This article originates from a presentation at the Product Marketing Summit in San Francisco, 2022. Catch up on this presentation, and others, using our OnDemand service. For more exclusive content, visit your membership dashboard.
Let’s start with a quick game of two truths and a lie. There are three statements below. All you need to do is figure out which one is the lie.
- Buyer persona is the same as buyer profile.
- Buyer journeys are not always linear.
- Personas are never static.
What do you think?
The lie is number one: a buyer persona is the same as a buyer profile. Well done if you got it right! This is one fundamental thing I want to leave with you today. Buyer personas and buyer profiles are two different things.
When we think about buyer profiles – your IT Ivans and your marketing Megans – we geek out about their demographics, their roles, and what a day in their lives looks like. Then all that information goes into a long, long document.
The buyer persona takes a fundamentally different approach. It’s not so much about the buyer’s role as it is about how they make the buying decision. What are the criteria? What is their journey? Zooming in on the buying aspect is key. While a buyer profile could be one-dimensional, the buyer persona looks at multiple attributes.
A real-life buying process
Let’s look at a real example of a buying process – with Pokémon cards.
My son is the buyer; his thought process is, “is this Pokémon card real or fake?” His cousin is the key influencer in the buying process; he’s always saying, “always buy your cards from a pack, not online!”
I’ll be honest: I still don't get it. The final stakeholders are me and my husband. Our role is to make sure that our son isn’t getting scammed. Then, on the vendor side, tons of amazing platforms personalize, hyper-personalize, and share ads and offers.
My point is that we see buying processes every day, and there are a bunch of different stakeholders involved, all with their own wants and needs.
Getting your buyer personas right
Coming back to the title of this article, are personas and segmentation overrated? No. Not at all. However, there is a delicate balance between doing it and overdoing it. I’m going to share my four top tips on how you can strike the right balance.
Tip one: Don't make your research rocket science
The first time I did buyer research, I took a 30-slide template and meticulously filled the whole thing in. What I should have done instead is have a conversation with a buyer about the things that matter to them. Lucky for us, the Buyer Persona Institute has created a simple framework that outlines the five fundamentals that you’ll want to discuss in an interview with a buyer:
- Priority initiatives: Why are they buying?
- Success factors: This goes beyond financial success; it could also be about personal success.
- Perceived barriers: These could include anything from a lack of alignment with the executive team to not being able to build a business case.
- Decision criteria: Perhaps your buyers are looking for the lowest-priced, best-rated, or easiest-to-use solution. It’s up to you to zoom in on the factors that have the biggest impact on their buying decision.
- Buyer journey: Make sure you understand the stakeholders involved and how decisions are being made.
While it’s important to focus on these fundamentals, I wouldn’t recommend that you go into an interview and start asking these questions right away. Start with some open questions and keep an open mind.
The same applies to the types of people that you interview. I used to make the mistake of only interviewing people from the finance and operations departments.
Instead, you want to flip that thinking on its head and talk to anyone involved in the buying decision. Look at all the people on the buying committees you deal with – you might be surprised by the range of roles.
Tip two: Research need not be expensive
One of the best pieces of advice on persona research I’ve ever heard is not to outsource it. Instead, you should listen to the buyers as much as you can and unearth their insights yourself.
At our organization, to keep research costs down, we look for existing opportunities to speak to buyers. If there's an annual conference, we’ll squeeze in 20 or 30 minutes for a chat.
If we’re conducting a case study, we’ll try to carve out an extra 15 minutes to understand the buyer’s behavior. In the current economic downturn, it’s a great way to keep up to date with what's going on from the buyer’s standpoint.
Tip three: Align your sales cycle to the buying cycle
Research, if not actioned, is a waste of everyone's time. There’s no point in producing reams of documents if nobody reads them.
When it comes to the time you spend on buyer personas, you want to spend 20% on research and the remaining 80% on activation – that's where the value lies.
The goal is to align your sales cycle with the buying cycle you’ve uncovered. Let’s look at some practical steps to make that happen.
In my company, we've done activation workshops. They’re a great way of rallying people from multiple facets of the organization around the core value proposition. You want to share where the buyer’s need is, where your product’s strengths are, and highlight the intersection.
