Listen First, Then Speak

Welcome to the first edition of the Buyer Persona Buzz newsletter! Our mission:

To provide you the knowledge and tools you need to intensely listen to prospective customers and influence their buying decisions

Listening is an essential part of any first meeting with a prospective customer. It’s how professionals learn about their customers’ needs, concerns, and expectations and THE essential ingredient in developing effective buyer personas.

“Hi, how may I help you?” is a question asked hundreds of times a day in doctors’ offices, repair shops, banks, law firms, and other types of customer-facing establishment. Listening to the customer’s story and asking probing questions to understand their needs and motivations is the only way to present them with a relevant solution and talk about them in a way that’s clear and meaningful.

This seems logical, yet in many organizations this one-on-one communication between marketing professionals and prospective customers is infrequent – if it happens at all. The result is marketing strategies and messaging based on assumptions or best guesses rather than unbiased insights that can only come from interviewing actual buyers.

How to Develop and Use Buyer Personas More Effectively

Fortunately, there is knowledge and tools that can help, and we will use this newsletter to:

1. Provide some needed clarity about what a buyer persona is and what it is not. During the past decade, the term “buyer persona” has almost become a marketing mantra. However, the growing interest in buyer personas has resulted in confusion about how you create them, how you use them, and their ultimate effectiveness. We’ll start to provide more clarity further down in this issue of the newsletter.
2. Offer guidance and tools for developing buyer personas. We’ll tell you how to avoid the traps of building buyer personas with too much (or too little) detail, and how to conduct buyer interviews that reveal exactly what you need to know to develop game-changing marketing strategies.
3. Discuss approaches to activating buyer persona insights. These methods reveal winning value propositions and messaging at the intersection of what buyers want and your company’s capabilities. They will also drive buy-in and alignment across your organization.
4. Provide buyer insights to inform your own marketing strategies – over the past 15 years, the Buyer Persona Institute has conducted thousands of in-depth buyer interviews across a wide variety of industries and solutions. We’ll share some of these buyer insights so you can use them in your own marketing efforts.

Since this is the first issue of Buyer Persona Buzz, defining what an actionable buyer persona is, and what it is not, is the logical place to start…

What is a Buyer Persona in Plain English?

In the simplest of terms, buyer personas are examples or archetypes of real buyers that allow marketers to craft strategies to promote products and services to the people that might buy them. Developed from the authentic voice of real-life buyers, a buyer persona will inform every marketing and sales decision you make, including what you need to communicate to prospective buyers (messaging), who you should communicate it to (targeting), and how (buyer’s journey). As one marketing executive confessed to us recently:

“This is almost like cheating; like getting the exam paper weeks before the final. Instead of trying to guess what matters, I now know not only what the customers wants – I realize how they go about it.”

Here are the three main characteristics of an actionable buyer persona:

First, they reveal insights about your BUYERS’ DECISIONS – in particular:

• Pain points that trigger a buyer to look for a particular solution that you offer (Priority Initiatives)
• Outcomes a buyer expects from their investment in that solution (Success Factors)
• Concerns a buyer has about making the investment, or making it with you (Perceived Barriers)
• Questions buyers have about your solution and capabilities (Decision Criteria)
• Steps taken, resources trusted, and people involved in the buying decision (Buyers Journey)

We call these the 5 Rings of Buying Insight because by understanding them, you can connect with buyers in a way that will be difficult for your competitors to match.

Second, they are developed from in-depth interviews with recent buyers. Buyer personas are built around a story of your customers’ buying decision. To obtain that, you need to talk to them. There are no shortcuts. And, when you talk to them, you need to give them time to tell their complete, unfiltered story to identify all the critical “moments of truth” in their buying journey.

The art and science of asking probing questions and carefully listening your customers’ responses lie at the core of the buyer persona concept. It’s the key to discovering their mindset and the motivation that prompts them to purchase a solution like yours. We’ll discuss this even more in future issues of the newsletter.

Third, they are particularly useful for higher stakes buying decisions where earning a customer’s trust is critical. These are business or personal buying decisions that usually:

• Include multiple decision influencers and take a longer time to make
• Are made infrequently (or for the first time)
• Involve multiple solution options that buyers struggle to make direct comparisons
• Have higher switching costs

Examples of personal buying decisions like this include purchasing a home or selecting a college for your child. Business examples could include buying a technology solution for your company or choosing a consulting firm to help with a particular business challenge.

What a Buyer Persona is NOT

By comparison, a buyer persona is NOT:

• A profile of an individual or role (a.k.a., a “buyer profile”). Profiling people that influence a particular buying decision (e.g., their age, education, role, priorities, etc.) is fine, but it’s not an actionable buyer persona until you understand the 5 Rings of Buying Insight. By focusing on the buying decision, you will have fewer personas and clear guidance on what you need to do to educate and gain the trust of buyers.
• A profile of your ideal customer. Your own customers have inherent biases, particularly your “ideal” ones. If you’re trying to influence new, prospective customers, then your personas MUST represent an unbiased view of a market full of buyers, including those that choose a competitor. Another marketing executive recently told us:

“We knew about the current customers we had through our salespeople. But I know it was skewed. I was looking for an independent, objective assessment of the buyer’s journey. I wanted to understand the whole spectrum of buyer needs from those that should have been in our sales pipeline but weren’t.”

• Based on assumptions or educated guesses. It may seem easier to try to infer what buyers are thinking based on your own knowledge or intuition. In fact, before we had buyer personas, that’s exactly how marketers made decisions. The purpose of a buyer persona is to give you a better understanding of a buyer’s actual needs, so you can align with the things that they want and expect most. Interviewing buyers eliminates the guesswork so the foundation of all your marketing decisions is fact-based and relevant.

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Thank you for reading this first edition of Buyer Persona Buzz. I hope you enjoyed the topic, and we welcome your comments and suggestions.

Here are some other ways to access insights about your target buyers:

• Follow me or the Buyer Persona Institute on LinkedIn for timely tips to better understand your target buyers and join the conversation on my posts
• Visit the Buyer Persona Institute website to learn how to gain insight into your persona’s buying decisions and align your teams to enable their purchase journey
• Subscribe to receive the bi-weekly Buyer Persona Buzz newsletter