller-centric organization and adopting strategies and technologies that shift the balance of negotiation and navigation of a purchase in favor of the buyer.

Buyer Enablement

At a time when CEO’s are trying to formulate growth strategies coming out of the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression, they are confronted with the inability to have complete control of the decision process as in years past.  To succeed, organizations will need to adopt buyer enablement strategies that contribute to growth and solidifying customer retention.  Let’s first start with a simple definition of buyer enablement:

“Enabling a transparent ability for buyers to research and interact that provides for the gathering of the right information to make an informed decision.”

This definition suggests three areas where a CEO will need to examine whether the organization is able to develop buyer enablement strategies. 

Transparency

For many CEO’s, the idea of opening the doors and perhaps opening the books for an inside view of their organization is a foreign concept.  Since many may be byproducts of MBA programs pre-Internet era means this will be a tough one to accept with ease.  Seller-focused organizations have had the ability for many years to orchestrate, construct, and organize the information flow to buyers.  Tactical operations related to marketing communications and product information focused on what to tell buyers, what not to tell buyers, and who was the deliverer of the information.  In today’s buyer-centric world, buyers are sourcing for information and decisions are being shaped by who is offering rich, detailed, and robust information that also provides a transparent view of the organization.  A case in point: one CEO we worked with had prevented for several years exposure to R&D results.  The buyer insight and buyer persona development efforts clearly showed that buyers were basing a good percentage of their decision-making on having access to the R&D progress as well as some of the key subject matter experts involved in R&D.  This insight proved to be a correlation to declining revenues over a five year period.  By creating transparency to the R&D group, the organization was able to alter its revenue decline and get buyers engaged in online discussions about the R&D results and how it could shape future innovation.

Interaction

CEO’s, by the nature of their positions, are inclined to act.  Even the language and terminology of organizations tends to create inertia to view buyer communications in the form of action.  We target, we go-to, implement a marketing campaign, go on the offensive, beat back the competition, we blitz, we close deals, and the list of clichés can grow.  The point is that the organizational language is geared towards that of one-directional communications to the buyer.   If we think of communications in terms of gateways, the organizations that are on the extreme end of one-way communications to buyers will face a slow death.  Why?  These organizations will face buyers that are becoming adept at closing gateway access to them.  What buyers want are gateways to interact with an organization at the moment they have a need and have a goal to fulfill.  CEO’s must enable an organization with strategies that allow for buyers to not only initiate interaction but also allow the buyer the ability to control the interaction.  As we have seen with social media, some buyers want permanent open access to gateways.  Attaining deep buyer insight is critical to know how buyers wish to interact in specific marketplaces.

Right Information

Buyers today are looking for the right information at the right critical moment to make an informed decision.  Sometimes this decision is centered on “who to invite” in for a discussion whereby others have a goal to accomplish in short order and the need to decide is immediate.  What has been ingrained in organizations is to “save the good stuff” for the sales call or the marketing campaign.  This puts the buyer in the position of having to wait for the right information to make an informed decision.  Mapping the right information at the right critical moment is done by acquiring a deep understanding of buying behaviors and buying processes. Today’s CEO’s will need to commit resources to uncovering this insight in order to provide the right information that is delivered instantaneously at the right time.  For some, a very counterintuitive notion when one comes up through the ranks with the rule of not showing your best hand until you get in front of the customer. 

While today’s CEO’s and their executive teams are being asked to evaluate how Sales 2.0 and sales enablement can transform an organization by adopting technologies to enable the selling process, a CEO must lead the effort to have an organization evaluate its resources devoted to enabling buyers with transparency, gateways of interaction, and the ability to source as well as have the right information accessible to make an informed decision.  An imbalance can have devastating effects that are not felt until it is too late in the game. 

Buyer Persona 2.0 – The Definition of Buyer Personas

In the series on Buyer Persona 2.0, part 6, I addressed the distinction between buyer profiling and buyer personas.  Ever since we began creating personas, specifically pioneering and creating buyer personas in 2002 to reflect the goals of buyers, we continued to follow the basic fundamental principles of persona development established in the late 90’s.  As buyer personas become increasingly popular, it is important for the fundamentals to serve as a reminder of what buyer personas can mean strategically – that is to inform on strategies to meet buyer goals.  I’ve been asked in a few emails to repost the definition of buyer personas that is reflective of elevating buyer personas to a best practice – we call Buyer Persona 2.0:

The Definition of 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 which 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 informs senior leaders on executable buyer centric strategies to serve buyers

To become a best practice of Buyer Persona 2.0, this definition must be supported by standard processes – be they strategic and tactical – that genuinely informs organization on how to best serve buyer goals.   Thanks to readers for this suggestion!