We are living in a world that is fraught with uncertainty. The degree of uncertainty for businesses today probably is at the highest level in decades. Resulting in a chaotic world for sellers and buyers looking to make sense of what the future may hold.
This high degree of uncertainty and chaotic environment is showing up in many forms for both buyers and sellers. Whether it is sellers suffering from significant skill gaps as recently pointed out in surveys completed by DemandGen Report and Sirius Decisions or buyers in recent compiled reports indicating lack of knowledge and information that helps them to make purchasing decisions – uncertainty and chaos reigns at the moment. This perfect storm of uncertainty and chaos making the ability of marketer’s to communicate with buyers extremely challenging and causing sales organizations to struggle in being relevant to the buying process. So how does an organization get a hold of itself in such times?
Adaptation Begets Patterns
Organizations and buyers are highly adptable albeit some adapt quicker while others lag. Oftentimes, those who do lag are left off the train with some just barely grabbing a hold of the last caboose that is pulling way. When adaptation in industries and markets occur, patterns begin to emerge as we have seen during the past three years - such as in how buyers search for information. A key to being relevant to buyers is an organization’s willingness to invest in staying abreast of patterns and then adjusting. This is much easier said than done. Buyer behavior patterns can be tricky indeed for it can be like shifting sand on a beach that on the surface looks flat but the moment a disturbance occurs - a crater is revealed. Caught unaware of the underlying shifts in buyer as well as market behaviors, an organization can find itself falling into a crater that could be difficult to climb out of.
Once patterns can be discovered, bringing order to chaos and uncertainty lays in understanding buyer priorities and goals. An essential point and the reason buyer behavior research is a primer for this understanding is that buyers themselves are dealing with a high degree of uncertainty and chaos. They are having their own degree of difficulty in clearly being able to express priorities and goals in precise ways. Given that premise, then organizations must develop a means for identifying patterns as well as being able to interpret patterns into an actionable understanding of buyer priorities and goals.
The path to gaining a deep understanding of buyer priorities and goals is through buyer behavior research and analysis. The high degree of uncertainty and chaos in today’s marketplaces makes a presumed understanding one that can be filled with many craters. Craters that can be littered with failed product launches, content marketing efforts, demand generation initiatives, and a smoldering fire of bad reputation.
Is it time for organizations to take a hard look at their efforts in understanding emerging buyer behavior patterns and how they reveal why and how buyers are making purchasing decisions today? I know my answer – what is yours?
Before jumping into a quantitative approach, it is important to emphasize the need for reaching an understanding of Buyer Perceived Value (BPV) qualitatively. Perceived values are changing rapidly and will continue to do so as new buyer behaviors are formed – changes driven by the introduction of new technologies and business models. Multiple and varietal forms of qualitative methods help to provide a unique articulation of value criteria that buyers may formalize or internalize for decisions. Qualitative understanding is essential due to buyers, common to human behavior, having difficulty in offering a clean series of statements that accurately reflect their value sentiments. Multiple qualitative methods assist in identifying un-articulated patterns of thinking and behaviors that can be translated into value attributes unique to your industry, markets, and organization. Basing a scorecard approach on a generalized and presumed sense of buyer perceived value attributes mitigates the usefulness of a Buyer Perceived Value Scorecard severely for informing buyer strategies. Now let’s take the academic speak out of the above and simply say that if you base the scorecard on what you think buyer’s value versus actually going out to talk to buyers and using qualitative methods to uncover values – it will be of no particular use.
As mentioned in the previous article on Buyer Perceived Value (BPV), value has been viewed conventionally around product and service. The convergence of the Internet and the Social Age is resulting in new as well as evolving values that we may not fully understand at the moment. Calling for qualitative means of discovering exactly what these values are and the meaning behind them. This is the primary reason why I advocate strongly the need for qualitative research to understand Buyer Perceived Value (BPV) meaningfully.
Once value attributes have been identified, monitoring and using a scorecard approach can help to inform how an organization can improve as well as build new strategies to better align with buyers. To make a scorecard purposeful for informing strategies, there are several key elements to incorporate:
Priority: Not all values are perceived equally. Determining through qualitative means how much weight buyers place on certain value attributes is essential.
Ideal: After values are weighted, what do the values look like in a perfect world to buyers? The goal becoming how to score a perfect 10 on all value attributes.
Perceived: Once value attributes have been identified and established, a combination of qualitative and survey methods can help in discovering how buyers perceive the organization abilities in measuring up to the ideal.
Differential: Using the scorecard approach can help in identifying the largest differentials between what buyers consider of high value and where the organization is falling short in the minds of buyers.
Below is a simplified version of such a scorecard:
In the example below, you will see a red flag around implementation support suggesting improvement. You will also note that 24 hour turnaround is prioritized highly and this can include the use of social networks. The meaning behind each value attribute listed should be supported by qualitative interpretation. For example, what exactly do buyers’ value in implementation support? How much of a factor is social engagement behind 24 hour turnaround perception?
By combining the use of multiple qualitative research methods and quantitative analysis, an organization can begin to get a realistic handle on how well they measure up to the perceived values buyers base decision-making criteria’s on. We are at a point in marketplace history where uncertainty reigns. The importance of refreshing, qualitatively, the understanding of exactly what buyers perceive as values and how much weight is put on each is critical to being on the buyer’s radar of choice. What we can count on is that new technologies, services, and business models will cause shifts in what buyer’s value.
How do you plan to stay informed of these shifts in buyer perceived values?
In my previous article, Enhance the Buyer Experience with Intelligent Engagement, I referenced a trend I called Experiential Buying. Buyer behaviors in B2B marketplaces are shifting tremendously towards more holistic experiential expectations that defy the conventional straight re-buy, modified re-buy, and new buy behaviors of the past. Buyer expectations have increased with regards to the experiences they undergo as well as desire.
In simplistic generalities, we can take a view of two experience categories that B2B buyers may seek:
Self-Enabled Buying
In this situation, a buyer may want to experience a re-buy that reaffirms his or her decision to continue a relationship. Even in modified re-buy situations, the buyer may be looking for an experience where they can perform the modifications themselves. The difference in the modern social age is that buyer expectations have changed. If companies have not adapted their businesses to enhanced online and social capabilities, they may very well be placing artificial barriers in front of their buyers who are seeking an entirely different straight re-buy or modified re-buy experience than in the past. As consumer-like experiences become more desired in business marketplaces, companies will need to rethink many aspects of their sales and service capabilities as well as interactions. This includes taking a hard look at barriers they may be putting up in front of their buyers unintentionally.
Assist-Enabled Buying
In those situations where buyers are actively seeking assistance, the cumulative experiences of the assistance they receive are becoming important factors in their decisions. In situations of modified re-buy and new buy, organizations today must look not only towards Intelligent Engagement as mention in my previous article, but they must examine and establish a balance between assistance and empowerment. Plainly speaking, what companies have to be careful about is how long-ago established internal processes may not be fulfilling buyer expectations for an experience. It seems to me, as observed in recent qualitative research, that buyers wanting assistance also want to feel empowered to act on their own on different levels without the excessive "hand-holding" companies feel they've gain permission to exercise.
What is becoming more apparent is that companies in the near future will need to build adaptive capabilities for enabling experiential buying. In such a way that it allows for buyers themselves to create their own adaptive differentiated experiences. Buyers enabled to create their experiences of finding the right knowledge at the right time at the right place at the right interaction level and at the right solution. Companies that can figure out how to get this experiential buying formula right – will have the competitive advantage going forward.
In my recent article, The Ascent of the Social Buyer, I made mention that social buyers today were exhibiting an internalized Social Engagement Index. The mention of a Social Engagement Index is not new. The people at Alterian have talked about a Social Engagement Index (SEI) as well as a Social Sentiment Engagement Index (SSEI). Recently, Brent Leary and John Hernandez offered a perspective for The Social Customer in a report called The Social Customer Engagement Index 2011. The report focused primarily on how companies are leveraging social tools and technologies to reach and engage customers in customer service interactions. It also pays note to how satisfied customers are with these interactions.
My mention of a Social Buyer Engagement Index is coming from a different direction. In my anthropological inspired studies, the interest has been on the value buyers today are placing on the ability of companies to provide social engagement capabilities. It is asking the question: are buyers today evaluating a company’s social engagement capabilities as part of the overall buying experience as well as social experience? Although in an embryo stage with further research warranted, I think we are beginning to see the emergence of this new expectation. There are three areas that buyers today may be looking at as they evaluate a company’s social engagement capability:
Service: Socially adept buyers today may be placing a premium on the instantaneous service capabilities that social networking and technology tools offer. Does not having social engagement capabilities in service – whereby a socially adept buyer sees only conventional email and toll-free numbers – affect a buyer’s receptivity to this company?
Knowledge: Social buyers today are knowledge seekers. One of the profound shifts in the social age is how buyers today can avail themselves of knowledge that may have been hard to come by in the past. As the social age evolves and advances, so does the social buyer’s savvy discrimination for real knowledge versus content in general. There has been much attention paid to content marketing and content strategy recently as a form of new media marketing. Social buyers today are becoming savvier at distinguishing between push marketing messaging and real knowledge.
Self-Direction: In attempt to avoid the now cliché expression and perhaps to elaborate on the “buyers are in control” adage, social buyers are oriented towards self-directed means of interactions. When evaluating the overall buying experience, social buyers may be looking at what we may refer to as the avenues of self-direction that a company may offer. Are there several avenues by which a social buyer can choose to engage and interact with an organization’s sales and service capabilities?
These are three of what are sure to be more factors associated with how buyers are internalizing their own form of a Social Engagement Index. This emerging trend ups the ante’ for companies today to begin looking seriously at their social engagement capabilities. Without doing so, they may become oblivious to a new expectation buyers are considering in their overall buying as well as social experience.
This is the fifth and final part of a series of reflective articles on the future of buyer personas in the social age. Leading up to this final part, part 1 through 4, I covered some of the misconceptions, impact of the social age, what changes were needed, and the establishing of a new role and framework. In this final reflection, I offer 6 essentials to embedding buyer personas into your organization.
In part 4, I described a new role of Social Buyer Behaviorist and Anthropologist that can reside in a framework of researching buyer behavior through anthropological means. A return to the origins and original meaning of buyer personas that was lost as the term went viral. It is worth reiterating that buyer persona research, since its origins, is meant to be coupled with social science research methods of anthropology and ethnography. Whereby the archetype buyer persona created represents an interface to the research conducted.
There are 6 essential guiding premises that will help to embed true buyer persona research into your organization and to do so where you are not merely creating buyer profiles but are performing the bona fide practice of buyer persona research:
Do The Real Thing
If you are able to build an in-house practice, bring on people who have the requisite background in anthropology and ethnographic research. Several Fortune 100 companies, such as Intel, have moved in this direction in the past decade. These organizations are employing a team of anthropologists and ethnographers to continuously research consumer or buyer behavior. Often times, performing in-house or through the use of an experienced third party schooled in anthropological methods, developing user or buyer personas to help be the interface to their research.
What if you do not have the means or resources to build an in-house practice that conducts the research and creates interfacing personas for the research? Then a third-party option should be explored. The key is to distinguish from those who claim they do buyer personas from real practitioners versed in anthropology and ethnographic research. As the terms personas and buyer personas went viral, there have been many who say they build buyer personas but do no to very little research. This is a clear indicator that they are building consumer or buyer profiles based on a quick gathering of client data. Essentially they are providing another profile building method and incorrectly labeling them as buyer personas. It is important to look at the track record of experience in having conducted anthropological inspired research and being able to translate into buyer personas that inform on business models, buyer strategies, meeting market or competitive challenges, and adaptive strategies. Informing on adaptive strategies is becoming critical as many companies are faced with adapting to new buyer behaviors and new social dynamics as a result of the evolving social age.
Commit To The Right Level Of Time
There is no way around it. Conducting buyer persona research – the real thing as described above and throughout this series of articles – takes a sufficient amount of time. From an in-house perspective, it becomes an ongoing agenda and specific research efforts often taking a minimum of 3 months to gain the insights needed and to translate into the rich interface of a consumer (user) or buyer persona. These efforts will undergo repeated interactions with consumers or buyers. Now, these repeated interactions even more important given the rapid changes occurring in buyer behaviors due to the introduction of new social technology every 2-3 months.
From a third-party perspective, if you are promised that you can have buyer personas in a week or a short few weeks, then you should be concerned. They are most likely talking about profiles and do not have the connection to the right kind of research established. On occasion, hypothetical or what are called provisional buyer personas can be created. However, the mistake often made is that these are then used as the real thing without having been validated through research. They are, after all, “hypothetical” and if you are being held accountable for a budget to market your company’s solutions – would you bet millions of dollars on “hypothetical”?
To gain the deep insights that anthropological and ethnographic based buyer persona research can offer, companies need to allow for sufficient time in months versus a few short weeks. It takes a minimal level of 15-30 ethnographic research interviews and I’m not referring to counting friends and employees or your sales reps. This means on-site participant-observation methods with actual consumers or buyers. Depending on the complexity of markets, products, and services, it can be even more. The social age is introducing new factors and levels of research that will need to augment traditional ethnographic research. It is important to reiterate that companies today seeking third-party help must look towards a long-term partnership potential for social behavioral research will need much repeated refreshing.
Valuable insights can be gained in 2 to 4 months and depending on the complexity from multiple markets and buyer segments, it may even take longer. However, we are turning a chapter here in the social age. The need for ongoing research, as mentioned, is becoming critical for the shelf-life of consumer (user) and buyer personas is shrinking rapidly in the social age.
Cheap Will Not Get it Done
If buyer persona research tied to anthropological buyer behavior research is done in-house, be sure to get the right level of people to support such efforts. You can be sure that some of today’s leading organizations with in-house practices have staff that includes anthropologists with graduate degrees. These are people well versed in the methods of anthropology and ethnography as well as have the interpretive skills to translate findings into communicable as well as informing consumer (user) or buyer personas. Additionally, commit to a budget that supports ongoing research.
Due to the viral misunderstanding about buyer personas, as I previously mentioned sometimes research is misrepresented as meaning to talk to a few customers, a few friends, and interview employees. This should be a red flag for you if promised by third-parties. You will not get the insights that come from the right level of ethnographic research and the information will most likely be used incorrectly – perhaps even damaging if used for a high stakes initiative.
Budgeting to do the real thing and with the right amount of time is usually somewhere between what typical focus groups costs and a large scale national study for example. Meaning an organization should explore conducting buyer persona research – the real thing backed by skilled ethnographic research – with a budget in mind of five figures – sometimes six figures if it involves many multiple markets and the degree of complexity is high. The real question for many organizations given challenges they may be facing as well as faced with transitioning to a social business – can you afford not to do true ethnographic based buyer persona research to uncover real insights and opportunities that will help shape the direction of your organization in the social age?
Triangulate Your Research
A common misperception is that quantitative and qualitative research has a great divide. In fact, they should enjoy a reciprocal relationship. Ethnographic researches accompanied by the interface of buyer persona archetypes can often times inform quantitative research direction that validate opportunities uncovered. Likewise, quantitative research can be triangulated with qualitative and ethnographic efforts with buyer personas providing the interface and the narrative that brings to life both the quantitative and the qualitative research. Focus groups as well as usability studies can play a role in triangulating research by being used to gauge the reaction to prototypes and new concepts that may be born out of the combined quantitative and ethnographic research.
Involve Multi-Disciplinary Groups
As the viral misunderstanding of the term buyer persona proliferated, a common misperception evolved that buyer personas were provincial to marketing. It is not hard to see why. If the perception is that buyer personas are target buyer profiles for targeting marketing and sales messaging, then it is a logical conclusion for marketing and sales has been targeting buyers for eons. Going back to the origins of personas and buyer personas as an ethnographic research effort to inform design and strategy, these meant involving multi-disciplinary groups from design, branding, corporate strategy, marketing, call centers, fulfillment, and service. With the prominence of the social age now an important development for all businesses, a multi-disciplinary approach becomes even more crucial. The new social buyer ecosystem is touching every facet of an organization and those organizations that have deep rooted knowledge of their consumers or buyers will have a leg up on succeeding in the social age.
A very disconcerting and negative outcome of the viral misunderstanding of the term buyer persona has been how it plays out in the minds of senior marketing executives. Many a VP Marketing I’ve spoken to in the last couple of years see buyer personas only as a tool to help marketing craft sales messaging. Thus, the concepts of buyer personas never make it out of marketing if this thinking exists. Anthropological inspired research and persona development should reside within a hub and spoke part of the organization that truly is focused on the customer and the buyer. Such as in customer experience for example where the efforts must take on a multi-disciplinary approach.
Know When To Use Buyer Persona Research
The questions your organizations are attempting to get answers to can serve as a guide to know when you need the real thing – true ethnographic based buyer persona research. I like to refer to these as the “I have no idea” types of questions that keep executives up at night. If you have no idea about consumers or buyers in a new market and how they may respond to your products or services – then buyer persona research is right for you. If you have no idea how products or services are used in new and emerging markets – then buyer persona research is right for you. If you have no idea what the impact of social media has been on the buying behaviors of potential buyers – then buyer persona research is right for you. If you have no idea how to generate demand now that buyers have changed their buying behaviors – then buyer persona research is right for you. If you have no idea whether approving $15 million in new product development will be received well in the markets targeted – then buyer persona research is right for you. If you have no idea what mix of sales and marketing strategy to deploy – then buyer persona research is right for you. If you have no idea why previous buyers are no longer buying - then buyer persona research is right for you. If you have no idea how best to communicate with potential consumers or buyers - then buyer persona research is right for you. If you have no idea why market share dropped by 5% in one year - then buyer persona research is right for you. I think you get the idea!
True anthropological and ethnographic based buyer persona research is meant to get answers to many of the strategic big questions that shape the future direction of organizations. I conclude with saying that the future of buyer personas is social primarily because the social age is presenting executives with many big questions that we’ve yet to have answers for. Returning buyer personas to its origins and original meaning as well as advancing with changes adaptable to the social age will help in answering such big questions.
From a B2B market view, the new social buyer ecosystem continues to undergo a rapid evolution. The pace in 2011 has noticeably quickened. While the social customer ecosystem in the B2C market space is still legions ahead of B2B, it behooves B2B executives to not fall prey to the false sense that the comparative differences means they have to pay little attention. A new social buyer ecosystem is developing with implications on our conventional thinking about how B2B buyers in particular may actually go about researching and buying.
New Buyer Perspectives Evolving
As a primer to talking about the ecosystem, it is important to first visit how buyers are changing against what we think is actually going on. We know from such sources as Basesone’s Buyersphere Report what B2B buyers are doing respective to the use of social media and the Internet as they ultimately make purchase decisions. My focus has been on using qualitative research to understand how buyers are developing social oriented ecosystems and how does this map to conventional thinking in B2B marketing and Sales. There have been some surprising revelations. I would like to break this down for you in several categories and let the actual voice of buyers speak:
Buyer’s Journey: “I’m not sure what that means. I know I don’t go on a so called journey when looking for solutions.”
Buying Stages: “One of the biggest changes for me has been that I no longer think of a step-by-step approach. In fact, I can’t even recall when I last did that. It really is an ongoing almost never ending process of staying on top of the challenges you have and knowing what’s out there."
Content Marketing: “The term, content marketing, I am seeing here and there. Not sure I get it. What I do know is that the sources of information is abundant but can be overwhelming. You have to pick and choose.”
Sales: “Look, I’ve been around a while. Here’s the thing that’s changed. On high ticket items you still need a sales rep to help pull it together but the difference is you expect them to know a heck of lot more than in the past. If they don’t, then it is tough because we can’t spend too much time on bringing them up to speed.”
Social Media/Internet: “The game changer has been that with the Internet and Social Media you can really cull information together about products, solutions, companies, and the likes. Basically it is the first thing we do. As for some of the social networks, like LinkedIn, you can connect with people who can help you out. Without a doubt, I am on the Internet or some social networking site daily.”
The above represents consistent themes heard over several conversations. The qualitative interviews are not as rigorous as I would normally do in a buyer persona research and development effort but nevertheless revealing. This has caused me to reflect more deeply on the changes we are seeing and how a new social buyer ecosystem is forming.
Social Buyer Circles
With Google Plus, circles are suddenly the new rage. In this context they do serve a purpose. Circles are not new. I’m influenced by David Armano who came up with the concept of influence ripples or circles to depict blogger spheres of influence as far back as 2006.
Most recently, Michael Brito offered a great perspective via the use of circles on why content still matters and how the social customer is filtering relevant content.
Here is my view of Social Buyer Circles within a Social Buyer Ecosystem:
Implications for Engaging the Social Buyer
Always On: the Social Buyer is living and breathing the “always on” life via social media, social networks, and the Internet. The implications are that the Social Buyer – from a B2B prism – is active on the likes of Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook daily. This includes blurring the lines between personal and business.
Non-Linear Thinking: the Social Buyer appears to not be thinking conventionally with respect to a methodical stage-by-stage buying process or buying stages. Rather, challenges and solutions awareness as well as evaluation are in a constant state of motion and monitoring. This has implications to how we think in the future about sales and content marketing.
Pull Affect on Challenges: the Social Buyer is exhibiting behavior of setting up what I would like to refer to as “Challenge Circles”. Social Buyers have challenges they are constantly addressing and pull various elements of social networks and social information sources into these challenge circles. The implication for B2B marketers and sellers is how to get pulled into one of the social buyer’s challenge circles. From a sales standpoint, I like Tibor Shanto's perspective via his co-authored book with Craig Elias entitled Shift!:Harness the Trigger Events That Turn Prospects Into Customers and his focus on trigger events. The relevancy here is understanding what triggers one of the challenge circles to activate into motion towards a solution.
Information Sources Go Social: the Social Buyer is beginning to migrate from a purely search behavior to that of social media stored recall. What this means is that social buyers are using social information sources to recall when a “challenge circle” needs to be addressed with a solution. Storing recall through YouTube, Product Review Sites, Q&A such as Focus and Quora, and blogs they subscribe to.
Internal Collaboration Rules: the Social Buyer is engaging and collaborating through internal and private social networks. New platforms such as Jive are influencing the way organizations work and migrate towards being a social business. IBM is way out in front on this. This is making stakeholder buy-in and validation happen more rapidly. It is also establishing precedents for more open sharing of solutions which impacts how budgets are created for expenditures and allocating resources.
Validation Goes Social: the Social Buyer has rapid ability to validate solutions and potential purchase decisions socially through peer networks, social networks, internal networks, review sites, analysts, almost instant feedback on forums, online assessments, and the likes. The implication for B2B companies is that their online presence must extend beyond just their web site and few social networking accounts – it must be extended by influence sources. This is also radically changing the concept of public relations in the social age.
Become a Circle of Influence: the Social Buyer, as I have previously written about, is also interested in their professional growth and becoming a circle of influence themselves. Through blogging, tweeting, discussion groups, and etc. social buyers are actively seeking to be a “sphere of influence” as David Armano describes. This is new phenomenon in B2B market spaces whereby engaging with a recognized social influencer takes on new meaning.
Connected Influence: the Social Buyer is more connected, interpersonally as well as socially, than we could ever have imagined. We are finding that many interact with connections through social networks and other forms such as email or telephone. With many never having met their peer in person or arranging to meet peers at conference. The impact of peer influence on the social buyer is immense. The implication is obvious for B2B marketers and sellers – how do you make peer influencers brand advocates?
Surrounding the social buyer circles are interaction points with the top representing the buyer’s perspective and the bottom representing what the seller must provision. I offered a more detailed view of this when describing the importance of organizations to focus on buyer experience interactions.
While circles may be the rage, it is for good reason. They clearly are helping in gaining social intelligence about the social buyer. The driving forces of being always-on, instant accessibility to sources, overwhelming information overload, social networking management, and increase forces of internal collaboration are influencing buyers to have these circular adaptations. Changing forever conventional perceptions of how buyers in the social age work, collaborate, meet challenges, find solutions, engage with sellers, and ultimately make purchases.
This is the third part of a series of reflective articles on the future of buyer personas. In part 1 of this reflection on the future of buyer personas, I focused on some of the misconceptions about buyer personas and in part 2, I offered perspectives on why changes were needed to be relevant to the social age. In part 3, we turn to the topic of what types of changes are needed.
As I alluded to in part 1, somehow buyer personas went wayward in being correctly defined. Where did it go wayward? Primarily, like most definitions in business, the term was adopted as well as co-opted to put a new label on practices that have been around for a few decades in marketing and sales. Many a good sales professionals as well as marketing professionals I knew back in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s adopted the valued practices of understanding the buying process, profiling their customers/buyers, discovering buyer constraints, understanding the buyer’s decision criteria, and adopting KSF (Key success Factors) factoring in marketing and sales planning. Consultative and solutions selling programs were developed to incorporate sales techniques designed to enable sales in particular to learn how to ask relevant questions aimed at uncovering answers to the above. Buyer personas over the last five years in particular have been layered over these existing practices – as if we were putting a new cover on an old book. My hope in part 3 is that by noting what needs to change, it will also dispel the new cover on an old book misunderstanding. At the same time, offer perspectives on the future of buyer personas in the social age.
From Art to Science
Buyer persona development is more science than art. Now in the social age, the science of buyer personas must be emphasized even more so than ever. Why is this? Buyer persona – and now Social Buyer Persona Development is about understanding behaviors, ecosystems, culture, and goals. Goals have been at the heart of personas in general since their origins. It takes science to uncover changes in behaviors and to understand goals in ways that customers and buyers have difficulty articulating. The science of goal interpretation from the unarticulated reveals the deepest insights about buyer behaviors as well as taps into underlying resources leading to innovation. The science of goal orientation leads to discovering the often hidden and unarticulated roots of “why” people buy. The social sciences of ethnography and anthropology are becoming more prominent in the business world and are essential foundations for true social buyer persona development. Recently, I offered a perspective on a new field called Social Buyerology to foster this sharpened focus. This change is needed because we are in a period of history that is undergoing the most significant change in buyer behaviors since the end of the Second World War. Creating a new cover for existing practices is art. Rewriting the story inside is science.
From Push to Pull
I’m a big fan of John Hagel, author of the book The Power of Pull. His macro views on how business models are shifting from push to pull is important to buyer personas because they change the context by which buyer personas are researched and created. Traditional management and business models have been built on pushing outward through the organization to buyers and inducing them to buy. John Hagel’s makes a 21st Century argument that organizations must develop a spirit of collaboration between co-workers and customers (buyers) that pulls them towards improving both worlds via the organizations. No easy task for much of today’s management structure still is focus on pushing products and services out to customers. The social age however is radically allowing this concept to happen. Understanding how the social buyer persona behaves in a pull economic model is integral to organizations learning how to collaborate with their buyers versus engaging in the art of persuasive seduction.
From Messaging to Listening
Related to from push to pull, much of the intended efforts in building buyer personas – whether executed correctly or not – has been about how to message to buyers. The messaging of course aimed at persuasion in a marketing and sales context. Social buyers today are responding to social organizations that are becoming more adept at listening. The future of buyer personas in the social age is to adapt to the science of listening and identifying the constantly shifting patterns of changes in buyer behaviors. Let the words of a buyer captured in a qualitative interview speak to this: “Look, I get all kinds of stuff from (company name removed – sorry!) and its all the same – they are just pushing (product name removed – sorry!) on me. They can disguise it all they want with white papers and all but it still comes down to pushing a product on me. That’s not listening in my book.” Social buyer persona development must change to be more about informing on listening competency than messaging competency.
From Profiling to Narrative
Not to beat a dead horse, but buyer personas must continue to move from a misunderstood practice of profiling to a practice of understanding the narrative of the social buyer. The narrative is part science and part art. You cannot tell the narrative of the social buyer artfully without the prerequisite of the uncovering attained by science. Narratives have long been an interpretative component of the social sciences as a way of presenting as well as recasting research findings. Narratives and scenario design have been building blocks of personas since their origins and can play an essential role in helping to understanding the changing buyer behaviors brought on by the advent of the social age.
From Marketing/Sales Push to Social Experience Design
Another person I’m a big fan of is Paul Greenberg (plus he’s a big Yankees fan like me), a leading expert on Social CRM and author of CRM at the Speed of Light. Paul’s mantra of - “Buyers don’t want to be an object of a sale but rather the subject of an experience.” – says it best for me. For B2B organizations, this is a tough transition for buried deep into the DNA of their own corporate cultures is the emphasis on pushing outwardly product and sales messaging thus they have little guidance on how to turn B2B buying into a social experience. Both user and buyer persona development is a design thinking process. When implemented correctly, buyer personas have been used to inform the design of buyer strategies and interactions. In the social age, social buyer persona development plays an important role in informing organizations on how to design social buying experiences that’s predicated on listening and engagement as opposed to messaging and push.
From Content Presentation to Social Interaction
The idea of using content to create CTA’s (Call-to-Action) is not necessarily a new idea. It has been part of marketing efforts for years. The term “content marketing” is gaining a foothold due to the explosion of new media channels resulting from the Internet and the Social Age. Among the positive aspects afforded to organizations, there have been consequences. Let’s have the voice of a buyer articulate: “It’s like a fire hose at times. There is so much information coming my way that it is getting hard to manage and stay on top of. I wish there was a way to turn the faucet handle down.” To me this is content presentation just flooding media channels. Social buyer persona development can help inform not only the design of content but also how to design for embedding interaction into content strategy. Buyer persona development must change from a contextual intent of content presentation and messaging to providing deep insight into the design of social interaction behaviors buyers seek. Content marketing in the form of content presentation exacerbates information overload. Embedding social interaction into content is like a sorting belt to buyers. As content floods them along the electronic media conveyor belt, those with social interaction embedded get automatically sorted to a more streamline conveyor belt.
As we look to the future of buyer personas, it is becoming more and more evident to me that the next evolution is in adapting to the social age. It is apt to note that the social sciences of ethnography and anthropology must become more foundational to buyer personas due to the order of magnitude shift we are seeing in social behaviors, interactions, and goals related to the social age.
There is irony in the narrative of my reflection. Personas, both user and buyer, started out with an emphasis on ethnographic research before the term buyer personas was co-opted to describe marketing and sales buyer profiling. The social age is returning buyer personas to the realm of a practice that more closely aligns with the social sciences as well as with the conceptual origins of personas in general.
In part 1 of this reflection on the future of buyer personas, I focused on how it is important to leave some of the major misconceptions about buyer personas behind in order to peer into the future. In part 2, I would like to offer perspectives on why the practice and process of buyer personas, as we’ve known them for the past decade, must undergo significant change to be relevant in the social age.
Without a doubt, we are seeing the most dramatic change in buyer behaviors since post World War II. In my opinion, the seller to buyer world has literally been flipped upside down in unimaginable ways brought on first by the advent of the Internet and now by emerging social trends. In a recent article, The Influence of the Social Buyer on Business, I alluded to areas that are undergoing transformation as well as new relational aspects emerging. These being areas related to new social buyer ecosystems, social business models, and new social buying cycles. The areas mentioned are also having a transformational affect on the practice of buyer persona research and creation. Let us look at several factors that give insight into why changes are needed:
Frame of Reference Must Change
Our reference point for decades has been sellers in the mode of finding – or shall we say hunting – buyers. Organizations implemented simple to complex strategies designed to find buyers and persuade them to hear what they have to say about their products, services, and solutions being offered. Much of marketing and sales still operates the same way today from this frame of reference. Training programs still continue to be focused on finding, probing, presenting, and the likes all aimed at persuading a buyer to hear what a company has to say. Simply stated, the defined role of marketing and sales for the past century has been to be the deliverer of information and to persuade. In today’s social age, this is no longer true. Marketers and sellers can expect social buyers to know if not more than they do, then plenty about products, services, and solutions well before they even get the chance to engage. This is of importance to the process of buyer persona research and development because it means organizations must be in a social listening mode to take in the insights about social buyers. The insights gained may not match up well with an outbound or inside-out frame of reference. The frame of reference succinctly must go from how to get buyers to hear to how to listen to buyers.
The Connected Buyer
Social buyers today are highly connected to peers, influencers, informational sources, suppliers, and academia. Creating new forms of social buyer ecosystems that are also malleable – meaning they are likely to undergo ongoing movement and changes constantly. This has profound implications for buyer persona research. We can no longer have a concrete buyer-centric view whereby we look at the singular buyer. Social buyer persona research will need to adapt to a discrete social buyer ecosystem perspective to truly understand how social buyers are connected and creating new social ecosystems literally on the fly.
No Longer a Snapshot – More Like a Movie
Prior to as well as since personas were originated, the aim was to capture a static snapshot of the user or buyer at a particular point in time. As buyer personas evolved, a prevailing notion was that buyer personas came with a “best if used by” date. At first, it was recommended that new buyer personas be created every 5 years. This timeline continued to shorten. I say it is just about gone altogether now. Let’s face it – a lot happens - even in six months. Buyer persona development will need to adapt to helping organizations have an ongoing dynamic view of social buyers as opposed to a static snapshot of a buyer. This is creating implications on how social buyer personas are researched as well as developed and will call for new methodologies.
Time to Jettison the Sales Funnel and Buying Stage Views – Might as Well Throw Out the Buyer Journey Too
There has much debate as well as thoughtful new ideas about the sales funnel or the sales pipeline view marketing and sales has been wedded to what seems like forever. If you have been around in marketing or sales even just a few years, you know that what you learned in college still looks the same. The buyer has stages leading to a purchase decision. Wherever you are now, these stages have been altered slightly, given new names, or diagrammed differently. But, the view is still the same – like gospel - by golly there are four, five, or six stages that buyers religiously go through. There has also been much discussion about the buyer’s journey – including from me – on how we have to map to the buyer’s journey as they go through these buying stages and how we track via the sales funnel. My view has changed on this the more I see qualitatively how a new social buyer is emerging. Closely associated with the view of the connected social buyer, I am seeing the social buyer self-creating socially oriented cycles and circles that are meaningful to them in their pursuit to achieve goals. I will offer more insight soon in a separate article on the emergence of Social Buyer Circles. This is an important development that will alter significantly social buyer persona research and development.
The above represents just few of several reasons why the future of buyer persona research and development is social. The social age is causing many businesses to rethink and reinvent themselves in the wake of the emerging social buyer. Buyer persona research and development is no exception.
Next: The Future of Buyer Personas is Social – Part 3
The pendulum has been swinging rapidly during the past two years with respect to understanding buyer behavior and interactions in the social age. What we know for sure is that the dynamics and interactions between businesses and buyers are undergoing their most significant transformation in many years and decades. How groups of buyers as well as individual buyers are interacting with each other and with sellers continue to metamorphosis anew monthly redefining our knowledge of how buyers make decisions today.
We are also witnessing the phenomenon of buyers in B2B marketplaces becoming more social in their interactions. This phenomenon is fueled by the advent of social networking technologies that enable buyers to interact with selling businesses and peer buyers. The degree of interactions amongst buyers, both at a group and individual level, is most likely at the highest levels in the history of B2B selling and buying. This phenomenon is causing turmoil in the rank and file infrastructure of B2B Marketing and B2B Sales. We are seeing the births of new technologies and processes, such as content marketing, inbound marketing, marketing automation, and social media technologies attempting to address the voids created as B2B businesses shift their own buying processes and cycles. The results of these new approaches and technologies are mixed as best to date. Why do some work and others do not remain a puzzle.
Reflecting on the significant changes still evolving has led me to a belief that a new discipline is warranted in the B2B business world. This discipline is called Social Buyerology which is centered on understanding buyers in the social age. It seeks to understand the social influences on buyers as well as understand social networking relationships between individual buyers, social buyer groups, and sellers. B2B buyers today are becoming more social and not just in technology usage but in terms of what the influence of the technology has done to make buyers behave more socially. As if there were a social reservoir that has been untapped for many decades and social technology serving as the key to open the locks of the reservoir.
There are seven social factors embedded in Social Buyerology that lead to an understanding of buyer behaviors and interactions in the social age:
Social Mental Models: this represents the collective insight into attitudes, beliefs, perceptions, ideas, and emotive thoughts that are learned, experienced, and acquired in a social and business context.
Social Goals: buyer behavior, as well as the foundational principle behind buyer persona development, is goal oriented. In the social age, we are beginning to see the rise of social goals related to interacting and networking. Drastically affecting how organizational as well as personal goals are established and fulfilled.
Social Persuasion: proactive approaches are cropping up everywhere in terms of messaging designed to persuade specific buyer groups. Creating an imperative to understand new communication mediums and approaches to have buyers not only engage but adopt certain viewpoints. Obviously, content marketing comes to mind here. Which may go through several iterations as a practice and concept or something new may arise altogether as buyers continue to evolve socially.
Social Experience: this represents understanding the collective experiences a buyer and/or group of buyers has both in the social networking world as well as in the offline world.
Social Influence: this is looking at how new social networking and social group dynamics affect as well as influence individual and collective social buyers. We are just beginning to understand social influence on a generational level and by certain professions.
Social Interaction: how groups of sellers, buyers, stakeholders, and multiple departmental affiliations interact socially as well as through new social technology mediums have direct correlations to decision-making. New decision-making and buying cycle processes are now being based to a high degree on social interactions between multiple parties.
Social Networking: the advent of the social age is affecting and changing how buyers relate to colleagues and peers not only within but outside of their organizations. The spheres of networking has exploded and connections are made daily through channels such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. We are still on top of an enormous current that is flowing rapidly in terms of understanding how this has changed buyer behavior and interactions.
Buyer behavior today with respect to decision-making is being directly affected by the continuing evolution of the social age. B2B buyers are more social than ever which behooves B2B organizations to understand this impact as well as to adapt their business operations to the new social buyer. While traditional influences remain strong, overtime and as younger generations grow into leadership, social constructs and social models of behavior will become more prevalent. Social Buyerology can be a discipline devoted to understanding the new social buyers for organizations and allow for collaboration with academia.
Baseone, the London based B2B Marketing Agency, released its 2nd annual Buyersphere Report 2011 this month. The Basone Buyersphere Report surveys approximately 1,000 businesses, heavily comprised of UK and European firms and ranging from small to multi-national enterprises, on the steps they take in making purchases. The annual report is aimed at surveying the changing B2B buyer behavior.
While this second report highlights the continuation of the changes noted in the 2010 report, there is definitely a “more of” aspect that is revealed and a few surprises. There are several components of the report that stands out in terms of providing clues to how B2B buyer behavior is changing:
Information: as noted in the report – “one of the biggest changes in buyer behavior is the growing appetite for more information” – this is expected as we move from traditional outbound models to inbound models of marketing. I happen to like the term “appetite” for it serves as an apt description of the search mentality B2B buyers may be exhibiting.
Channels: the report indicates that we should be careful about throwing the baby out with the bath water. The report revealed that 68% of buyers checked their supplier’s websites and that 65% used search engines to research the information they needed to support their purchasing process and decisions. All those who have clamored about social media and social technology dominance, hold on to your seats. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Blogs, and other social media ranked near the bottom. Yes, Facebook usage nearly doubled compared to last year but it still does not have anywhere near the usage levels that traditional channels have when it comes to B2B purchasing.
Influence: This is where the report gets a little interesting. Blogs, WOM, Twitter, and Direct Mail were all ahead of Facebook in terms of influence. What was the King of Influence in this survey? Believe it or not the findings point to Offline Events and Seminars. What we are seeing in the numbers is that although Offline Events ranked the highest, people attending fell by half compared to 2010 and webinars nearly doubled. However webinars still ranked fairly low in terms of influence.
Company Website: the report findings indicated that the closer a buyer came to the actual decision; the more influential were company websites, web searches, and industry press. In need identification, supplier identification, and final supplier selection stages, this pattern continued to hold true. In terms of both influence and usage, company websites were still at the top of the list.
Social Media Significance: the report, although indicating growing usage of social media, does not affirm soundly that social media influence has grown significantly. The report questions the perception versus the reality about social media.
Sharing Content: the report does indicates that buyers are reluctant to provide data capture information to receive content and are more likely to download content if data capture is not required.
Reflecting on this report, a few things come to mind:
Buyer’s appetite for information continues to grow. This supports recent observations I’ve had about buyers self-directing their buying cycles and it makes sense as they shift to this behavior the need for more information becomes essential.
Companies should still pay utmost attention to their websites and maximizing web searches to their site. While social media is the shiny new object and resources should be devoted to evolving, it should not be done at the expense of keeping the company website up to date. Facebook, while a wonderful personal and consumer social platform, remains questionable as a B2b marketing and selling platform in my mind.
Offline events are still king in the B2B world. It is in my mind the ultimate “social” event. I’ve had a gnawing feeling about webinars that this report pokes at. Attending a few and participating in a few, I had always been left with a void feeling about webinars from this angle: does anyone really listen to them? The report may provide some evidence to put offline events back in the budget.
There is still a healthy degree of skepticism amongst B2B company leaders about the usage and influence of social media. I think we need to keep in mind that we are in the infancy of a burgeoning new social buyer economy and that in time both usage and influence will grow. I heard the same degree of skepticism when the Internet first came into play in the mid-‘90’s. Business leaders then in B2B felt that it would not amount to being a big influence in their B2B businesses. I’d love to talk to a few them again now!
In terms of sharing content – okay I get it!
I wish to express many thanks to the Baseone Buyersphere Team for their efforts in this valuable report. Although I believe there may be differences between the U.S. and Europe, perhaps even significant ones, the report gives us an important global look at the changing B2B buyer behaviors.
Image via Wikipedia
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