We are shocked to hear anyone say that buyer personas are fictional. Why would anyone rely on fiction for important decisions? And although simple approaches are always appealing, please be…
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B2B marketing
Gartner says: Sales and marketing influences just 32% of B2B buyer’s journey
I am fascinated by a recent Gartner study about the journey of 700 enterprise buyers across the U.S., EMEA, Brazil, India and China. According to a recent interview with Hank…
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Big News from Buyer Persona Institute
You might have noticed that I haven’t published updates on this blog and that my presence on social media has been scarce over the last few months. I wish I…
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Go Big Or Go Home: How Buyer Personas Help A Global Marketing Effort
We frequently talk about how buyer persona insights add value to sales, messaging and content, but how does that work in a company with more than a thousand marketers around…
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Got Buyer Personas? 44% say yes, but 85% aren’t using them effectively
This disturbing data was reported in a recent ITSMA study. The sample size was relatively small and limited to the services marketing sector, but I’m seeing indicators that this is…
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Make Every Word Matter (and Make Sure Your Buyer Personas Tell You How)
There’s a wonderful Mark Twain quote that goes like this “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—’tis the difference between the…
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Practitioner Perspective: The 6 Most Important (Surprising) Things I’ve Learned From Doing B2B Buyer Personas
This post is contributed by Gordana Stok, a Certified Practitioner of the Buyer Persona Institute methodology. Last year I decided to learn how to develop buyer personas so that I…
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Power to the Soccer Mom: How Just One Buyer Persona Revealed This Winning Strategy
I like to learn about marketing in unexpected places. The U.S. presidential campaigns are especially fascinating because they represent a “high consideration” decision where, like many B2B products, you don’t…
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The 5 Marketing Lessons I Learned From My 5 Years in Sales
One of the life experiences I credit most for teaching me about marketing was the five years I spent in sales. I came to that job in a roundabout way…
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Keep Your Eye on the Gorilla
I was recently reminded of a very interesting experiment that two cognitive psychologists conducted in 1999. In it, they tasked a group of people with watching people pass basketballs around,…
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