Buyer Personas

Perhaps you will have also invested in another interviewing technique that provides more visionary insight into the long-range priorities for specific buyers. In contrast to the interviews with buyers about recent decisions, these interviews focus on larger trends and conceptual issues in the marketplace. It's an advanced skill that calls for the experience of a professional interviewer, or someone who already has become comfortably adept at conducting probing inquiries. These interviews would help your CMO to identify buyer needs years in advance, with questions such as:

How will the use of Big Data change the way business is done?
What is next with the Cloud?
Where is the idea of driverless cars going?
What is the next evolution in green housing?
Unlike the buyer stories featured throughout this book, these interviews require you to introduce a topic that the buyer may or may not have contemplated. It is extremely easy to bias the outcome of these interviews and, as a result, collect data that are unreliable. So, with a recommendation that such exchanges are best conducted by an experienced interviewer, here, nevertheless, is the concept.

The first question should be defined around an issue or priority that your company hopes will be relevant in the coming years. For instance, your opening question might be, “We've been interviewing a number of retailers about drone delivery services, and one of the things we're hearing is their concern about the drone's limited battery life. We are hearing deep concern that gas-powered engines appear to be the far more practical option. What are your thoughts about that?”

Alternatively, you might want to explore the financial considerations of this solution, asking a different question, “We've been talking to other retailers about delivery drones, and we're hearing that this is going to allow them to deliver more items while cutting both their manpower and delivery time. They report they are now starting to make huge investments in this technology and are rushing to be among the first to offer this service. What are you thoughts about that?”

The model for beginning this kind of interview is, “We've been talking to other people like you and one of the things we're hearing…” and then you insert a trend or issue that you see developing in the market that your company wants to capitalize on, followed by a conclusion that's somewhat provocative.

The reason we want to make it provocative is that we want to elicit an emotional reaction from the buyer. Some will respond, “No way! Those batteries last only 10 minutes, and that isn't going to help me, except in very dense markets. I would love to use a gasoline-powered engine, but my customers aren't going to want a noisy weed-whacker flying over their heads.” Or, “This is a Buck Rogers fantasy. We're not going to invest in this.” Or you might get the buyer who says, “Absolutely, we agree completely. Gas-powered engines are the only way delivery drones are going to happen, and here's why…”

With these reactions you can begin to get a sense of buyers' current attitudes around a solution that your company sees as a part of your long-term strategy. It's a completely different method of conducting buyer interviews, and we caution you not to start here, but in combination with the fundamental interviewing covered throughout the book, we predict a future where your CMO will have increasingly valuable input to your company's most strategic decisions.

By confirming that sales and marketing have the same goals but distinctly different competencies and timelines, we can move ahead and meet on common ground: aligning our story with the one our buyers want to hear.

When marketing and sales get together, use the time for a conversation in which salespeople can report what they are hearing from buyers and compare their reports with what marketing is learning from buyer interviews. When every conversation between sales and marketing centers on what buyers want, and when marketing provides demonstrated expert knowledge about buyer insight, the teams will naturally align to respond to their customer's expectations.

Frankly, trying to sell buyer personas to internal audiences is a lot like promoting your products to buyers who aren't looking for them.

However, there are a number of reasons to cite caution. Salespeople are not in the habit of thinking about patterns in buyer behavior. The nature of sales engagement encourages salespeople to 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.

More important, 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.

Furthermore, it's unlikely that salespeople can provide usable intelligence about the buyer's perceptions that negatively affect 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 reveal to sales reps out of fear that they will use these points to reengage with them.

Although it offers a possible starting point, relying on internal intelligence eliminates the possibility that you will learn anything new. If you market a solution that buyers consider at length, there remains a wealth of additional insight available to you.

Expert marketers struggle right along with everyone else. David Ogilvy, the renowned advertising sage who reigned during the era depicted in the popular Mad Men TV series, memorably summarized the market research dilemma this way: “The trouble with market research is that people don't think how they feel, they don't say what they think, and they don't do what they say.”

Too often, Buyer Profiles are nothing more than an attractive way to display obvious or demographic data. Defining markets based on demographics—data such as a person's age, income, marital status, and education—is the legacy of 60 years of selling to the mass market.