Buyer Persona Development Process = Game Plan

Sales and Marketing executives are continuously faced with having to come up with a new game plan or altering a game plan that constitute a series of strategies.  The investigative customer insight and buyer persona development process can provide the means to help executives answer three major components of an overall game plan.

Where To Play

Figuring out where to play can be a perplexing proposition.  It can have geographic implications.  It can come to mean a sub segment of an overall market.  Or it can mean a specific vertical market.  The investigative process of gathering customer and buyer insights can yield a compass on where to play.  Take the case of FedEx right now.  They recently reported their first year-over-year profit increase in five quarters.  In part due to insights that led them to focus on growth strategies for their commercial end of the business.  Realizing that consumers would retract in spending, FedEx began to look at their commercial business as well as beef up their sales efforts in the manufacturing and distribution sub segments.  A global business, FedEx also went into gear to think globally.  FedEx spotted opportunities in the Asia market and put in place growth strategies to grow their commercial business presence in Asia.  By figuring out where to play, FedEx is weathering the storm and is proving once again to be a bellwether of recovery.

How To Play

Just getting to the playing field oftentimes is not sufficient in of itself.  Once there, sales and marketing executives have the challenge of determining how to play.  The investigative process of identifying target buyer personas can illuminate how an organization can best play in the market.  Let’s take the case of the Que proReader from Plastic Logic.  This past Christmas shopping season saw a push for eReaders on a mass scale for the first time.  The Kindle faced new competition from the Barnes & Nobles Nook and the Sony Reader. Plastic   
Logic decided that where to play and how to play was to design and market their eReader for business.     Making a much larger eReader and optimizing it to fit the business world of reading PDF, Word, and Excel documents for business meetings and transactions.  In addition, Plastic Logic optimized the Que for magazines and newspapers– knowing that business customers would find this appealing. 

How To Win

 The dividends paid back from going deep in the investigative process can yield insight into how to win in a specific market.  By attaining the deep understanding of how and why people and businesses buy, sales and marketing executives can put into place strategies that provide an edge over competitors.  Much like a football team that has a balanced game plan between running and passing plays.  After studying reels and reels of film on their opponent that showed a weakness in pass defense over the middle of the field, coaches then map a game plan to call more passing plays and routes over the middle of the field.  Determining how to win has strategy relevance to pricing, selling structure, content marketing, and etc.  Let’s take the case of HP and IBM as they battle it out in the midmarket space. Each is investing significant dollars in their marketing and demand generation programs to attract medium sized businesses.  In addition, both are recognizing that how to win is through their channel partners.  So each organization is making considerable investment in leading with partner-led solutions backed up by their own sales and marketing efforts. 

Sales and Marketing executives who make the investment in gathering customer and buyer insight through a buyer persona development process – with rigor and precision – can develop an overall game plan that gives them the edge in knowing where to play, how to play, and how to win.  Three components of a game plan that increase the odds of winning in today’s highly competitive marketplaces. 

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010buyerpersonastrategy/03goalcentric/prweb3663374.htm

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Buyer Persona Strategy Playbooks Introduced by Goal Centric

Goal Centric introduces revolutionary strategy, marketing, and sales playbooks based on buyer insights and buyer personas. HP incorporates use of buyer persona playbooks to develop winning strategies and gain marketshare in the mid-market space.

New York, NY (PRWEB) March 15, 2010 -- Goal Centric Management, Inc., a privately held strategy consulting firm and the leading experts on Buyer Insights and Buyer Persona Development since 2002, announced the introduction of their Buyer Persona Strategy Playbooks Series. The interactive Playbooks are designed to provide an insightful view of customers and buyers that will enable senior leaders to formulate effective strategies in sales, marketing, and customer experiences. Goal Centric addresses senior leaders’ need to gain critical market and buyer insight to inform strategies that result in top line revenue growth.

The Buyer Persona Strategy Playbooks Series will consist of four Playbooks aligned with strategy, sales, and marketing:

The Buyer Persona Strategy Playbook: designed to provide the foundational insight into an organization’s target buyers and their ecosystem of relationships, a detailed view of their buying processes, and strategic insight about how to best meet their goals.

The Buyer Persona Sales Playbook: designed to enable sales teams with the situational conversation guidance they need to anticipate buyer goals and to align selling processes with their buyers’ buying processes.

The Buyer Persona Marketing Playbook: designed to empower marketing teams with the insight and guidance they need to create marketing and sales-ready messaging that resonates with buyers.

The Buyer Persona Experience Playbook: designed to map a buyer’s journey through an organization’s touch points, providing leaders with the insight they need to uncover gaps and create new touch point experiences that improve customer loyalty.

“The Playbooks are revolutionary in that they are designed to help senior executives answer the questions of where to play, who to play with, how to play, and how to win in today’s dynamically changing buyer-centric marketplace,” said Tony Zambito, Founder and Principal of Goal Centric. “The Playbooks are designed to enable strategy, buyers, sales, and marketing in a way that creates alignment to best serve buyers’ goals.”

Buyer personas, archetypal representations of buyers and their buying processes, serve as guides to marketing strategy, sales strategy, customer and sales messaging, and content development. "We've often seen companies that just create a buyer persona profile as the end product, which is too insubstantial and misses the strategic value of buyer personas," said Angela Quail, Goal Centric Principal. "The Buyer Persona Strategy Playbooks Series result from an investigative process that gathers critical buyer insight designed to inform and deploy executable, top line revenue growth strategies.”

Hewlett-Packard Company, which mounted a 9,000 mid-market accounts mapping strategy with partners, utilized Goal Centric’s Buyer Persona Strategy, Sales, and Marketing Playbooks to gain the insight it needed to develop effective sales, marketing, and buyer enablement programs. “The Buyer Persona Playbooks provided us with the information we needed to win in the mid-market space. The Playbooks enabled our selling teams to anticipate buyers’ wants, needs and decision process at their level, using their language and terminology. They have been a key game changer and a component of our market share gains against the competition”, said Kevin Hooper, HP Vice President, Emerging Growth Accounts, Enterprise Business Sales. HP has developed vertical market strategies around buyer personas that align their sales and marketing organizations efforts to win at the mid-market competitive level.

About Goal Centric

Goal Centric is a privately held company based in New York, New York and Menlo Park, California. Goal Centric is a strategy consulting firm that provides Buyer Insight and Buyer Persona Development services to help companies understand their customers better and develop growth strategies. The company today is led by two noted innovators and experts in buyer persona development, Tony Zambito (author of the blog Buyer Persona Insights and Angela Quail (author of the blog Persona Creation), who together have nearly twenty years in persona development experience. The two principal partners have provided persona development advisory services to many of today's leading global companies, including FedEx, Reed Elsevier, Microsoft, HP, and IBM.

For more information, visit www.goalcentric.com.

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Buyer Insights

What amazed me about Joe Morgan’s story was how he could see, in the pitcher’s wind up, where the fingers were on the baseball.  And that he could tell by how the seams were positioned and how the baseball rotated out of the pitcher’s hands, what kind of pitch it was.  Based on that insight, he would know if he was going to try for a home run or aim for a hit. 

Similarly, CEO’s today need to have keen buyer insight into today’s markets and buyers.  Without it, it will be a struggle that results in wasted, and precious, dollars disappearing into the catcher’s mitt of campaigns and initiatives gone awry. 

Not Always A Home Run

Buyer insight and insights as a term suffers from potential symbolism issues.  Talk to a group of people in a business setting, and most likely 6-8 out of 10 will have the idea that insights mean the grand “ah-ha” moment.  This can certainly be true.  However, buyer insights don’t always have to be characterized as the home-run that forever changes the game.  It can be something of a genuine nature that is equivalent to a base hit or even a double and yet advances the momentum of the company as the winner in its market space. 

Here’s an example.  One organization we conducted buyer insight gathering and buyer persona development for embarked on a well-intentioned effort to make it easy for their customers to reach them and to place orders.  They created four toll free 800 numbers depending on the type of product and service you wished to order.  Since the four products and services were distinctive enough and potentially reach different types of market segments, this approach seemed to make sense.  When you think about it, who can really argue with the idea that you want to open up more lines of communications for your customers?  Right?  Well, so we thought.  Our buyer insights revealed that when it came down to the moment of making a decision on who to place an order with, there was buyer confusion on which toll free number to call.  This invariably caused, for expediency sake, them to call the closest competitor instead.  Leaving the CEO and the organization scratching their heads on how could revenues decline when they were doing even more to make it easier for their customer base.  The insights also revealed “why” this was happening.  Most of the orders were placed at the end of the day and thus buyers saw this as potentially causing delays that might not allow them to leave their offices when they needed.  The organization quickly reverted back to a single number but based on this insight, expedited the ordering process as well as improved their web capabilities – knowing that their buyers just plain and simply didn’t want to be delayed leaving on time to get to their kid’s little league baseball game.

Revealing Insights Can Prevent 3 Strikes

For CEO’s, buyer insights can be important for three areas that keep them up at night:

Finding out what is not working:

When revenues are supposed to be growing and they are not, it is bound to keep you up at night.  Executives pour over reams and reams of customer and buyer intelligence, crunch numbers endlessly, and query the sales team like the old KGB looking for that secret dossier.  With a thorough investigative process and usually through the use of third party expertise, the how and the why of what is not working can be revealed.  You might not always like the answer but it is better to know than not to know.

Validating an idea:

We all have some great ideas.  Let’s face it, what initially sounded great, turned out to have some holes in it once we received more input from trusted colleagues and friends.  Senior executives must be conscious of the fact that not everyone is comfortable offering reasons on why their idea or suggested strategy might have holes in it.  Courageous senior leaders and CEO’s have the will to use buyer insights to validate ideas – knowing that it just might not validate their idea as a good one. 

Making a discovery:

Some senior executives, wisely so, are kept up at night thinking about what they do not know.  What changes have taken place in their market space that they do not know about?  What new processes have been implemented that has an impact on our solutions?  What better ways can we meet the needs of buyers?  What is the competition doing that we are not?  The questions can be endless.  Good insight leads to good strategies.  Done consistently enough, then one day there just may be that grand slam home run “ah ha” moment that is a game changer. 

As in the game of baseball for a masterful hitter seeking insight into the nuances of a pitcher, insights can lead to sound approaches that can help CEO’s to win in his or her market.  And just as in baseball, insights need not always be of the home-run variety.  Like the urging on of a good baseball manager to practice your swing and base running consistently, so must a CEO urge his or her organization to practice the art and science of buyer insights consistently to stay ahead of the game of who can best serve its customers and buyers. 

Buyer Enablement

At a time when CEO’s are trying to formulate growth strategies coming out of the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression, they are confronted with the inability to have complete control of the decision process as in years past.  To succeed, organizations will need to adopt buyer enablement strategies that contribute to growth and solidifying customer retention.  Let’s first start with a simple definition of buyer enablement:

“Enabling a transparent ability for buyers to research and interact that provides for the gathering of the right information to make an informed decision.”

This definition suggests three areas where a CEO will need to examine whether the organization is able to develop buyer enablement strategies. 

Transparency

For many CEO’s, the idea of opening the doors and perhaps opening the books for an inside view of their organization is a foreign concept.  Since many may be byproducts of MBA programs pre-Internet era means this will be a tough one to accept with ease.  Seller-focused organizations have had the ability for many years to orchestrate, construct, and organize the information flow to buyers.  Tactical operations related to marketing communications and product information focused on what to tell buyers, what not to tell buyers, and who was the deliverer of the information.  In today’s buyer-centric world, buyers are sourcing for information and decisions are being shaped by who is offering rich, detailed, and robust information that also provides a transparent view of the organization.  A case in point: one CEO we worked with had prevented for several years exposure to R&D results.  The buyer insight and buyer persona development efforts clearly showed that buyers were basing a good percentage of their decision-making on having access to the R&D progress as well as some of the key subject matter experts involved in R&D.  This insight proved to be a correlation to declining revenues over a five year period.  By creating transparency to the R&D group, the organization was able to alter its revenue decline and get buyers engaged in online discussions about the R&D results and how it could shape future innovation.

Interaction

CEO’s, by the nature of their positions, are inclined to act.  Even the language and terminology of organizations tends to create inertia to view buyer communications in the form of action.  We target, we go-to, implement a marketing campaign, go on the offensive, beat back the competition, we blitz, we close deals, and the list of clichés can grow.  The point is that the organizational language is geared towards that of one-directional communications to the buyer.   If we think of communications in terms of gateways, the organizations that are on the extreme end of one-way communications to buyers will face a slow death.  Why?  These organizations will face buyers that are becoming adept at closing gateway access to them.  What buyers want are gateways to interact with an organization at the moment they have a need and have a goal to fulfill.  CEO’s must enable an organization with strategies that allow for buyers to not only initiate interaction but also allow the buyer the ability to control the interaction.  As we have seen with social media, some buyers want permanent open access to gateways.  Attaining deep buyer insight is critical to know how buyers wish to interact in specific marketplaces.

Right Information

Buyers today are looking for the right information at the right critical moment to make an informed decision.  Sometimes this decision is centered on “who to invite” in for a discussion whereby others have a goal to accomplish in short order and the need to decide is immediate.  What has been ingrained in organizations is to “save the good stuff” for the sales call or the marketing campaign.  This puts the buyer in the position of having to wait for the right information to make an informed decision.  Mapping the right information at the right critical moment is done by acquiring a deep understanding of buying behaviors and buying processes. Today’s CEO’s will need to commit resources to uncovering this insight in order to provide the right information that is delivered instantaneously at the right time.  For some, a very counterintuitive notion when one comes up through the ranks with the rule of not showing your best hand until you get in front of the customer. 

While today’s CEO’s and their executive teams are being asked to evaluate how Sales 2.0 and sales enablement can transform an organization by adopting technologies to enable the selling process, a CEO must lead the effort to have an organization evaluate its resources devoted to enabling buyers with transparency, gateways of interaction, and the ability to source as well as have the right information accessible to make an informed decision.  An imbalance can have devastating effects that are not felt until it is too late in the game. 

The Definition of Buyer Personas

· Buyer Personas are richly detailed archetypal representations of real buyers

· Buyer Personas are derived from the investigative process of buyer insight gathering

· Buyer Personas are goal centric at their core which are defined through rigor and precision

· Buyer Personas are representative of buyers in action and engaged in the buying process

· Buyer Personas provide insight into the unarticulated, the not-yet-discovered, and affecting mental models of buyers

· Buyer Personas serve as a communications tool and informs senior leaders on executable buyer centric strategies to serve buyers

To become a best practice of Buyer Persona 2.0, this definition must be supported by standard processes – be they strategic and tactical – that genuinely informs organization on how to best serve buyer goals.   Thanks to readers for this suggestion!

Buyer Personas Inform Strategy and Innovation

The binding purpose for the tenets discussed as well as for the next generation of Buyer Personas is that Buyer Persona 2.0 serves the purpose of informing senior leaders on strategy and innovation.  Buyer Personas provide senior leaders with qualitative-based insights that helps bring to life the quantitative-based, and sometimes often over-emphasized, analytical insight. 

Visual Thinking

I recently finished reading Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaccson and what surprised me profoundly is how Einstein relied on first pondering a visual of the problem before he dove into the analytical aspects of physics and math.  He essentially viewed the problem and tried to solve it in his head first.  For example, he pondered the visual of what it would be like to travel alongside a light beam.  Buyer Personas, as defined in my previous posts, can provide senior executives with the visual view of the market that helps them to acquire the necessary insight needed to shape business strategy (inclusive of sales and marketing) and to discover paths of innovation the organization can pursue. 

Insight into the Unknown

For many executives, especially those who have tenured years of experience, entrance into a buyer-centric world could feel like entering the Twilight Zone.  Strategies, tactics, practices and knowledge of buyers once predictable now appear as a discomforting unknown.  Outcomes once explainable are no longer explainable.  Buyer Persona 2.0, as defined with all of its elements of the investigative process, can provide senior strategists with a window to the changing world of buyers.  Allowing executive to take a qualitative view necessary to understand and assess the implications of the dynamic changes happening before them.

A Roadmap

Over the past few years, we’ve seen the growing use of GPS systems in automobiles today.  They’ve evolved from purely directional navigation to offering very colorful guidance that will get you to where you want to go.  Buyer Personas has evolved over the past decade by paying adherence to the fundamental principles of persona creation while at the same time evolving into an effective guide for senior executives to gain the critical buyer insight needed to navigate in a buyer-centric world.  By providing the qualitative overlay to the analytical, organizations can be informed on strategies and paths to innovation that can be difficult to roadmap just on an analytical approach only.  Buyer Persona 2.0 is a roadmap for organizations to develop strategies that will give them a competitive advantage by getting closer to the customer and their buyers.

Puzzle Pieces

What senior executives strive for and are held accountable for is their ability to predict and anticipate.  Have you ever tried to put together a puzzle without having the picture on the puzzle box?  Not an easy task but possible.  It is bound to take you at least two or three times longer than if you had the picture to begin with.  In many ways, this is how senior executives, selling organizations, and marketing organizations operate today.  Continuously using existing as well as building new puzzle pieces of strategies yet not having a very clear picture of how and why they fit together.  I am sure creating a bevy of sweaty palms as they prepare to provide a forecast of future earnings before a senior management team, board of directors, and some very nervous investors.

Buyer Persona 2.0, as a discipline and practice, can help senior executives and organizations to navigate the turbulent waters of an unstable marketplace.  This navigational power is where competitive advantages can be gained and breakthrough strategies and innovations can occur. 

Buyer Persona Insights is now privileged to be part of a selected group of B2B marketing experts covering such B2B relevant topics as lead generation, sales, content marketing, and several more.  Buyer Persona Insights is pleased to provide contributions covering the growing use of Buyer Personas as a strategic practice in B2B Marketing and Sales.

Tony and Tom have created a unique central resource site for B2B Marketers seeking guidance and the latest pracices in B2B Marketing and Sales.  Here you will find excellent blogs such as Savvy B2B Marketing, Marketing Interactions,B2B Lead Generation, Marketing Genius Blog, and several more. 

Thanks to Tony and Tom, B2B Marketers now have a resourceful site to learn and find the best practices in B2B Marketing and Sales.

Buyer Personas Segmentation

In the B2B and buyer-centric marketplace of today, buyer personas can play a crucial role in segmentation efforts.  Buyer personas can effectively enhance large scope segmentation initiatives by providing the layered details and insight that if often missing from such efforts.  Whereby market segmentation can provide information at the 3,000 feet level or sometimes at even the 300 feet level, buyer personas can help selling and marketing teams to know what is going on at the 3 feet level.  Buyer personas bring a sense of equilibrium to the scientific quantitative approach used in market segmentation contrasted by the qualitative gathering of buyer insight needed to create buyer personas. 

Bring to Life

Without buyer personas, market segmentation has been a static and sterile exercise.  This form of exercise can become a marketing statistician’s dream of cutting, slicing, dicing, and correlating huge amounts of quantitative data.  The growth of CRM, Sales Automation, and Data Mining applications has provided a home for the numerous lists of market and company data.   Many sales teams today start their day by turning on such applications as Salesforce.com while marketing teams perhaps dig deep into report generators from CRM and Data Mining applications.  All in the search for that ever so elusive “gold mine” of revelations that will put the organization on top of it’s’ competitors, 

What buyer personas can do is bring to life the human side of the quantitative data housed in these applications.  Well investigated and crafted buyer personas can provide a means for understanding at the human level a real person with a set of real goals.  Most sales and marketing teams are working from lists of market segmentation data that is focused on markets, roles, company names, products, employees, and the list can go on and on – and on.  Unfortunately, oftentimes with little focus on the goals of buyers.

Humanistic

Buyer personas are adept at painting a humanistic picture of how as well as why a buyer is attempting to accomplish specific goals.  This picture can give the selling and marketing teams the badly needed context that the quantitative data cuts can sometimes lack.  It also can put into context where is the appropriate place to “go-to-market” in terms of who to reach with sales and marketing messaging.  For example, an IT services provider can mandate that “we are going to target the C-Level or C-Suite”.  Whereby the qualitative gathering of buyer insight needed to craft buyer personas would reveal that their products and/or services are best designed to meet the specific goals of mid-level managers. 

Goals Not Roles

In my previous post in this series –part 6, I emphasized how buyer personas are defined by goals.  One of the misconceptions that can plague buyer personas is that buyer personas are used to help bring to life specific roles – especially in a B2B setting.  This is also where the distinction between buyer profiling and buyer personas, as emphasized in part 6, can come in handy once again.  When buyer personas are misunderstood as just profiles, then it will be an exercise of profiling a specific role that is deemed as the target buyer.  Usually done from an internal data gathering exercise - the appropriate question of what are their goals as well as issues is asked but goals are not used as the defining premise.  However, creating buyer personas without a thorough investigative and qualitative gathering process can lead to “buyer persona profiles” being created for the wrong roles per se’ in the target market.  In the example already mentioned, if the C-Level is mandated and a role of CIO is targeted, a marketing team could build “buyer persona profiles” for the CIO.  The investigative process though would have revealed that the specific defining goals of an IT Director, with buying power, were a direct fit to the product and/or services being offered – and consequently a higher probability of success. 

How Many Is Too Many

The question of how many buyer personas is often asked in our client engagements.  But as is often the case, the question is asked in the context of the misconception of buyer personas being a “profiling” exercise only.  For instance, if the focus is on roles, it will be a temptation to build “buyer persona profiles” for each role.  Whereby an investigative process may reveal that multiple roles have an equivalent set of meaningful goals and that a single created buyer persona is appropriate for multiple roles in a market.  The question is best answered by reiterating that buyer personas are defined by goals and that if the goals are distinct from another, then a buyer persona should be created for each distinctive set of goals.  This is what makes buyer personas a powerful enabler to the process of market segmentation. 

The Future of Market Segmentation

As the exponential growth of increasingly complex variations of quantitative data begins to overwhelm organizations, more and more will look to buyer personas, as originally intended, to help shape distinctive segmentation efforts.  Making segmentation a more humanistic exercise and bringing to life realistic pictures of buyers at the 3 feet level versus the 3,000 feet level.   Thus enabling selling and marketing teams to engage with buyers on a “one-to-one” personal level with the focus where it can best serve buyers – on their specific goals.

Next: Buyer Persona 2.0 – Part 8

· “A profile of your typical buyer….”

· “A brief description and profile ………”

· “A profile and short biography…….”

· “A description and profile of a specific person…”

· “A profile of your customer segment...”

What is common about these many attempts at defining buyer personas is that they are focused on profiling and descriptions only.  While profiling can be an element of buyer personas, they were not meant to be just profiles.

Buyer Personas Are Not Just Profiles

The concept of customer profiling has been a part of business practices for well over a quarter of century now.  Target marketing and the advances in the selling professions such as Consultative Selling, Conceptual Selling, LAMP, Key Account Selling, and the many more have all included an element of profiling your target customer.   Target selling and customer profiling called for asking the same level of questions that have been suggested for creating buyer personas, such as:

· What are your target’s goals and issues?

· How does your target go about making decisions?

· What professional magazines do they read?

· Who do they support?

· What motivates them?

· What are their pain points?

· And a host more of similar questions…….

These types of questions can help create an understanding of who the target buyer is and how best to approach from a selling and perhaps content marketing perspective.  Where this can become problematic in gaining senior leadership adoption of buyer personas is when these leaders have risen through the ranks and are experienced with profiling.  I have encountered conversations with CEO’s, SVP’s, and VP’s in both sales and marketing who have looked me straight in the eye and stated something to the effect of : “we’ve been profiling for a long time and I see buyer persona profiles as just another way of doing what should be done as standard practice.”  The issue here is that profiles, in terms of how they are constructed, do not fully represent the intended purpose of buyer personas established nearly ten years ago.

Buyer Profiles Are Different Than Buyer Personas

It is important to make a distinction between buyer profiles and buyer personas.  Buyer profiles tend to consist of what can be called static characteristics that can be derived from quantitative analysis and market research methods.  Buyer personas are detailed graphical narratives that represent the buyer in action and are derived from qualitative synthesizing of in-depth one-on-one buyer insight gathering.  In my first article in this Buyer Persona 2.0 series, I stressed the importance of buyer insight gathering and how this has been overlooked or presented as lightly needed.  Buyer personas were meant from its’ inception to provide detailed graphical and narrative stories which allowed for a rich robust understanding of the buyer’s goals and mental models that lead to the buying decision.  To accomplish this requires the investigative process to attain an accurate and insightful buyer persona portrayal. 

Buyer Personas Are Not “Made-Up”

In the late 90’s, Alan Cooper established the creation and use of personas for design.  Angela Quail and I were fortunate to have received as a by-product of working for him the first hand knowledge of several “truisms” about personas in general that has served as guiding principles for our own efforts in buyer persona development.  One of these is:

Buyer Personas are not “made up” and are derived as an outcome of a thorough investigative process

Buyer profiles can be “made-up” through the synthesizing of variables found through quantitative data from market research, segmentation analysis, CRM applications, and other sources. (Note: I do not use the words “made-up” in a negative sense – only to help make the distinction between buyer profiles and buyer personas.)  Buyer personas are distinct in that they are derived from a planned investigative process that involves direct face-to-face interviewing, in-depth conversations, direct observations, and use of other techniques associated with anthropological and/or ethnographic research which I have summed up previously as buyer insight gathering.   

Buyer Personas Are Goal Centric

Another of the “truisms” especially important for buyer personas is that they are defined by their goals.  In part 3 of this series I covered the types of buyer goals that exist with buyer personas.  Since the dawn of personas in general, goals has always been the crucial core element.  It is the primary reason the name of our firm is Goal Centric.  Attaining a deep insightful understanding of goals comes through the investigative process and goes beyond the stand alone question of – what are their goals? 

Buyer Personas are defined by deep understanding of buyer goals obtained through rigor and precision

Defining goals need to be done with much rigor and precision.  The investigative process can reveal insight into goals that can affect the buying process and decisions significantly.  What makes buyer personas distinctive from buyer profiles is that goals serve as the basis for the dynamic graphical and narrative story building that makes them more robust than static buyer profiles.   

Buyer Personas Represent Buying Processes and Behavioral Patterns

Identifying the workflow of the buying processes and what behavioral patterns are exhibited also make buyer personas distinctive from buyer profiles.  In the graphical narratives it is important to put buyer personas in action accomplishing goals through the buying process. 

Buyer Personas are representative of buying processes and behavioral patterns

Behavioral patterns offer clues to how the buyer engages with others and the buying process.  This can provide tremendous insight and background for sales and marketing teams on how to align their own processes with that of the buyer.  At Goal Centric, we have depicted buying processes and behavioral patterns through carefully constructed buying scenarios which show how the buyer engages with non-sales and sales resources during the buying process. 

Buyer Personas Are Meant To Provide Insight

Buyer profiles are based on predominantly quantitative data about known facts.  Buyer personas are distinctive in that the end goal is to uncover insight that can lead to a market edge.  There are three areas of insight that the investigative process should focus on:

· The Unarticulated: oftentimes deductions can be made as a result of identifying patterns in buyer insight gathering whereby goals and needs are expressed in such ways that their meanings and references are completely new.

· The Not Yet Discovered: through the investigative process of buyer insight gathering, new roles, markets, product needs, and etc. can be uncovered that no other resources had yet to uncover before. 

· Mental Models: identifying attitudes, beliefs, perceptions, and behavior can be encapsulated into constructs called mental models.  Portrayed in graphical narratives, they offer very powerful insights that can significantly change a course of action or provoke an emotional response. 

As opposed to offering static profile information, the insights can significantly provide a powerful platform for sales and marketing organizations to engage with buyers like no other competitor can.  Allowing for more engaging and intimate sales conversations as well as relevant messaging that has meaning to the buyer. 

Buyer Personas Informs Strategy

When Alan Cooper made the use of personas prominent, its’ primary function is to inform design.  A “truism” similarly exists in the world of buyer personas.  Buyer personas need to be constructed with a means to an end of informing business and customer facing strategies.  This is of the highest importance to have senior leaders adopt Buyer Persona 2.0 as a core competency and business practice of their organizations. 

Buyer Personas serve as a communications tool to inform senior leaders on buyer centric strategies that serve buyers

At Goal Centric, we’ve had enlightening success with this endeavor in some cases.  One CEO in particular embraced the efforts enthusiastically and the unique uncovering that he scheduled an off-site executive meeting to review the buyer personas in detail.   The purpose being to determine how the revelations impacted strategic planning and how the organization can communicate to employees a charted course of direction through the use of buyer personas. 

Buyer Persona 2.0: A New Standard Definition of Buyer Persona

At this stage in the next generation of buyer persona modeling and development – Buyer Persona 2.0, it is my belief that a new standard definition of buyer persona is needed.  A definition that embraces the so called truisms about personas in general as well as ultimately becomes the accepted practice of informing senior leadership on strategic direction that best serves buyers in today’s buyer centric marketplace:

What Are Buyer Personas?

· Buyer Personas are richly detailed archetypal representations of real buyers

· Buyer Personas are derived from the investigative process of buyer insight gathering

· Buyer Personas are goal centric at their core and goals are defined through rigor and precision

· Buyer Personas are representative of buyers in action and engaged in the buying process

· Buyer Personas provide insight into the unarticulated, the not-yet-discovered, and affecting mental models of buyers

· Buyer Personas serve as a communications tool and inform senior leaders on executable buyer centric strategies to serve buyers

It is my hope that this new standard definition will allow for Buyer Persona 2.0 to take its rightful place as an essential discipline that informs on strategies to truly serve buyer goals.

Next: Buyer Persona 2.0 – Part 7 

B2B organizations represent a multitude of complex relationships.  These relationships all meant to help advance an organization towards profitability and in today’s buyer centric world – sustainability.  Buyer Persona 2.0, as a discipline, must factor in these complex relationships if it hopes to present an accurate portrayal of buying decisions that take place in a B2B context.  A misconception seen over the past few years is the creation of buyer personas in a one dimensional setting.  For senior leaders to embrace buyer personas, three dimensional views are critical to providing the buyer insight as well as market insight that senior executives seek.

Buyer Persona Relationships

A buyer persona, in a B2B context, is oftentimes serving others.  As previously reviewed, the career, business, and market goals of a buyer persona will have elements of contributing to the goals of others he or she serves.  Buyer Persona 2.0 calls for extensive development in this area for it holds the keys to successfully affecting the buying decision as well as creating effective buyer messaging.  As senior leaders seek to gain a market edge, they focus on developing teams that are adept at understanding how their products and services make an impact.  This impact is best understood through the lenses of a buyer persona as he or she serves three distinct groups:

User Personas

All too often, in creating buyer personas, the user has been forgotten.  There has been much written over the years about how user, or design, personas are different than buyer personas.  This is very true.  However, a distinction must be made in a B2B context.  Users must be viewed through the lenses of buyer personas in terms of what the buyer persona is attempting to accomplish for his or her team.  More the case than not in a B2B setting, the buyer is not the user of the product or service he or she is purchasing.  However, the buyer persona must see how a product or service will make his team of users more effective in accomplishing business and market goals.  Sales and marketing teams will benefit greatly from having this understanding in terms of utilizing sales-ready and marketing messaging. 

Stakeholder Personas

A buyer persona, in making buying decisions, is usually serving the agenda of his senior manager, division heads, committee members, board members, and etc.  As many seasoned B2B veterans in sales and marketing know, no buying decision is made in a vacuum.  Key stakeholders exert pressure on a buyer to make the right decision within a set of procedures or parameters.  Gaining insight through creating stakeholder personas is essential to obtaining the clear understanding of the buying process to make selling teams effective.  What has frustrated many senior executives, especially heads of sales responsible for forecasting, is gaining an understanding of sales opportunities that go proverbially “dark” in the sales process.  Developing a stakeholder personas perspective can shed light on what the buyer personas is adhering to in order to satisfy key stakeholders in his or her organization and how a sales and marketing team can be a part of this process versus sitting on the sidelines waiting for an outcome.

Influencer Personas

We’ve seen often in our engagements the need to develop a distinct set of influencer personas.  These differ from stakeholder personas by their nature of being third party influencers outside of the organization.  With the rise of social media, for example, this is becoming more prominent.  In complex regulatory environments, we’ve seen a heavy reliance on legal advisors and government advisors.  In the IT world, many IT people rely on other experts outside of their own organizations.  My advocacy of making the investment of time and financial resources to acquire the necessary in-depth buyer insight is based on, in part, first-hand discoveries of “influencers” who subtlety changed buying decisions – many times the selling organization having no awareness of this influence .  We have found in several of our engagements that influencer personas significantly “influence” the buying process and decision.  Not accounting for this factor could cause a company to miss a key critical element of how to succeed with a buyer. 

In this evolving buyer centric selling world, it is imperative for an organization to gain an insightful view of the relationships a buyer persona will have before, during, and after the buying process.  Knowing who he or she must serve and how can provide tremendous advantages to selling and marketing teams.  In a recent engagement, we developed Buyer Centric Selling Playbooks for both inside and field teams.  What was fascinating to hear and witness was how these selling teams, armed with knowledge of buyer, user, stakeholder, and influencer personas, became adept at conversing with prospective buyers about the impact of these personas on the buying process and how they can help facilitate the buying process.  Even more impressive was how marketing adapted its’ messaging efforts to meet the buyer where he or she was at in the buying process – which meant providing materials that helped the buyer communicate with his or her users, stakeholders, and influencers.

Buyer Persona 2.0, as a discipline, can be fully embraced by senior leaders if it can demonstrate real world application that achieves top line revenue growth.  Getting to know the relational personas that buyer personas must interact with and serve can go a long way towards accomplishing this embracing adoption by senior leaders.

Next: Buyer Persona 2.0 – Part 6