How well do you know your buyer personas?

If you've read my book The New Rules of Marketing & PR or spent time on my blog, you may recall that I stress the importance of "buyer personas." In fact, I believe they're one of the most fundamental aspects of great marketing. A buyer persona is distinct group potential customers, an archetypal person whom you want your marketing to reach.

Basing your work on buyer personas prevents you from sitting on your butt in your comfortable office just making stuff up, which is the cause of most ineffective marketing. Incidentally, my use of the word "buyer" applies to any organization's target customers. A politician's buyer personas include voters, supporters, and contributors; universities' buyer personas include prospective students (and their parents); a tennis club's buyer personas include potential members; and nonprofit buyer personas include corporate and individual donors. Go ahead and substitute however you refer to your potential customers in the phrase "buyer persona," but do keep your focus on this concept because. It is critical for success online.

Buy truly understanding the market problems that your products and services solve for your buyer personas, you transform your marketing from mere product-specific, ego-centric gobbledygook that only you understand and care about into valuable information people are eager to consume and that they use to make the choice to do business with your organization.

Instead of creating jargon-filled, hype-based advertising, you can create the kind of online content that your buyers naturally gravitate to—if you take the time to listen to them discuss the problems that you can solve for them. Then you'll be able to use their words, not your own. You'll speak in the language of your buyer, not the language of your founder, CEO, product manager, or the PR agency staffer. You'll help your marketing get real.

Consider Kadient, a company that provides salespeople with a SaaS application for managing content used in the selling process such as PowerPoint presentations, RFPs, and proposals.

Kadient has a number of buyer personas, including "Anya" and "Luke" both salespeople. In order to build these personas, Kadient marketers interviewed dozens of these sorts salespeople to build a composite of Anya and Luke. The company has kindly let me talk about these two here, (but we're keeping their other personas confidential).

In the photo, you'll see, from left to right, Heather K. Margolis, Director of Marketing for Kadient, Luka and Anya (both cardboard cutouts) and Jeff Ernst Vice President of Marketing for Kadient. Note how much more valuable it is for personas to "come alive" with both names and life-size photos.

Anya

Anya is a 30-year-old senior sales professional who has been in the top 10% for the past 5 quarters at a large financial services company. She is a career salesperson, always willing to put in the extra effort to deliver the most value to her customers, even when that means staying late at the office or working at home on the weekends. She's been selling long enough that for most sales situations she finds herself in, she's seen it before and has a set of strategies and messages she uses. Anya is very competitive and, while she believes in teamwork, hesitates to give too much of her secrets away to newer salespeople. Anya wants to ensure she always remains at the top of the team.

Anya's Goals

Anya needs to bring in the numbers every quarter, to remain secure in her position at the top of the sales performance chart. To do this, she knows that if she can spend less time doing administrative duties and looking for information and creating materials for her buyers, she can work more opportunities and maximize her face-time with customers. The service offerings she sells change frequently, and she knows she needs to be armed with the latest, most accurate messaging and content.

Luke

Luke is a 25-year-old sales professional who has been in his position at a large financial services company for six months. He's been in sales for several years but is fairly new to this level of financial services. Luke has a lot of sales talent, is very driven and eager to learn but realizes he does not have the experience of many of his peers. He’s got a busy social life and is very good at networking. He enjoys working hard and playing even harder. Luke lives in the city and travels for fun on the weekends.

Luke's Goals

Luke is not yet hitting his quota, in fact he has yet to close a deal on his own. Ramp up took longer for Luke then he thought it would and he’s concerned that if he doesn’t close a large deal or beef up his pipeline he will be at risk of losing his position. Luke needs to learn better processes for building a pipeline, explaining a plethora or products and services, and perfecting his process to be more efficient. He spends a lot of time learning about his product offerings and needs more time to figure out his buyers needs. He doesn't feel like he gets enough support from his company and has to figure things out on his own. He knows that if he could better understand what the top sales people in his firm are doing to sell in certain scenarios, he would nail it.

What about your company? Do you know your buyer personas as well the marketers at Kadient do?

Disclosure: I am on the Board of Directors of Kadient. Although the company follows the ideas in my book, I did not have anything to do with this effort.

For more information on Buyer Personas, visit Adele Revella’s excellent Buyer Persona blog.

Comments

[Adele Revella]

Hi David:

Thanks for the acknowledgement, and for all of the work you do to reinforce that the fundamentals of marketing are critical to succeeding with the New Rules. A marketer recently told me that his boss thought that anything about "traditional" marketing is irrelevant. My response, this boss is still thinking that marketing is about tactics. While marketing tactics may be divided between the old rules and the new rules, effective targeting, messaging and segmentation strategies still need to be based on deep insight into the company's target buyers. Buyer personas just happen to be the best way to convey that insight throughout the company. Thanks for giving us a great example of a company that's making this work.

[Scott Sehlhorst]

What a great article.

I think the personas' goal sections are great at highlighting their perceptions of what features/capabilities are important to solving their problems. Well done Kadient.

Do you (David and his readers!) normally differentiate between buyer personas and user personas? Or do you normally deal with situations like Kadient's where they are the same people?

TIA for all responses. Also, if anyone is interested, I just wrote an article targeted at product managers, to help them differentiate buyer personas and user personas (http://tynerblain.com/blog/2008/07/22/buyers-and-users/ ) I'd love it if any of you could contribute more/better/different ideas to it. This is a distinction we definitely struggle with as product managers, with our (default) focus on user personas.

[Lisa Kelley McGrath]

David-
It's vbeen ages since I worked with you while I was at RoweCom & you were at NewsEdge ... but found your Blog today and have a new daily Bible!

[John Flynn]

I was a little troubled about the "persona" of the sales people.
It seems that they had two personas. When I work even with small companies I like to come up with five.

I think this is another backhand against Sales Reps.

Sure you have the type "A" sales person without a life making her quarterly numbers.

Then you have the type "Z" sales rep how is complaining about how the company is not getting him enough sales leads.

Well I make my numbers and I have a life and a family.

Are most Sales people jerks? The answer is yes. 20 years in sales and I have to say that most of the sales rep (even the ones that make thier numbers) are not what I would call great sales reps.

A good sales rep uses your and Mr. Godin's methods to reach out to the customer and builds relationships with them. Finds out what thier needs are. Helps them idenify thier buyers. It is surprising how many business don't know thier buyer personas.

Sales Reps are on the ground floor and no the lay of the land.
They have the information that marketing could use to make an informed program to rise above the clutter of interruption marketing.

So yes some sales reps may fit into the two very narrow personas.
But there are many of us out here that are asking questions (of customers and of our own marketing, communication and promotion departments) to help the company get on the path of the "New Rules".

[David Meerman Scott]

Thanks for your comment John. I generally agree with what you've said. Please be aware (as I said) that Kadient has more than just two buyer personas. I just talked about two of them.

Take care, David

[Mark]

I've been in technology sales for over 10 years and your idea of personas is a fantastic idea, although not a new one. We would call it target market or sweet spot. What is the make up of the buyer most likely to buy our product. We would seek these people out and they are who we would spend most of our time with. You would deviate from the sweet spot, but you didn't want to chase "bright shiny objects" that were so far from the target buyer that you were wasting your time. Sales is all about time management, and you want to spend the majority of your time in front of your sweet spot directly your time and effort at them. The surprising thing about your article, is that marketing is developing these "personas", buit I've never had a marketing person ask me, what is the makeup of our target customer. As someone whose livelyhood depended on knowing that profile and identifying it asap, it amazes me that marketing departments aren't coming to sales and asking them this. Whenever I come to a new company my first goal is to understand who the marketing is directed at, who the majority of sales people are actually selling to, then modifying the materials created by marketing to fit ther sweet spot and identifying and closing these high potential targets. My suggestion is that anyone creating a persona for marketing to, should start with the people touching your buyers on a daily basis and asking them what should this buyer profile look like.

[Seh]

It feels as if online marketing forces you to be more aware of your buyer's persona. For instance I am now creating my online video around keywords. I post to a site at http://www.Adwido.com and they target specific keywords to boost my search engine traffic. Not to mention the account is Free.