If you’ve worked in a marketing or sales role for any time, you’ve likely encountered buyer personas and developed an opinion about them.
Done well, buyer personas are an indispensable “cheat sheet” that informs every marketing decision you make. They provide deep insight into the buying decision you’re trying to influence, enabling you to prioritize marketing activities and develop breakthrough content and messaging.
While some companies have figured out how to develop personas that do all these things, others are still missing the types of buying insights that enable greater influence on prospective buyers. If you’re in this camp, read on!
Here are the three buyer persona challenges we see most often and three ways to overcome them:
Challenge 1: You have too many buyer personas.
This typically occurs when a persona is created for EACH influencer in the buying decision. For example, a CRM software provider might have one persona for the CIO, one for the IT Director, one for the CMO, one for the Head of Sales, and so on. Things can get unwieldy quickly for companies with a broad portfolio of products and services. We’ve seen companies try to develop marketing plans and messaging for 20, 30, 50, and up to 100 personas! Even if you have the resources to deal with this many buyer personas (doubtful in most organizations), it introduces unnecessary complexity into your marketing efforts and ignores more essential buying insights – see next challenge.
Challenge 2: Your buyer personas don’t provide insights that marketing and sales need most.
This usually happens when your personas describe WHO a decision influencer is but not WHY they buy, HOW they buy, and WHAT you can do to influence their buying decision. Demographic data about a buyer, or even a high-level view of their priorities and challenges, doesn’t provide enough insight into their buying decision. Things like what triggered the need for a solution like yours, how buyers define success, what concerns and questions buyers have, and what steps they take in their buying journey are much more critical. These are the buying insights that marketers need to develop winning strategies, inspired content, and differentiated messaging.
Challenge 3: Your buyer personas are missing insight into opportunities you never see.
Interviewing your customers and sales teams is a good place to start building your buyer personas. However, your customers represent only a portion of the total market and have inherent biases. In the same way, your sales teams only know the opportunities they participate in. Even then, they are unlikely to have a complete and objective view of all the competitive alternatives buyers consider. This creates huge knowledge gaps about your competitors and why you’re not seeing certain opportunities that you would want in your pipeline.
The end result: Nobody uses the buyer personas that you have.
Because of these reasons, organizations lose faith in the value of buyer personas, stop using them, and fall back to “best guesses” about what buyers need most. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
A Better Path Forward
Fortunately, there are three things you can do to address each of these challenges. By leveraging these buyer persona best practices, you’ll reduce the number of personas you need, increase their value, and virtually guarantee that everyone in the organization uses them as the foundation for all your marketing and sales activities.
Opportunity 1: Focus your buyer personas on the buying decision you’re trying to influence, not just a profile of an individual.
For high-consideration buying decisions, you’ll want to develop insights in five key areas:
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.
Opportunity 2: Interview recent buyers to develop your buyer personas.
A recent buyer is someone who made the same buying decision that you’re trying to influence. These are not your current customers or sales teams who have a more limited view. Instead, these are recent buyers you would have wanted in your sales pipeline. Interviewing them as a journalist would, and listening to their entire buyer’s journey, will reveal insights you need for your buyer persona.
Opportunity 3: Put your buyer personas to work by finding the intersection between what buyers want and your organization’s capabilities.
Your fully developed buyer persona will include insights into everything a buyer needs to know and experience to have confidence in buying from you. Take each of these insights and map them to your company’s ability to deliver unique value. This analysis will yield message themes that will guide sales playbooks and marketing copy, from website and thought leadership content to demand generation and lead nurturing campaigns.
The Payoff
If your organization isn’t currently using buyer personas or is frustrated by the lack of value they provide, implement these best practices. Taken together, they will:
• Drive alignment across the organization about what matters most to buyers at each step in their buying journey
• Improve marketing focus and prioritization – what to do more of (and less of!)
• Align and enhance your messaging at each stage of the funnel
• Focus your efforts on features that matter most to buyers and best differentiate your solution
Need Help Building Your Buyer Personas? Let’s Talk!
