Creating an authentic Buyer Persona is pivotal in understanding your buyers’ decisions — their goals, concerns, decision criteria, and journey. It informs how to best influence them towards choosing your solution over competitors or the status quo. While various methods exist for gathering the necessary insights — from analyzing data to leveraging GenAI tools — none are as effective and insightful as conducting one-on-one interviews with recent buyers.
The Unmatched Value of One-on-One Interviews
In a one-on-one interview, two people engage in a conversation where one person (the interviewer) asks the other person (the interviewee) a series of questions to gain their perspective about a particular topic. These are open and free-flowing conversations—there are no right or wrong answers. The interviewer is simply trying to understand the interviewee’s “truth” in their own words.
Imagine a skilled journalist interviewing someone. They ask questions and probe deeply, not settling for surface answers. This is the essence of one-on-one interviews for Buyer Persona development. Through these in-depth conversations, you uncover the interviewee’s genuine experiences and perspectives, gaining insights that are both rich and authentic.
To uncover buying insights, one-on-one interviews work well because they give the interviewee time to talk about their entire journey—from the moment they have an initial need for a solution that you offer until the time they make a final buying decision. Unlike focus groups, one-on-one interviews give you time to ask questions, probe more when needed, and listen attentively as a buyer tells you their thoughts and behaviors at each step in their buying decision. Only this depth of discussion yields real insight.
Interview Recent Buyers – They’re the Experts!
A recent buyer is someone who has made the exact same buying decision (ideally in the last 3-6 months) that you’re trying to influence. These are not just your current customers who have inherent biases—good and bad. These are also buyers you would have wanted in your sales pipeline, but they chose either someone else or the status quo.
Why is interviewing recent buyers so important? There are several reasons:
- Recent buyers aren’t guessing about what they were thinking and doing throughout their buying journey. They’ve been through it recently and will tell you everything you need to know with confidence and accuracy. As one marketing executive and advocate of this approach recently told us, “It’s like getting the answers before the test!”
- Recent buyers represent the full market you’re targeting. They include the opportunities you’re not seeing, or losing to a competitor, so you can be confident that the insights they reveal aren’t missing important perspectives.
- Interviewing recent buyers provides the buyer quotes you need for your persona. These quotes gives your organization a front row seat to learn what buyers are actually saying. These quotes add depth, richness, and another level of understanding that cannot be matched any other way. And it’s this depth of understanding that enables breakthrough strategies, content, and messaging.
- Interviewing recent buyers increase the authenticity of your Buyer Persona and aligns your marketing, sales, and product teams around “one version of the truth”. By combining buying insights with actual buyer quotes, the legitimacy of your Buyer Persona will be self-evident to all.
We’ve participated in hundreds of Buyer Persona read-out meetings over the years and the discussions among the marketing, sales, and product teams are always engaging and unifying. Because the insights are developed from interviews with real buyers, there’s no dispute over the findings. Faced with the truth about what actual buyers are thinking and doing, these teams come together to focus on actions that boost a buyer’s confidence and positively influence their purchase behavior.
Don’t Be Afraid to Talk to Recent Buyers
We often hear that marketers get a little nervous interviewing buyers. You shouldn’t be! Here’s why:
- First, as the interviewer, you’ll be amazed at how willing buyers are to talk about a recent buying experience that was important to them. As you continue to do interviews to complete your persona, you’ll develop a sixth sense about what buyers really need to have confidence buying from you. The learning starts immediately, even before you aggregate findings from all the interviews to develop insights for your Buyer Persona. Enjoyment comes from facilitating an engaging conversation with someone you are trying to understand and the knowledge you’ll gain to influence buyers just like them.
- Second, recent buyers enjoy the interviews because they get a chance to communicate something of real value to a highly interested party (you!). They don’t have to guess about their thinking and the steps they took in their buying journey. They’ve already gone through it, so it’s enjoyable and even a bit cathartic to share the ups and downs of an important decision with someone else. In fact, across the thousands of interviews we’ve conducted over the years, we consistently see that buyers will open up to us, revealing the trials, traumas, and triumphs of decisions that, had they gone awry, would have resulted in huge losses for their companies or personal reputations. We are amazed that the people we talk to don’t want the interview to end, and that when we finally conclude, they often thanked us profusely, as if we had done them a favor.
Where Other Approaches Fall Short
Of course, there are other methods of developing the buying insights you need for your Buyer Persona, but each has inherent disadvantages to be aware of:
Interviewing Current Customers
While it may be easier to secure interviews with your own customers, they don’t represent the full, viable market you’re targeting. They only represent the opportunities that you see (and have won). Current customers also have biases that can be difficult to detect, and they often shy away from revealing anything that might be perceived as negative towards your organization or your capabilities. To develop authentic Buyer Personas, you need the full, unvarnished truth from your prospective buyer’s perspective.
Relying on Sales Team Feedback
Your sales representatives have first-hand experience with buyers and will likely have a viewpoint about your buyer’s concerns, needs, goals, and who the key decision influencers are. Gathering this information from your salespeople can kick-start your efforts to understand a buyer’s mindset. However, there are a number of reasons to cite caution:
- Salespeople are not in the habit of thinking about patterns in buyer behavior. Salespeople typically treat every account as unique, and any input they provide is likely to feature something about the few deals in which they are currently involved.
- Salespeople witness a small slice of time in the buyer’s journey, as buyers increasingly rely on their own sources to narrow their options before they are willing to meet with someone in sales. Therefore, your reps are unlikely to know anything about how the buyer navigated the earliest stages of the buying decision, a troubling limitation when this is the part of the buyer’s decision that marketing needs to influence the most.
- It’s unlikely that salespeople can provide usable intelligence about the buyer’s perceptions that negatively affects the outcome. The information conveyed to you from a sales representative who failed to close the deal provides a simplistic view of the situation; there are missing details that buyers won’t often reveal to sales.
GenAI Limitations
The hype train for these GenAI models and applications has never been greater, and for good cause. The idea of artificial intelligence (or machine thinking) has been around since the early 1950s. However, it’s only been recently that a combination of forces have come together to make GenAI models possible at scale—most notably advances in the areas of big data, computer processing, cloud computing, open-source software, and deep learning algorithms.
Unfortunately, GenAI has two significant limitations:
- Lack of Access to In-depth Buyer Insights: GenAI cannot directly access or interpret the nuanced, day-to-day experiences of buyers. Important details and quotes that bring a Buyer Persona to life are best obtained through direct conversations, which GenAI tools are not equipped for due to the private nature of such data.
- Challenges with Data Verification: GenAI tools, including ChatGPT, cannot always guarantee the source or accuracy of their insights. “AI hallucinations”—responses generated by AI that contains false or misleading information—is a big challenge that the AI community is still working through. Without the ability to directly source or verify information, the reliability of GenAI-generated insights can be questionable, underscoring the importance of direct interviews for accurate and trustworthy data.
The good news is interviewing recent buyers is doable, fun, and yields all the insights you need to develop actionable Buyer Personas that takes all the guesswork out of your marketing and sales activities. Armed with these buying insights, you’ll provide your prospective buyers with what they need to know and experience to have confidence buying from you!
