Buyer Persona Insights

The 10 Rules for Creating a Buyer Persona: Rule 10 and Final Recap

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Some of the great orators of our time had the gifted ability to communicate as well as rally an entire nation.  One of the most gifted was Winston Churchill.  His “we shall fight them on the beaches” and “this is our finest hour” speeches rallied the entire British nation and Allied forces in the epic fight against Nazi domination in World War II.  Those speeches were born out of Winston Churchill’s many years of political service and his intimate knowledge of the British people.  He knew how to tell a story about his own people.

For senior level executives today, the need for a rallying speech of the century may not be that pressing but they need to rally personnel around a deep understanding of customers and buyers like never before.  The 10th and final rule:

Rule 10: Buyer Persona Development Serves as a Communications Platform to Tell the Story of Customers and Buyers

A struggle for any CEO is to communicate the story of how the organization can and will best serve the goals of it’s’ buyers.  How to interweave this story into the daily mechanisms of an entity can be a challenge and an epic one at that.  Buyer personas, derived from a rich and robust process of getting to know customers and buyers experientially, can serve as the media for executives to tell the story about their buyers and how their company will help to continue the story. 

It has been a privilege to tell the story of the 10 rules for creating a buyer persona.  These rules are a reflection of over a decade of contributing to persona development in general and taking the first step in 2002 towards making persona development a useful process for sales and marketing when I asked the question: “why not buyer personas?”  (See article The Origins of Buyer Personas)  The term “buyer persona” has been popularized over the last four years in particular and taking on many different meanings.  It is my hope that these rules will serve as guidance for understanding the foundational principles of buyer persona development as a process and methodology for understanding buyers.  The recap of the 10 rules with links to the original articles:

Rule 1: You Can’t Make Them Up
Rule 2: Don’t Confuse a Buyer Persona with a Customer Profile
Rule 3: Get the Right People with the Right Attributes and the Right Skills Involved
Rule 4: Buyer Personas Are a Translation of Goals
Rule 5: A Buyer Persona Offers Insight into the Unarticulated and the No-So-Obvious
Rule 6: Buyer Persona Development is Not a Quantitative Process
Rule 7: Avoid Building a Wire Mesh of Data Points When Developing Buyer Personas
Rule 8: Goal-Centered Qualitative and Experiential Analysis is the Foundation of Buyer Persona Development
Rule 9: The Purpose of the Buyer Persona Development Process is to Inform on Goal-Centered Customer Strategies
Rule 10: Buyer Persona Development Serves as a Communications Platform to Tell the Story of Customers and Buyers

Thank you to those who have retweeted these articles and to those who have emailed me.  It has been great to engage in these conversations.

 

The 10 Rules for Creating a Buyer Persona: Rule 9

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When the compass was invented by the Chinese during the Qin dynasty (221-206 B.C), it radically changed civilizations and ushered in many years later the Age of Exploration in the 15th century.  Just as the invention of the printing press created the advent of knowledge and information being made available to the masses, the compass meant civilizations were given the tool to explore.  The compass allowed travelers and explorers to know what direction they were headed with a good degree of certainty.  This simple tool spurred on civilizations coming in contact with each other, trade, and the introduction of goods never before seen.  In the modern world, GPS Technology is now becoming so commonplace that we not only know in what direction to go, we also know where others are.

The buyer persona development process has an important rule related to the compass:

Rule 9: The Purpose of the Buyer Persona Development Process is to Inform on Goal Centered Customer Strategies

For senior executives today, there is a vast wilderness of the digital and social world yet to be explored fully.  Buyer behaviors and buyer goals are changing rapidly with many changes happening around the globe by the time you finish reading this sentence.  The buyer persona development process is meant to be informing and exploratory.  The process of buyer persona development provides insights and direction for senior planners to create strategies for customer engagement that meet buyer’s goals and also meet buyers where they are located in the digital world. 

A few years ago we were working with an organization that was perplexed by a drop in revenues from a specific segment of their customer base.  What we now know as being a part of buyer behavior in the modern world, we saw a glimpse of back then.  That is, those buyers wanted available resources to do research on a product/service to meet specific goals before the intervention of sales.  The company implemented a unique content and subject matter expertise strategy that met buyer’s need for information and resources available at their fingertips.  This early adoption of content marketing turned the tide and they saw revenues regained and grow.  The buyer persona development process gave them insightful information on where buyers were headed, how it was impacting their business, and what strategies they could incorporate to meet buyer’s goals.

The buyer persona development process holds the promise of being a senior executive’s compass for shaping future strategies for customer engagement, digital marketing, and for growing top line revenues.

 

The 10 Rules for Creating a Buyer Persona: Rule 8

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An interesting show to watch is Extreme Makeover Home Addition.  It is quite an amazing process when they can take what looks like hopeless situations and turn dilapidated houses into dream homes.  Have you ever noticed where they typically start with a house about to be made over?  Ty Pennington, one of the stars and host of Extreme Makeover, can often be found starting the show in the basement of the house selected for an Extreme Makeover episode.  Ty is checking for structural issues, leaks, shifts in the soil, the wiring, and many other areas related to the determining how solid the foundation is for the house.  It is not surprising that in many episodes, they wind up razing the entire house and building new as a result of the foundation being weak.

When it comes to the process of buyer persona development, one of the rules that are foundational to creating a buyer persona is:

Rule 8: Goal-Centered Qualitative and Experiential Analysis is the Foundation of Buyer Persona Development

To redo a house as in Extreme Makeover, it begins as a process with very distinct stages.  In other words you cannot put up a roof until you have a foundation and the frame of the house has been established.  Similarly, with buyer personas, they can be created with tremendous meaning when they are grounded in qualitative and experiential analysis that is focused on buyer goals and have been created through a process-oriented methodology that also has distinct stages.

The buyer persona itself is meant to be an archetype of buyer goals that are derived from foundational qualitative and experiential analysis with real and potential customers.  They in of themselves are not the end means.  In many ways, the process of creating them is far more relevant to informing goal centered customer strategy than the actual buyer persona itself.  This concept is very foundational to the origins of personas as well when personas were a means to inform goal directed design strategy and served as the communication vehicle and archetype of user goals.

In the next few years, it is my belief that the need for buyer persona strategists will grow and that the pendulum will swing back to the origins of a goal centered approach to buyer persona development.  Executives will see tremendous value in the foundation of qualitative and experiential analysis in informing them on evolving buyer goals and behaviors.  Which will serve as foundational guidance for making important decisions respective to customer strategy.  Buyer persona strategists of the future will become a unique specialty in the sense that it will require the convergence of attributes and skill sets in the areas of strategy, ethnography, anthropology, sociology, and qualitative analysis. 

 

The 10 Rules for Creating a Buyer Persona: Rule 7

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When MS Excel came into existence many years ago, it was a significant leap in computing power.  The uses for MS Excel have grown far beyond the basic computations it was designed for.  Graphs, tables, charts, matrixes and the likes are all very common to what people can now do with MS Excel.  You can add data into many rows and columns almost infinitum it seems. 

It also seems that in the concept of buyer personas, there has been misguided efforts to engage in an oversimplified process of creating a composite of many data points.  The outcome being buyer personas resembling a wire mesh of columns and rows that have every conceivable bit of information on the “what” of a buyer persona.  This leads me to the next rule:

Rule 7: Avoid Building a Wire Mesh of Data Points When Creating Buyer Personas

It is a natural tendency to layer data on top of data.  We desire to find out as much as possible about a buyer persona.  When the wire mesh effect happens it is a result of three problems:

1. Buyer persona creation is viewed as a composite profiling exercise and not a development process with distinct stages.
2. There is a lack of qualitative and experiential analysis that provides deep insight thus a reliance on finding as many data points as possible via internal or survey oriented vehicles.
3. An over emphasis on what buyer personas do versus on the insight that can inform customer strategy.

The downside to the wire mesh effect is that it perpetuates the attempt to fit buyers and segments into neat boxes.  This type of approach creates a counter to the value of buyer personas which is to gain deep insights into buyer’s goals that are translated into informing customer strategies. 

The wire mesh effect on building buyer personas as oppose to viewing buyer personas as a development process results in a poor foundation on which to make informed decisions in many areas.  Both the B2C and the B2B world are changing extremely fast as digital marketing and social media evolves.  Creating buyer personas resembling a wire mesh can leave you on the outside looking in. 

 

The Rise of the Digital Buyer Persona

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I have been evolving the buyer persona development process as well as have been writing about buyer personas for the last eight years now.  To say buyers have changed during that time would be an understatement.   Most notably, the B2B buying process has undergone a significant transformation within the past three years.  Predicting and assessing shifts in buying processes and buying behaviors is becoming increasingly difficult.

Over the past few months, we’ve seen several reports that indicate what buyers are doing.  For example, the recent Buyersphere Report regarding B2B use of social media commissioned by Base One of the UK is very illuminating.  It takes a snapshot of what B2B buyers are doing in the B2B market space albeit reflective of a sampling of 500 businesses from across the UK.  In addition, we’ve seen insightful views from Mike Seltzer’s 2010 Social Media Marketing Industry Report.  I have also enjoyed the treatment Steven Woods, CTO of Eloqua,  gives to the shift in the way buyer's consume information in his book "The Digital Body Language."  There are several others cropping up as well.  What is evident from them all is that B2B buyers and markets are exploring social media and digital marketing strategies.  I believe what we are witnessing is the rise of the Digital Buyer Persona.

Although we are beginning to get some indications of where buyers are going, (for example Facebook and Twitter) and an idea of when (i.e. early stage of buying process), we are not exactly certain why they are going to these communities and what they may be doing there.  We also are seeing emerging data on how B2B buyers will access various “social points” and how they will engage with these points digitally.  Will mobile technology become more prominent in the buyer’s digital world?  Will the Apple iPad usher in a new model for B2B buyers to interact with suppliers and customers?  Is "social" just "social noise" at the moment?  These types of questions are yet to be answered.

In light of these evolving and emerging trends, I along with Angela Quail and those associated with Goal Centric will be examining the Digital Buyer Persona in our work going forward.  We believe this is important for several reasons:

• The need for qualitative and experiential analysis is greater than ever for B2B businesses in particular.  We are dealing with business model, cultural, social, and behavioral changes on an order of magnitude that has not been seen before.
• The need for businesses to discern differences between core Buyer Personas and Digital Buyer Personas will become more apparent.
• Buyer’s use of digital and social communities will continue to evolve and businesses must find out what that means in terms of how they construct engagements with buyers.
• There have been and will continue to be transformational implications to strategy models for marketing and sales as we know them today. 
• We are entering the first wave of change and we will undoubtedly have several more before we have a clear picture of how much buyer behavior has changed and what these changes mean for B2B businesses.

Over the next few months and perhaps few years we will be exploring the Digital Buyer Persona, how buying behaviors are manifesting, and what are the key strategies for engaging the Digital Buyer Persona.  It is our hope that we will be able to help organizations make informed decisions about the increasingly complex world of digital marketing and social business.  Without question, we will continue to refine this evolving vision and will hope to communicate what we have been learning as we work with leading organizations in this important new area of B2B Customer Strategy.

 

The 10 Rules for Creating a Buyer Persona: Rule 6

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The quest for information can be addicting.  In organizations where the leadership is mostly analytical in nature, the need for information and analysis can be interwoven into the corporate culture and is a component of every decision.  When it comes to markets and customers, quantitative analysis of many shapes and forms are used to arrive at customer data.  You may have recently sat in a presentation whereby you reviewed results of online surveys, viewed multiple pie charts segmenting data, analyzed customer data reports generated in multi-variant ways, and purchased industry related reports with a chockfull of relevant data.  Several years ago, the futurist John Naisbitt came up with this quote:

“We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge.”

The sixth rule related to buyer persona development is about distinguishing information from insight:

Rule 6: Buyer Persona Development is not a Quantitative Process

One of the pitfalls of buyer persona development in an analytical oriented organization is that it could be dropped into the market research area and undergoes a transformation into a quantitative research project.  A cognitive dissonance occurs over sampling sizes in quantitative areas such as market research.  A question that often leads to this transformation is: How could a buyer persona development initiative with a sample size of 40 to 50 possibly offer the same validity of performing surveys on a sample size of 1,000? 

What happens is that you wind up with reams and reams of information but the knowledgeable insights that are gleamed from qualitative and experiential analysis is missing.  Thus, the results lack contextual reference of exactly what the goals of the buyer personas may be.  My colleague Angela Quail and I saw this happen firsthand.  Six figures were dropped onto such a project in an organization we helped afterwards.  Buyer persona “profiles” were created and they consisted of many data points pulled from a quantitative effort of sending out surveys as well as creating online surveys.    It was clear that there were usability issues with the crafted profiles since sales and portions of marketing rejected them.

A hard lesson learned.  However, it is important to note that the qualitative aspects of buyer persona development complement the quantitative aspects of market research in two ways.  First, insights derived during buyer persona development can point the way towards opportunities that need to be explored and validated quantitatively.  For example, during the insights gathering, uncovered is a promising new market potential.  Market research can go to work then trying to figure out what the size of the market may be and validate the potential.  The second can be when market research has identified a market with valid potential but the picture of the identified buyer segment is blurry.  Executives can utilize buyer persona development to “humanize” the buyer segment, gain clarity on buyer goals, and determine what the appropriate strategies for customer engagement are.

Next up: Rule 7

Links to Rules: Rule 1, Rule 2, Rule 3, Rule 4, Rule 5

 

The 10 Rules for Creating a Buyer Persona: Rule 5

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When you travel to a foreign country where you are not familiar with the culture or the language, it can be exciting yet very trying.  The first few hours are like being in a giant maze and you wonder how you will ever get to find your way around and be able to communicate with the locals.  The next few days are a real struggle as you attempt to make sense of all the gestures, facial expressions, and how the local people respond to you as you seek help. 

If you are there more than a week, you find yourself surprisingly starting to immerse yourself into the culture and you are doing so almost entirely on a non-verbal level.  All the funny gestures, expressive motions of the hands, wrinkle of the faces, and the exasperated laughter of those trying to help you suddenly are beginning to make sense.  At the very least you now know how to order an espresso nonverbally. 

This next rule deals with a critical element of buyer persona development that serves executives as they formulate customer strategy:

Rule 5:  A Buyer Persona Offers Insight into the Unarticulated and Not-So Obvious

As in visiting a foreign country, visiting buyers can be akin to going on foreign territory.  It is tough to make out specifically what they mean.  And what buyers say may not always be what they mean.  While information respective to a customer profile about background, job functions with related titles, reporting, motivations, pain points, needs, fears, and wants can be derived with some degree of research, the real value is in uncovering profound unarticulated insights and not-so obvious goals that lead to a winning customer strategy and a competitive differentiator. 

This is one of the key rules that separate buyer personas from being a customer profiling exercise to a means of providing senior executives with the informed insights they need to make sound decisions about customer strategy.  As mentioned previously, it takes the right people with the right skills to go into this foreign territory.  It is my belief that in the near future, organizations will have specialists who are hybrids of customer strategists, ethnographers, and anthropologist who engage in buyer insight for the purpose of informing strategy.  The near future is not that far off as forward thinking organizations such as Intel, HP, and Starbucks continuously seek the unarticulated and the not-so obvious. 

Can Culture Shock Align Sales and Marketing?

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A couple of years ago, Dave Stein made this provocative statement on his sales leadership blog about sales and marketing alignment:

"What’s going on is that many CEOs, COOs, GMs, and other executives haven’t figured out that sales and marketing alignment is more about culture, philosophy and business orientation than it is about marketing providing sales with leads, marketing messages and sexy product brochures and sales selling enough so everyone, especially those in marketing, gets to keep their jobs."

I thought of this statement as I reviewed strategies with a group of sales and marketing executives recently.  Dave was right on the mark with this statement.  For both sales and marketing it really does amount to culture change.  Here’s what is happening as I see it through the lenses of a corporation undergoing efforts to align sales and marketing.   They are undergoing culture shock versus culture change.  Two major events have happened in two years.  The financial crisis and the meteoric rise of social media marketing have suddenly changed the game for both sides.   Both events causing senior executives to put into question how to create the alignment let alone define it. 

Buyer personas, qualitative research derived archetypes of buyers and their goals are being used to create a unified platform for understanding how to communicate to customers and buyers.  Just a few years ago, sales and marketing were trying to get the web channel aligned.  Now there is the added challenge of figuring out how to reach customers through sophisticated email, paid search, iPhone, BlackBerry, Facebook, and the new question burning up Twitter today – should we buy promoted tweets!  This is culture shock, not culture change.

There is hope though.  Buyer persona development is meant to get these two teams on the same playing field.  As I watch creative people figure this out, I am realizing that this is going to be a process of “heavy lifting.”  But, it is going to be a fun process.  Culture shock will bring people together and buyer personas will serve their purpose. 

This new philosophy that Dave Stein refers to highlights the shift in thinking senior exectuives need to get across an entire organization.  A message to both sales and marketing that they need to be having the same conversations with customers and buyers with a new twist.  They have to figure out where their customers and buyers want to meet for conversations.  Now that will be fun for sales and marketing to figure out together! 

The 10 Rules for Creating a Buyer Persona: Rule 4

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Understanding your customer’s pain points has been a staple of sales and marketing for quite some time.  Gaining a solid grasps on their motivations, drivers, personalities, people they interact with, and the likes has led to many programs offering clues on how to reach, sell, and close business with buyers.  Anyone who has been through a significant amount of sales training can attest to how each program stresses the need for understanding buyer’s needs and wants as well as the promise of adapting your selling style to that of an analytical or other personality types.   The difficulty lies in putting the picture together and making sense of what you have learned.  The next rule is one of the cornerstone rules first established by Alan Cooper; many consider being the founding father of personas:

Rule 4: Buyer Personas are a Translation of Goals

This may sound relatively simple and easy but it is not when you consider that goals, in this framework, are a result of translating all of the findings gathered in qualitative research such as pain points, motivations, drivers, interactions, and personalities.  Alan Cooper created user personas for the purpose of informing Goal Directed Design Strategy.  My colleague, Angela Quail, and I took this same principle we learned from Cooper to help clients create a Goal Centric Customer Strategy that are informed by buyer personas. 

Getting at the goals of buyers can be tough for this reason: buyers may not always be able to articulate their own goals clearly or are yet precise about goals of the organization.  Thus it takes some solid qualitative research to arrive at discovering buyer goals that are truly a translation of insight that senior executives can rely on to make sound decisions on customer, sales, and marketing strategies. 

I believe that this is one of the most important rules in buyer persona development.  Keeping the focus on goals will help you and your organization to have meaningful buyer personas that lead to winning strategies.

Next Up: Rule 5 

The 10 Rules for Creating a Buyer Persona: Rule 3

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Did you ever have one of those sleepless nights in a Godforsaken hotel and you find yourself channel flipping?  You 100k miles per year executives know exactly what I am talking about.  You suddenly hit an infomercial promising you earnings twice to three times what you are making now and you only have to work as little as 10 hours per week.  Infomercials are good at this. They are real good at showing you the golf course, the BMW, and the testimonials of people who live the lifestyle of the rich and famous.    As you sit there in your catatonic state your mind screams “- why can’t I have that!”

This next rule has to do with not falling for the promise that you can have just anybody on your team creating high quality buyer personas after they attend a one-hour workshop:

Rule 3: Get the right people with the right attributes and right skill sets

Like any new concept that begins to rise in awareness, you start to see workshops promising that in an hour or half-day you will be creating buyer personas and you will be taking them back with you to the office.  As mentioned before in this series, this approach seriously devalues buyer personas in the eyes of executives.  It takes a certain set of attributes and skill sets to do the qualitative work, distill what you’ve learned, create buyer personas that are reflective of true buyer goals, and are meaningful.  Needless to say, to begin to apply attributes and skill sets to actual experience takes more than an hour or a half-day. 

I’ve seen several buyer persona development initiatives fail because they were simply put in the wrong hands.  It was just a matter of the wrong set of attributes and skill sets compounded by the lack of adequate knowledge.  And as many of you know; this is a recipe for disaster and a failed project.

Adele Revella, who has introduced the need for buyer personas to hundreds of people that came through her Effective Product Marketing course and advocates for buyer personas in her blog Buyer Persona Blog, myself, and Angela Quail had talks about this topic recently.  We discussed the issue of how all of the aspiring product marketers want to learn how to create a buyer persona but the reality is that all may not possess the right attributes and skills to do so or to carry out an in-depth buyer persona development initiative that can last 3 to 4 months.  This poses a real dilemma for senior executives to choose the right people to be involved in buyer persona development efforts with the intent to inform strategy and one they must get right.

The next time a request to approve sending personnel to a one-hour workshop to become an expert in creating a buyer persona, snap out of the catatonic state traveling has you in and come to your senses – say no.