While we've seen the rise of the social consumer in the past two years reshape the concept of social currency, we are witnessing the ascent of the social buyer embracing social commerce. The B2B buyer continues to ascend and advance in the use of social technologies, networks, and commerce that are radically changing the notion of business as usual. We are seeing the birth of a new era in B2B commerce that is more social, more connected, and more humanized.
The B2B buyer, for decades, has engaged in primarily offline buying activities. With the advent of the Internet, we began to see the first shifts in online buyer behaviors influencing how plans and decisions were made in a B2B context. As the constant motion of the social age evolves, offline and online buying activities are blending into a myriad of new buying behaviors that are yet to be defined clearly. Like a lens, we are still trying to focus the picture on seeing clearing today as well as into the future how these new social buying behaviors will change B2B commerce as we know it.
A New Social Engagement Index
One of the more interesting developments in the ascent of the social buyer has been the new expectations of social engagement. In recent ethnographic studies I've conducted, where I am talking with B2B purchasers and decision-makers, I am witnessing conversationally the new threshold of what we may call a company’s Social Engagement Index. What I mean is an index of how a company is perceived in its’ efforts to utilize social technologies, networks, and etc. to advance its’ relationship with their buyers. The important discovery here is that how a company is perceived to be engaging socially is beginning to influence the willingness to enter into a B2B relationship.
This insight brings back into focus the topic I recently wrote about – turning b2b buying into a social experience. It is becoming more evident that not only do B2B buyers – as social buyers – desire more humanized social experiences; they are beginning to manifest it into an expectation. This has profound implications for B2B businesses to think about remapping strategically how they align their efforts to engage with social buyers. A tough assignment when the picture is yet not as clear as desired on knowing exactly how to do this. B2B companies do know however that they must learn for the risk of being caught flat footed is too great.
Social Experience Becoming More Meaningful
One thing we can count on is that B2B social experiences are taking on meaningful contexts in terms of how buyers select who they choose to engage with for advancing their own causes – whether they be for finding solutions to challenges or how it helps them in the advancement of their careers. I especially note here how social buyers have introduced the more humanized element of a social connection that plays into how they perceive doing business with a certain company. The social buyer taking into account how a business will help them, within a social world, to advance their careers and how they think others will perceive the decisions they make.
Social Experiences Counting as Social Capital
This is an interesting development because it blends into a concept long held in consumer psychology and sociology. That is consumer purchases are made within a realm of how it helps identify who we are as well as the statement it may make to others about who we are. We may be beginning to see how this type of social psychology is becoming more prominent a factor in the B2B buying world and for the social buyer. Who the social buyer chooses to engage with and the statement their decisions make becoming a reflection of their identity as well as social capital for advancing.
Who is the Social Buyer Persona?
Answering this question definitively is going to take some time and you can count on it shifting constantly. What we do know is that a few things are beginning to come into a fuzzy picture – and I use fuzzy because we are only in the infancy of the social age – that help us to get a better idea of who the social buyer persona is:
Social buyers are exhibiting new behaviors resulting from the new remix of offline and online buying activities
Social buyers are beginning to internalize a Social Engagement Index calculator as they investigate businesses and relationships
Social buyers are desiring more humanized social experiences
Social buyer’s identity and affinity are factors in whom they choose to enter business relationships with
There is most definitely much more to learn. The ascent of the social buyer is real and it is being reflected in how social experiences and social commerce is having an influence on buying behaviors and purchase decisions. As mentioned before, the efforts of B2B companies will need to focus on how they remap their business models, functions, and social engagement capabilities to become the social business that B2B buyers are expecting.
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.
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
About a dozen years ago, I became involved with personas through fate by meeting Alan Cooper, at the time he just finished his landmark book The Inmates Are Running The Asylum, and becoming enamored with personas as a process to build more user friendly products. I learned and watched in awe from the wonderful collective group of pioneers from those early heady days in using personas at Cooper Design – people like Kim Goodwin, Robert Riemann, David Fore, Wayne Greenwood, and Dave Cronin. Along with Alan Cooper, these folks are the real forerunners of personas back in the late ‘90’s. This group included Carol Christie who was instrumental in landing some of the first batch of design projects back then that involved the use of personas.
As an individual with a background in marketing and sales, I began to think of how this could be a process to help make informed decisions not just about users but also buyers. A little known fact is that it was Alan Cooper who first coined the phrase buyer personas in his book to differentiate from user personas as well as to highlight that products should be designed for users and not buyers. While spending time at Cooper Design, the phrase stuck around my head like a gnat that just wouldn’t go away. After first adjusting the process to adapt to the rising presence of the Dot.com boom; next came the turbulent fall from the Dot.com bust. Cooper barely survived the bust - and I am glad it did. I wound up on a path afterward searching for a way to make buyer personas a reality.
Flash forward to the present day nine years later, I believe that buyer personas in general and as a marketing and sales process is at a critical juncture needing significant change. I am seeing this need firsthand as well as reflecting back on these nine years of what worked then but may not work in the future. Just as personas needed to change from a process aimed squarely at software design to incorporate the Web, buyer personas as a process must now undergo reinvention to be applicable to the Social Age. The future of buyer persona research and its processes are social as the social buyer becomes a prominent as well as permanent fixture in the new social age.
What Buyer Personas Never Were and Should Not Be In The Future
Buyer personas has suffered from the malady of being characterized incorrectly more often than not. The starting point for organizations to understand how buyer personas in the future will be social is first addressing myths and misconceptions. Let's look at a few:
Buyer personas are not a buyer profile, a demographic profile, a psychographic profile, a market segment profile, a sales profile, a market research profile, a customer survey profile, or a focus group profile. The latest trendy term of content marketing has even resulted in buyer personas being characterized as content profiles. The point is that buyer personas are not profiles. Personas in general were never intended as such.
Another misconception is that buyer personas are role personas. This myth has resulted in many organizations building buyer personas that mirror the roles they typically market and sell to. They amount to glorified buyer profiles that do not possess revealing insights that shape marketing or sales strategy. Oftentimes, buyer personas, when researched correctly, can be role agnostic.
Closely associated with the myth that buyer personas are role persona descriptors is that they describe what a buyer does as opposed to what goals buyers have difficulty articulating. Thus, you see buyer personas built that amount to not only a role description but also accompanied by a litany of tasks performed, responsibilities, and background information. In many ways, like a job description.
The source for building buyer personas oftentimes leads to the above misconceptions. If buyer personas are based on internal sales and marketing customer data only they will offer little value. This holds true for surveying methods associated with traditional market research, customer surveys, and focus group methods. Some companies have made valiant attempts to do requisite qualitative field interviews with customers however utilized internal personnel not trained or skilled in ethnographic or anthropological techniques to conduct them adequately. These interviews becoming more relevant to Voice of the Customer oriented programs.
In order to peer into the future, it is important to leave behind the misconceptions about buyer personas. Only then will social buyer personas be able to play an integral part of the transformation taking place in the social age.
Next: The Future of Buyer Personas is Social - Part 2
Buyer Persona Development and the qualitative research methodology applied to creating buyer personas have proven to be an effective means for B2B organizations to reach a deeper understanding of their buyers. They have helped companies to gain insights into market opportunities, find out why challenges exists, depict buying processes, and how to map critical sales and marketing strategies to the goals of buyers. For CEO’s and their staff of senior sales and marketing executives, they have proven to be the communications platform to help their employees become buyer-focused.
Buyer persona development methodology is at its core a research methodology. I have seen a plethora of articles and services that portray buyer personas as something completely different. Mainly, buyer personas are presented as a means of templated profile building. And, unfortunately companies can get quite self-referential about building these profiles because they believe their sales and marketing people already know just about everything there is to know about buyers – even when sales are declining and the market share pie is getting smaller.
As a former senior executive in sales and marketing, I evaluated as well as implemented several of the sales and customer profiling systems that exist where you are plotting buyers neatly into personality quadrants, demographic as well as psychographic categories, using blue sheets, and multiple other types of systems. As buyer personas makes their way into the dialogue of B2B marketing, content marketing, lead generation, and lead nurturing, this seems to be what is happening: buyer personas are being seen as another means for profiling buyers. I am not sure this is a good thing for both buyer persona development and for sales or marketing in general. Here's why: they can lead to a false sense of knowledge of the buyer and creating tactical efforts that will see little fruit. I would advocate calling this type of profiling more appropriately buyer descriptions.
Since my early days in persona development back in the late 90’s, quality persona development has always been about the research. Initially, research was conducted on users to help inform product and/or service design. The focus was on understanding user goals and how to design products or services that helped users to achieve their goals. The story and narratives of users were told through personas. This tenet has not changed one iota. Buyer persona development is a qualitative research and contextual inquiry methodology to help inform sales and marketing strategy. The qualitative research serves as a means for understanding buyer goals. The story and narrative, depicted through buyer personas, informing on how and why buyers buy as well as providing a window of insights into how to help them accomplish their goals. The insights derived an outcome of employing qualitative research methods, rooted in the principles of qualitative contextual inquiry, that allows for reflection and interpretation. An important principle regarding buyer persona development is that one size does not fit all. Each segment and each industry may require different mixing of contextual inquiry and qualitative research methods to attain the deep buyer insights that make a competitive difference.
The myth that exists is that by pouring over internal customer data, talking to a few sales reps, and even a customer or two you can build a buyer persona profile. That can be true just to a small degree. True only if your intent is to put a face on a profile and have a buyer description. And yes, they can be of help when there is nothing else around. I suspect though that many a CEO and CMO who paid top dollar for buyer persona profiles, or more accurately buyer descriptions being called buyer personas, are left scratching their head on the value of these. I don’t blame them because they offer little or no insight value into what is staring at them in the face: how am I going to grow revenues and increase customer acquisition?
To make buyer persona development an integral component of formulating a buyer strategy, organizations can best be served by righting the train onto the right track. That track being the one that takes the company on its own journey of understanding buyers and learning valuable insights about their goals and multiple challenges. Grabbing the ideal window seat and having a panoramic view of their buyer’s world afforded by skilled contextual inquiry, ethonographic, and anthropological means. Without this type of perspective and the requisite journey of qualitative research, it will be like riding on a train at night - you will be lacking deep insight into the how and why of their buying behaviors. You will pull up to the depot platform and see passengers ready to board. You will be able to gather a good sense of the crowd. How many women or men? What seems to be their age range? What tickets did they buy? However, you will know little of how they got there, why they are there, where they may be going, what they plan to do once they get there, and the surrounding environment they came from.
The expression “monumental shift” is a powerful one. It is filled with connotations that represent and implies transformational changes are occurring. In the world of books we see the title of Shift as perhaps the new trendy title for business as well as personal self-help oriented books. Two notable books in the business and self-help categories are Peter Arnell’s book Shift: How to Reinvent Your Business, Your Career, and Your Personal Brand on how to change your life and your business and Shift: Harness the Trigger Events That Turn Prospects Into Customers by Tibor Shanto and Craig Elias in which the authors make the case for timing and path dependency understanding to transform selling. Both offer illuminating perspectives that will cause us to think differently.
In the global business and digital world of today, and particularly in B2B markets, a monumental shift is occurring in our percepts of buyer behavior and buyer strategy. Such a shift is creating new buyer experience economics for buyers and sellers alike. B2B buyers today desire the totality of end-to-end experience in addition to products and services that help them to meet goals and solve challenges.
These monumental shifts occurring are calling for organizations to think differently and to design buyer experiences that create long-term buyer retention and buyer loyalty. As products and services are subjected to increasing entry into the level playing field we call commodity, differentiation is made in designing innovative buyer experiences. In the Buyer Experience Innovation framework, the design of buyer experiences is one of its most important elements. There are three central aspects to Buyer Experience Design that provide the necessary roadmap:
Confluence of Buyer Insights, Buyer Persona Development, and Buyer Experience Journey: This is the bed rock of understanding that offers insight on whom your buyers are, the buying journey they take within their own organizations as well as yours and competitors, and the sequential views that are critical to understanding the current buyer experience. In this series, I have presented the Seven Principles of Buyer Experience Journey Mapping and the Seven Stages of the Buyer Experience Journey as primers.
Buyer Interaction Modeling: For every stage in the buyer’s journey, interactions that correlate to a buyer’s journey lead to successful buyer experience design. Interaction modelings not only embodies the touchpoints encountered, such as web sites, channels, selling teams, and call centers, but involves modeling end-to-end processes that are designed to create adaptable buyer experience journeys for buyers who pull the levers on different paths to take. Interaction modeling, as described in the brief Buyer Interaction Shapes Buyer Experience Design, allows for the ability to shape buyer interactions to the different buyer personas, channels, and industries.
Buyer Experience Ecosystem: Originally presented in the article The Four Elements of Buyer Experience Ecosystem Thinking, this aspect of Buyer Experience Design seeks to provide integrated thinking on four experience planes:
Relationship: the design of relational capability that directly correlate with the different relationship avenues that exist such as existing buyers, prospective buyers, and renewal buyers Engagement: the design of direct, indirect, digital, and social engagement that not only enhances the buyer experience but helps buyers to move along the value-chain and create loyalty Brand: integrated thinking on how to incorporate brand experience along the buyer experience journey and the buyer experience interaction model that is inclusive of strategies related to thought leadership, content marketing, public relations, sales messaging, and packaging Technology: identifying enabling technology that enhance the overall buyer experience and can be inclusive of digital as well as social mediums for buyers, technologies related to sales enablement, marketing automation, demand generation, and interactive media technologies
Collectively, these three essential aspects represent the building blocks of Buyer Experience Design. B2B executives in B2B Marketing, B2B Sales, and B2B Support know that a buyer transformation is occurring and that a “monumental shift” in the buyer-seller relationship is evident. The recent advances in technologies related to the Internet, interactive digital media, and social media represent the coalescing “tipping point” that is shifting buyers to have expectations for improved experiential opportunities that have not existed before. This “tipping point” is placing demands on businesses to not only provide high quality products and services but to also build an end-to-end circle of experience around them that creates a wall of loyalty. To achieve buyer retention goals and keep buyers loyal, businesses today have an action plan: build and design buyer experiences that provides robust engagement and keeps buyers as a community within the walls of loyalty.
One of the most prominent forces of sociological thinking in the 20th century was that of symbolic interactionism. An interesting man and pioneer of this thinking was George Herbert Mead, an American sociologist, psychologist, and philosopher who developed his theories while at the University of Chicago in the 1920’s. Mead’s work concerned itself with human interactions and the symbolic nature of the world and languages. Mead theorized that how people view the world, as well as experienced the world, shaped human interactions and that our interactions with others also shaped our view of society. He also believed that to research this phenomenon, unstructured qualitative observation methods were the means to understand sociological human interactions. Mead was most certainly a forerunner to today’s modern methods of qualitative research.
Many of today’s modern movements related to experience design, social media, and digital engagement have in their DNA at least a molecule of interactionist theory. Brian Solis, a thought leader on social media and author of Engage!, has as one of his main premises in his fantastic book that we must engage in meaningful conversations with customers to make them true empowered participants in social media. Suggesting that how we interact with customers in the social engagement ecosystem cultivates customer loyalty and trust. Paul Greenberg, a prolific speaker and leading thinker on Social CRM and author of CRM at the Speed of Light has written and spoken often on the notion that customers and buyers are not expecting just a product but are expecting experiences. He offers us the insight that customers and buyers are saying no to being “objects of a sale” and yes to being “subjects of an experience.”
B2B executives who oversee marketing, sales, and support must think of how their organization should design corresponding interaction points along the Seven Phases of the Buyer Experience Journey. Determining how buyer interactions collectively will shape buyer experiences that cultivate the loyalty and trust that Brian Solis mentions and creates subjects of experience as Paul Greenberg states. The Buyer Experience Interaction Model offers seven aligning and human centered interaction points to the buyer experience journey that B2B executives can make actionable.
The Buyer Experience Interaction Model:
Thought: The buyer experiences thought leadership and subject matter expertise wheninitiatives arise.
Content: The buyer experiences accessibility to rich and robust content offerings that enables research.
Engage: The buyer experiences multi-channels of engagement options that allows for adequate assessment.
Value: The buyer experiences value-based solutions and justification that enables a buying decision.
Expertise: The buyer experiences the expected level of expertise when implementing complex solutions.
Access: The buyer experiences ease of access to expected levels of support for products, services, and complex solutions.
Loyalty: The buyer experiences two-way loyalty when faced with considerations to renew products, services, or address new initiatives.
The “buyer” is a term used in the B2B context by which the “buyer” represents the target buyer persona and the stakeholders that represent the multi-disciplinary buying committees. What this interaction model does recognize is the complexity of the buying decision and the process by which buyers seek to mitigate risks associated with multi-faceted solutions. The buyer's views on implementation and support are critical to the overall buyer experience.
Aligning the Buyer Experience Interaction Model to the Buyer Experience Journey can address sales and marketing alignment issues by enabling a buyer experience continuum orientation. At the same time, including support along these same buyer experience continuums and ensuring it is not positioned as a separate adjunct function outside of the overall experience.
(In the Social CRM arena, Esteban Kolsky, who has a fantastic blog crm intelligence & strategy, with graphics help from Jacob Morgan of Chess Media Group came up with a wonderful graphic of a “loop” that represents the social customer experience continuum. Admittedly limited in my graphic design capabilities, I concur with Esteban on this point and advocate a loop overlay on the buyer experience interaction model and buyer experience journey to include feedback, end-to-end process, and actionable insights.)
The challenge for B2B executives lies in how well they can lead efforts to design and calibrate different buyer interactions for various target buyer personas, engagement channels, and segments along the Buyer Experience Interaction Model. Fueled by qualitative buyer insights that informs on buyer experience strategies, buyer interactions can be a significant part of the buyer experience design process and help to determine just how to design experiences for segmented buyers and channels.
What is still true nearly ninety years since Mead is that humans desire meaningful interactions. The rise of social media and the digital age has heightened the awareness on the part of B2B buyers to seek more meaningful ”buying” interactions on a humanized level. These drivers making buyer experience orientation on the part of B2B organizations an important new core competency.
For anyone who has been in business planning for a while, it is not hard to figure out that executive management has a robust obsession for numbers and quantitative analysis. Problem solving and decision making in the business world is usually accompanied by a heavy prerequisite dose of being backed up by the quantifiable and the predictive. We look at the quantifiable as if the numbers presented themselves will guarantee the results. When confronted with confounding issues about buyer decisions and their future choices, the impulse is to “run the numbers” for answers. We’ve become fairly adept at implementing various forms of enterprise CRM software that allows us to “slice and dice” the numbers for just about any perspective we are seeking. Does it help? Of course. Does it tell the whole story? Of course not.
To develop a loyalty building Buyer Experience Strategy in today’s digitized world means executives need to raise their qualitative Buyer Insight Intelligence Quotient. As many executives have found out in the rapidly changing business climate, relying solely on the quantifiable can have severe shortcomings and predictability can be – well less predictable. Take the Great Recession as pundits now call the economic crisis we faced in 2008 and onward as an example. This disruptive event meant that the numbers companies collected could hardly be used for predictable strategy planning. All it takes is a cataclysmic event to literally implode the numbers and make them useless – until new numbers are collected over a new period.
Addressing problems as well as formulating future growth strategies around buyer experience requires a new school of thought around the qualitative aspects of buyer insights. While quantitative buyer insight has its important role to serve, it cannot be utilized solely at the expense of qualitative buyer insight. Executives, to make effective informed decisions when it comes to developing an overall customer strategy as well as leading the organization in Buyer Experience Design, need to articulate a full story about buyers and the goals buyers are attempting to accomplish. Ignoring the qualitative can have severe consequences. Qualitative buyer insight can also help prevent consequences and get on top of what may be showing up in the numbers but no story exists to put meaning behind them. Take FedEx as an example. They knew, via quantitative analysis, that UPS was winning a battle at a crucial moment in the day when shipments were batched and sent out by distribution firms. Gaining qualitative buyer insight through investigation, they discovered that it really came down to the ease of sorting the freight, ground, and air shipments. They quickly addressed this issue and got back on the shipper’s radar screen at that crucial moment in the day.
What can executives do today to raise their Buyer Insight IQ?
Imbed qualitative buyer insight into customer strategy and buyer experience innovation
Distinguish between numbers that merely inform on what is happening versus providing insight into “why” – realize that the “why” may be found in qualitative buyer insight
Incorporate qualitative buyer insight gathering as a core element of buyer experience strategy that is repeated and refreshed often
Learn the art of storytelling and make it a part of the organization’s culture. While business acumen has always been thought of in terms of the quantitative and the financials, leaders of tomorrow will need to have strong attributes and qualitative insight acumen in making buyer experience stories relevant to the organization.
Commit and invest in qualitative buyer insight. Realize that at the start, this in-house capacity may not exist. Think long-term by bringing in outside help while concurrently building in-house competency.
Buyer behaviors, processes, perceptions, and attitudes change rapidly in the digital age of the modern business world. Relying solely on the quantifiable puts organizations behind the Buyer Insight IQ curve for numbers can certainly lag and also become meaningless in a short time frame. To increase the sharpness of an organization's Buyer Insight IQ, CEO’s and their teams will need to build up the qualitative side of the equation. Not doing so means a zero on the qualitative side of the equation and mostly likely a zero or negative growth number.
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.
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