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. Buyer persona development starts with understanding your customers deeply.
“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 establishments. 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.
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 that 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 is a Buyer Persona?
We wrote an in depth article on this topic and why it matters
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.
How to Develop and Use Buyer Personas More Effectively
Fortunately, there is knowledge and tools that can help. We have made it our mission to create content that focuses on these key elements:
- Providing Clarity: We offer insights about what a buyer persona is and what it is not. The term “buyer persona” has become popular, but it has led to confusion about creation, usage, and effectiveness. We aim to break through the clutter.
- Guidance and Tools: Learn how to develop buyer personas effectively, avoiding common pitfalls. We guide you on conducting buyer interviews that reveal essential insights for creating impactful marketing strategies.
- Activating Insights: Discover methods to activate buyer persona insights, developing value propositions and messaging that resonate with buyers while aligning with your company’s capabilities.
- Buyer Insights: Gain valuable insights from thousands of in-depth buyer interviews conducted by the Buyer Persona Institute. These insights can inform and enhance your own marketing efforts.
Need Help Building Your Buyer Personas? Let’s Talk!
