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?
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.
Every once in a while, we come across an article that just seems to nail it on the head ever so profoundly.Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto authored such an article in the Harvard Business Review entitled The Secret to Meaningful Customer Relationships.For quite some time, in fact the last ten years, I have made the point about buyer personas being based on qualitative insights that lead to a deeper understanding of customers and buyers.I should have just called Roger.
Roger states: “If our understanding of customers is based entirely on quantitative analysis, we will have a shallow rather than deep relationship with them.” This does run against the “prevailing view of customer understanding” as Roger notes and it also runs counter to how buyer personas are viewed at times.When static data is used to create buyer persona profiles, it is an exercise akin to just looking at the quantitative analysis.Getting at the unarticulated and not-yet-discovered is the art and science of buyer personas because as Roger puts it: “customers often struggle to put into words their feelings about products, services or providers, we can watch them do what they really do, rather than what they say they do — and may not actually do. This all enables a much more nuanced view of our customer.”
The success of buyer persona development initiatives to inform strategy lies in the ability to translate the unarticulated into meaningful insights.These translated insights then leading to the creation of meaningful representations of buyer personas and the portrayal of their buying processes.Roger puts it very clearly this way: “But all of that is subject to qualitative judgments on our part. The quality and depth of our relationship with the customer will be a function of the quality of our interpretative eyes and ears. However, unlike with quantitative research where we really have no chance, with qualitative research we have a fighting chance of attaining a deep understanding of our customers.”The interpretative ability requires a set of attributes and judgmental skills that makes it worth using outsourced experience and expertise to get the quality interpretation as well as the quality relationships with our buyer personas.
Attaining a deeper understanding of customers and buyers does not mean throwing out quantitative analysis.What qualitative insight in a buyer persona development imitative can do is help illuminate existing quantitative analysis.Additionally, qualitative insight can uncover new market opportunities that quantitative analysis can further illuminate and validate.Buyer persona development is the means of communicating the translation and interpretation that leaders can use to rally an organization to act upon.Very much counter to the prevailing view of buyer personas being a profiling process only.
The qualitative and investigative process of buyer persona development do give us “a fighting chance of attaining a deep understanding of our customers” as Roger elegantly states.If we want to develop meaningful buyer persona relationships, we need heed Roger Martin’s final words in this article: “if you want a deep relationship with your customers don't spend your time talking to them through the vehicle of quantitative research tools.”
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