Buyer Persona Insights

A Christmas Story

Image by A. Davey via Flickr

As this year draws to a close, I wish to extend my warmest wishes for a wonderful hoilday time to all.  Also, many thanks to those who have read my articles and offered encouragement.  I look forward to returning the first week in January after spending time with family and friends.  I leave you with a marvelous and inspirational Christmas Story from one of my favorite authors, Paulo Coehlo:

Our Lady’s juggler

A medieval legend tells us that in the country we know today as Austria the Burkhard family – a man, a woman and a child – used to amuse people at Christmas parties by reciting poetry, singing ancient troubadour ballads, and juggling. Of course, there was never any money left over to buy presents, but the man always told his son:

“Do you know why Santa Claus’s bag never gets empty, although there are so many children in the world? Because it may be full of toys, but sometimes there are more important things to be delivered, what we call “invisible gifts”. In a broken home, he tries to bring harmony and peace on the holiest night in Christianity. Where love is lacking, he deposits a seed of faith in children’s hearts. Where the future seems black and uncertain, he brings hope. In our case, the day after Father Christmas comes to visit us, we are happy to be still alive and doing our work, which is to make people happy. Never forget that.”

Time passed, the boy grew up, and one day the family passed in front of the impressive Melk Abbey, which had just been built.

“Father, do you remember many years ago you told me the story of Santa Claus and his invisible gifts? I think that I received one of those gifts once: the vocation to become a priest. Would you mind if now I took my first step towards what I have always dreamed of?”

Although they really needed their son’s company, the family understood and respected the boy’s wish. They knocked at the door of the monastery and were given a loving, generous welcome by the monks, who accepted the young Buckhard as a novice.

Christmas Eve came around. And precisely on that day, a special miracle happened in Melk: Our Lady, carrying the baby Jesus in her arms, decided to descend to Earth to visit the monastery.

All the priests lined up and each of them stood proudly before the Virgin trying to pay homage to the Madonna and her Son. One of them displayed the beautiful paintings that decorated the place, another showed a copy of a Bible that had taken a hundred years to be written and illustrated, while a third recited the names of all the saints.

At the very end of the line, young Buckhard anxiously waited his turn. His parents were simple people, and all that they had taught him was to toss balls up in the air and do some juggling.

When it came his turn, the other priests wanted to put an end to all the homage that had been paid, since the ex-juggler had nothing important to add and might even mar the image of the abbey.

Nevertheless, deep in his heart he also felt a great need to give something of himself to Jesus and the Virgin. Feeling very ashamed before the reproachful gaze of his brothers, he took some oranges from his pocket and began to toss them in the air and catch them in his hands, creating a beautiful circle in the air just as he used to do when he and his family traveled to all the fairs in the region.

At that instant, the baby Jesus, lying in Our Lady’s lap, began to clap his hands with joy. And it was to young Buckhard that the Virgin held out her arms to let him hold the smiling child for a few moments.

The legend ends by saying that on account of this miracle, every two hundred years a new Buckhard knocks on the door of Melk Abbey, is welcomed in, and for the whole time he remains there he warms the hearts of all who meet him.

 

A Conversation on 7 Buyer and Sales Trends to Watch in 2011

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Every once in a while, you have to admit you just didn’t get it right.  My recent post entitled Seven Buyer and Sales Trends to Watch in 2011 is one of those instances for me personally.  Not because of what I had to say but because I made it difficult to understand.  Although it received tremendous notice, it seems that it was just not conversational enough and was a bit too academic.  Thanks to Lou Dubois from the Customer Collective for his editorial and moderation guidance and for the gracious subtle hints by Stephanie Tilton of Tenton Marketing.  And thank you Mr. Hope for your constructive comment.  Sometimes I suffer from “MBA-itis” and get too academic.  I am probably exorcising some old demons from the one professor out of five who trashed my Pepsi versus Coca Cola War thesis.  Yes, I know, get over it!  So what I would like to do is start a conversation on these seven trends. 

First, let me just add how I came up with these trends.  They come from two plus years of doing qualitative interviews with buyers on behalf of three Fortune 50 organizations.  In addition, I love the numerous amount of content available by some really great writers that shape your thinking or spur further thoughts.  So here are my conversation starters for each trend to show what I am thinking:

First a conversation primer: What is happening?

I don’t know about you but I am seeing so much change during the past two years that it is downright breathtaking.  Two major impacts are the recession and the rapid growth of the digital age.  I like the term digital age because it is a way of including all things such as social media, mobile, digital marketing, and even the iPad!  We all know buyer behavior has changed so much that the B2B business world has to find ways to adapt or be left in the dust.  In addition, we know from the people who survey sales trends, such as Sirius Decision, CSO Insights, and McKinsey, today’s buyers get through nearly 70-80% of the buying process BEFORE they engage with sales people.  By the time they get to sales folks, whether it is in person or on the phone, they already are armed with enough information to help make a decision.  This is old news now and has created the expanding industry of marketing automation.  The real news is this - when they do engage they want and expect more not less!  More information and more expertise are what buyers are expecting.  Basically, the starting point of engagement has moved further up the buyer's journey.  This is a major challenge because many B2B organizations, both in their sales and marketing departments, have built-in processes where they want to start from the “beginning” with potential buyers.  That is, the usual forms of this is who we are, here is our product introduction, what features and benefits we have, and you can all guess the rest.  One buyer put it this way in an interview: “look if I call and reach a rep and they start out with something like here is my product, click, I hang up.  I already have that information and it just tells me it is going to be a waste of my time.”  How’s that for a wakeup call!

Trend 1: From Sales Relationship to Sales Experience

What do I mean?  For years, B2B companies have put sales people through training on relationship selling methodologies that focused on – well – the relationship.  They are so numerous that I could not possibly list them all.  But they all get at the same thing.  To succeed you have to have a consultative relationship with the buyer.  My favorite was Mack Hanan’s fantastic Consultative Selling.  I used it for years personally, had sales teams trained on it, and even had Mack Hanan speak at National Sales Conferences I held.  He recently passed and he will be remembered as one of the greats indeed.  But what is going on then?  Paul Greenberg put it best this year when he said buyers today do not want to be an object of a sale but a subject of an experience.  Here it is from a buyer’s mouth in one interview: “I love the guy we deal with; he’s really cares.  But I’ve got to tell you that all he’s doing is constantly trying to jump through hoops for us to get over the darn hassle we have with just doing business.”  Okay, so you think he is having a good buyer experience?  Do you think he will be loyal and suffer through bad buyer experiences because he likes the rep?  I really don't think so.  It is not enough anymore to just have good relationship selling – the entire sales and buyer experience has to be good.

Trend 2: Reinvent the buyer experience

Here’s what I see firsthand.  Many B2B companies still manage from these very same sales processes without regard to the entire buyer experience.  We’ve become fixated on the process and not the experience.   Sales reps are compensated on how well they follow the process and close deals.  So they are ill prepared to be flexible.  On top of that, the entire buying experience is fragmented.  Buyers experience something different from marketing than from sales and even different yet when they reach support.  B2B businesses need to view the entire buyer experience and reinvent it.  This will require new ways of thinking, new tools, new systems, and much deeper understanding on who is your buyer persona and mapping your buyer’s journey to know the best ways to meet the buyer where they are in their journey. 

Trend 3: Buyers want expertise

As mentioned, by the time buyers are ready to engage, they are already well informed.  So, two things need to happen from the way I see it.  First is content has to exhibit a level of expertise that informs and educates buyers.  I previously mentioned in my article How Social Media is Transforming the Buyer Experience that companies need to think like online educators.  This is a real challenge from a content marketing standpoint.  Second, when they do engage directly, they want subject matter expertise – not regurgitation of sales literature.  One buyer put it this way in an interview: “They had pretty good information available online but their sales people – um how shall I put this – they didn’t know anything.”  I think you get this trend.

Trend 4: New and better tools to enable the sales and buyer experience

Most of sales and buyer thinking over the last 100 years have revolved around the AIDA and BANT process. When you think about it, many of the tools and system that have been created revolve around these processes and measuring “the funnel” around these processes.  Again, these views have caused sales and marketing organizations to be fixated on the process and not the experience.  Once an understanding of the buyer persona and mapping the buyer journey are reached, sales and marketing teams need better tools as well as systems that allow for co-creating content as well as solutions with buyers.  Here’s the voice of a sales rep interviewed: “It’s frustrating, I mean, there is no way I can mix and match what we already have from marketing and I wind up trying to type it out on Word.  I know it looks bad but what else can I do.”

Trend 5: The meaning of sales enablement will change

Personally, I think the term sales enablement needs to change to buyer enablement.  This should happen sooner rather than later in my mind.  Now, before everyone gets in a tizzy in sales enablement, I want to make it clear that I have nothing but admiration for the progress made in sales enablement the last few years.  My point is that even sales enablement has to adapt to buyer behavior and focus on enabling the buyer.  Think of it this way, if 70-80% of the buying process is self-directed by buyers, should we be spending 70-80% of our time enabling sales versus the buyer?  Should we not focus on preparing sales teams to be experts on buyer enablement versus experts on enabling the sales process?  This means that we need to get sales as well as marketing to see themselves as enablers for buyers and not enablers of just processes. 

Trend 6: B2B companies will learn how  to “brand” the buyer experience

As I see it, most of B2B “branding historically has centered on the “product” and even their sales organization.  I listened to Joe Pulizzi of Junta42 and the fantastic blog The Content Marketing Revolution recently on a webinar where he told a story of putting a company's content material before a management team and asked them to tell him what they saw.  They all got it: the content was all about their product and them and nothing about the buyer.  This is not going to plain work anymore!  It has been written about plenty of times in 2010 that buyers want experiences that are like their consumer buying experience.  And where B2C is ahead of B2B is that they are making headway into realizing that consumers expect the equation of brand experience + interaction experience = buyer experience (oops MBA-itis strikes again).  Over used yes but the best example is Apple.  The brand brings emotional appeal and the interaction in the Apple Store is like going into a candy shop when you were a kid.  Apple has put together one of the best consumer buying experience in history.  And Apple has done a masterful job in branding the entire buying experience.  So Apple users who are also B2B buyers say – hey why can’t I have this experience in the business world?

Trend 7: 2011 will be The Year of the Buyer

I truly believe that 2011 will be the year B2B businesses begin to devote time and resources to developing strategies that are focused on the buyer.  B2B businesses will see the importance of gaining in-depth buyer insight through qualitative research, creating high quality buyer personas from qualitatively gained insight, mapping the buyer journey via qualitative means, developing meaningful subject matter expertise, and designing sales experiences and buyer experiences that they hope buyers will rave about. 

I think that 2011 will be one exciting year.  I’m excited – are you?  The country will begin to come out of the post-recession doldrums and the digital age novelty will begin to wear off leading to real world practical usage  in such areas as social media.  B2B businesses will begin to adapt to changing buyer behaviors – maybe even in ways we cannot imagine today. 

Join in the conversation………….write a comment…….write a prediction...and please refrain from selling your product and more importantly...from MBA-itis. Let's have a conversation.

B2B Imperative: Reinvent the Sales Experience

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Adapting to transformative changes in buyer behavior is the most significant challenge facing B2B organizations.  Buyers are asking for better experiences and better solutions.  The digital age bringing new expectations on the part of buyers for learning experiences, subject matter expertise, innovative customization, and varied channel engagements.  As B2B businesses seek to achieve post-recession revenue growth, they also must confront the issue of how to rethink long standing conventional practices in sales they know must change to meet this challenge head on. 

For the past thirty to forty years, sales have focused on relationship building, methodology, and processes.  The variety too numerous to mention but a trip to a Barnes & Noble or a perusal through Amazon will give you a good sense of what has transpired in this time period. On Amazon, over 1,500 titles in sales process and over 500 titles in sales process management are listed in their book category.  Sales management has become defined primarily by implementing and enforcing methodology and processes.  In today’s new state of mind of buyers, exercising rigidity to sales process management may very well be out of synch with buyers. 

How should B2B businesses respond to changing buyer behaviors and the issue of sales process management being out of synch with buyers?  One critical response is to develop strategies designed to innovate the sales experience for buyers.  The essence of sales experience lies in the ability of B2B organizations to innovate unique buying experiences.  While defined sales processes offer structure and guidance, enhancing the buyer experience will mean being less rigid.  B2B businesses can adapt to buyer behaviors by first gaining critical insight into the mind of the buyer and then innovating the sales experience.  The end result being a unique buying experience for their buyers.  The terminology in this new thinking could get in the way of the fact that sales experience is really about innovating as well as enabling a unique buying experience. 

 
A recent study by the Corporate Executive Board bares this out.    Interviewing 2,400 businesses, the study gives good reason to have an imperative to reinvent the sales experience.  In asking which drivers contribute to loyalty, whereby loyalty is defined as the willingness to repurchase, the largest percentage driver was sales experience at 53%.  The driver of sales experience was more than the combined percentage of the three other drivers defined in the study – company and brand, product and delivery, and value-to-price ratio.  This strongly indicates that if B2B businesses want to achieve strong buyer loyalty, they need to act on reinventing the buyer and sales interaction to create unique buying experiences. 

How should B2B organizations go about reinventing the sales experience as a means of creating unique buying experiences?  This question undoubtedly will be pondered for quite some time.  Here are a few suggestions on how to begin:

• Insight-Driven Planning:  Creating unique buying experiences and interactions with sales starts with gaining critical insight into the buyer, buying process, and the buyer experience journey.  Investing and obtaining in-depth buyer insight will directly correlate to the ability to innovate sales experiences and buying experiences that resonate with buyers. 
• Buyer Persona Understanding:  Today’s sales organizations must become experts on knowing their buyers as opposed to experts on sales processes.  Crafting buyer persona sales playbooks that offer guides to sales teams on buyer goals and issues will result in reshaping the sales and buying experience.  These buyer persona playbooks enable sales teams to help buyers consider options as well as offer insight to buyers on how issues and problems can be addressed.
• Subject Matter Expertise: As buyers work on initiatives or respond to triggers, offering subject matter expertise by way of content is critical to engaging buyers early in the buyer experience journey.  Insight-driven content is the key to establishing the organization in the role of educating buyers on how to address issues and attain goals.
• Multi-Media and Multi-Channel: The advent of the digital age has resulted in buyer expectations to engage in multi-media experiences as well as to have multi-channel options.   Gaining insight into what types of multi-media formats buyers respond to can lead to effective digital and social media marketing strategies. 

What is becoming evident today through various studies such as that completed by the Corporate Executive Board is that B2B companies will need to reorient thinking on the role of sales as they adapt to buyer behavior changes.  In the future sales will be less about the execution of process but more about how they can offer buyers a unique buying experience.

Seven Buyer and Sales Trends to Watch in 2011

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Reflecting on 2010, one cannot miss the incredible pace of change that is underway in B2B organizations as they adapt to the new state of mind of buyers.  Thinking ahead to 2011, this pace of change will increase significantly as requirements of buyers intensify measureably.  Sales departments in B2B organizations are facing their most severe test in decades as the post-recession impact continues to reverberate throughout the economy.  Buyer behavior as a result is changing significantly on two fronts.  The first is adapting to the limitations imposed by the lasting effects of the recession.  The second is adapting to the impact of the digital age on buyer behavior.  The year 2011 will shape up to be a transformative one for sales and there will be significant rethinking on how sales functions are integrated into B2B organizations. Several trends that point to transformation are:

Trend 1: A shift from sales relationship to sales experience

The predominant driver in sales over the past twenty-five years has been a focus on relationship selling in various contextual forms such as consultative selling, VIP selling, and etc. Sales will require development of meeting buyer demands for an experiential interaction with sales that is more than just a focus on relationships alone. The proliferation of “relationship” selling methodologies has made them predictable and of diminished value to buyers.  While relationship building will remain important, reliance on this alone will not be enough.

Trend 2: Organizations will focus on reinventing the buyer experience

The year 2011 will be the beginning of companies adapting more intensely to the changing landscape of buyer behavior caused by the lasting effects of the recession and the advent of the digital and social age. Sales will require adaptation to these changes with new methods, tools, and systems that map well to buyer behavior. Companies will see a need to shift from solely a focus on selling processes to incorporating the sales experience into a framework of the overall buying experience.  Inventing new ways of creating rewarding buyer experiences of which the sales experience is one aspect of several.

Trend 3: Expertise level requirement of sales will increase

As buyers demand more subject matter expertise to arrive at innovative solutions, this will place demands on B2B companies to increase the level of expertise on the part of sales functions. Problem-solving, assessment, and contextual solution creation relevant to buyer initiatives and triggers will become necessary requirements. The ability to map to buyer journeys and buying processes will increase as well as supporting sales with mapping perspectives and tools. 

Trend 4: Evolving systems and tools to improve the sales experience

Existing systems and tools will need to evolve from primarily static methods to dynamic methods. Increasing the ability of sales to customize on the fly and have modular approaches to demonstrate expertise as well as map to buyer initiatives and buyer goals. This increases the imperative on marketing to provide rich dynamic content in flexible forms that is oriented to the buyer's perspective yet allows for sales to "co-create" content with buyers that support solution "co-creation" as well. With respect to systems or standards for measuring qualified leads and sales opportunities, there will be a shift in thinking about the effectiveness of models such as BANT and AIDA as the focus increases on sales experience and the buyer experience. These two types of measurement perspectives may no longer be adequate in standalone formats.

Trend 5: Sales enablement will focus on improving buyer engagement

Sales enablement will play a role in improving the overall buying experience by dedicating a focus on deeper understanding of buyers and improving engagement capabilities with buyers. Multiple channels of engagements including those involving social media will increase demands for training and new tools to support not only improved ability in conversational skills or dialoguing with buyers but also adapting to new forms or channels of engagements. Companies will begin to invest more heavily in attaining buyer and market insight that reveal buyer goals, target buyer personas, and mapping of buyer journeys. 

Trend 6: Buyer experience branding

More B2B organizations will begin to bring an encompassing perspective to branding that has a distinct buyer experience orientation.  Branding that has solely a product-centric or a sales-centric orientation will prove to be insufficient to map to the demands of buyer.  Branding, reflected through strategy and content, will become representative of the experience buyers can expect. 

Trend 7: The year of the buyer

B2B organizations will look to develop comprehensive buyer strategies with particular focus on investing in resources to acquire informing buyer insights as well as market insights.  These insights utilized to develop market oriented buyer personas, buyer journey mapping, and buyer interaction models that enhance the sales experience and the overall buying experience. 

The year of 2011 may very well be a watershed year in the evolution of sales as many B2B organizations will recognize a need to adapt to changing buyer behaviors and expectations as well as the increasing maturity of social and digital integration into sales and marketing. B2B companies will find themselves caught in transition as they undergo various degrees of change management to reorient their organizations to the new state of mind of their buyers. While most predictions rarely pan out in exactness, one thing we can say for certain - 2011 will be a very interesting year indeed.