Targeting Your Audience with Buyer Personas: Strategies for Success.

Transcript lightly edited for spelling and punctuation. The conversation is unabridged.

Mark Evans: Hey. It's Mark Evans. Before we kick off today's podcast, I have some very exciting news. I just launched a new live cohort-based course on how to create better brand positioning. This is something that I've wanted to do for a long time, and thanks to Maven, I finally made it happen. It consists of five sessions. We'll cover insights into why positioning matters. We'll do worksheets and exercises to turn ideas and approaches into tangible assets, and I'll walk you through my positioning framework that I've used with dozens of companies over the past fifteen years. To learn more, visit maven.com/mark-evans/brand-positioning. If you have any questions, you can email me at mark@markevans.ca. Now let's get to the podcast. In theory, buyer personas make it easier for companies to identify and understand the people who matter to them. After all, the more you know about your customers, the better you can serve them. However, buyer personas can be a hit or miss proposition. Companies develop them, but they're sometimes more fiction than fact, or marketers and salespeople don't leverage them. How do companies extract value from using buyer personas to target and make the buyer's journey more efficient? To answer this question and more, I'm excited about this conversation with Jim Kraus, the president of the Buyer Persona Institute. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Jim.

Jim Kraus: Thanks, Mark. Great to be here.

Mark Evans: Before we explore the value and mechanics of buyer personas, what is the Buyer Persona Institute, and who does it serve?

Jim Kraus: Sure. So the Buyer Persona Institute, if we had a mission statement, is to take all the guesswork out of marketing. Right? So the companies that we work with, we're trying to provide them real, in-depth buying insights. So when they're developing marketing and sales motions, they don't have to guess about what buyers want, what they need, what they want to experience to trust them and their solutions. We develop buyer personas so they know exactly what it what it what those things are for them to really trust them and want to do business with them. And I'm sure we'll get this into this later, in the discussion, but we do that by way of actually talking to real-life buyers to get those insights.

Mark Evans: I'm glad you mentioned that because I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, probably too much if I had to be honest. And there are many posts by marketers on the importance of talking to customers. To me, that's marketing 101, but I think it suggests that many companies don't talk to their customers or their prospects for that matter. In your work, in your research, do you find that a lot of companies drop the ball when it comes to getting insight from the people that matter to them?

Jim Kraus: Yeah. I think there's two places that companies drop the ball. It could be it could be one or both of them. One is just not talking to the customer enough. Right? That's number one. So you can never talk to customers too much. Right? You know, you're at the end of the day, you're offering a particular product or a service, features, capabilities, but what the customer is trying to solve for, what benefits that they're looking to, how they define success is really going to dictate how successful you're going to be in the market if you can align what you offer to them. So you can never talk to customers too much. I think the other place is what are those who are they actually talking to, and what is the nature of those conversations? And the reason that's so important is because buyer persona, you really want to start with the end in mind as far as what are you really trying to learn in these discussions. Because that sets up how you interview customers, and then how do you take those results and analyze them so that they actually result in very meaningful insights you can use in your business.

Mark Evans: It's interesting because getting things out of buyer personas ultimately, buyer personas only have value if you can extract insights that you can use to drive your business. Before we get into the buyer persona creation and development, what are the most effective ways in your experience that marketers and salespeople can get tangible and actual insight from customers and prospects? Because it's one thing to talk to them. It's another thing to ask the right questions to get the insight that you need to do better marketing, to better sales. In addition to actually talking to customers, in your experience, what are the different vehicles that marketers and salespeople can use?

Jim Kraus: So there's a lot of different inputs that you can get, and none of them are wrong or right. I think they're all great. Right? So you can get input from analysts. You can get input from your sales folks, customer-facing people, customer service people. You can get inputs from any win-loss analysis or interviews you do. And there's any number of places. The other place which is really a very valuable place to go is just to talk to recent buyers, who have recently made the exact same buying decision that you're trying to influence. And these aren't your current customers necessarily. These are folks that literally made the same decision you're trying to influence them. And then I would say, for now, the biggest advice I can give you when you're talking to these folks is you want to understand their buyer story. That's the way we kind of look at it. So the interviews that we do and we talk to our clients about doing it, if they'd like to do them themselves, is to go into the interview really just as a journalist would. You're trying to understand their entire buyer's journey from literally the moment that they had a need for a particular product or service all the way until they make the final decision. It's not a, you know, a survey rating ranking type. It's really an exploratory interview and just being very curious, being a great listener, and just asking good questions to try to get at certain insights that are going to be the most helpful to your marketing sales team.

Mark Evans: As a former journalist, I appreciate the reference to asking journalistic-type questions and having people tell stories. Let me ask you a couple of softball questions, buyer persona 101 questions, and then we'll get into the nitty-gritty of developing buyer personas and how to get value from them. What's the value of buyer personas? And I'm curious about how they've evolved in recent years given that marketers have so much access to information. They can see and hear what their customers are talking about on social media or via YouTube or their websites. Has that changed the value of buyer personas and the role that they play?

Jim Kraus: Yeah. So first thing I'll mention is just defining what a buyer persona is. And I just want to make one key distinction here because it really probably drives everything else we're going to talk to. A lot of times in the market when you hear the words buyer persona, oftentimes that means to somebody that is a fictional avatar of a particular individual or role in the organization. So if you're talking about technology companies that are working with different IT and business folks, you know, maybe it's a buyer persona for the CIO role. You have descriptive characteristics of what that CIO may look like, education, overall priorities, top challenges, and that's all great, and that's useful. But what you want to do with your buyer persona is take it a step further. You want to understand more than just the person. You want to understand the ins and outs of the actual buying decision that they are making. And the buying decision you want to focus on is the one that you're creating the buyer persona for. So the way we define buyer persona is in-depth buying insights about a very specific buying decision. So as an example, if you sell CRM software, that's deep buying insights about CRM buying decisions. And we'll talk a little bit probably in a moment about key elements to include in your persona. To answer your second question, once you have these buying insights, they add tremendous value. I mean, a lot of our clients call them cheat sheets because they take all the guesswork out of if you're trying to develop positioning, messaging strategies, sales plays, even ways to overcome sales objections, these give you all the insights you need to go and do that. Number one is they help from a messaging standpoint at top, middle, and bottom of the funnel. No matter where sales, a prospect is, it's going to give you insights there. The second thing that we found is really valuable with personas, particularly in today's economy, is prioritization. Right? I mean, oftentimes marketers, there's any number of things they could be doing. Sales folks are demanding certain things. Execs are demanding certain things. You're trying to put different things out that could help business performance. What buyer personas really do is they help you really zero in on where is we're going to get the most bang for a buck and where should we focus on the buyer's journey, and then what should we be communicating in that buyer's journey. So the prioritization is a huge value, particularly in a tight economy.

Mark Evans: I guess from what you said, buyer personas could have a marketing problem. It's the idea that a buyer persona sits on someone's wall or in front of somebody's desktop computer, and they look at it, and it's that typical name, title, hobbies, interests. Are they married? How old are they? How much money do they make? And that is someone's perception of a buyer persona. So I think what you said stands in direct contrast because I look at your definition as being something that offers intelligence and insight and guidance and direction. The common view of a buyer persona is that this fictional sort of useful representation of what a buyer could look like and maybe that's the problem with buyer personas is that people really don't know their role and how they should be constituted.

Jim Kraus: Yeah. It's a double-edged sword for us. To be honest with you, Mark, we've talked about changing the name of our organization and calling buyer personas, and there's we could probably have a meaningful conversation about the marketing aspect of it. But the reality is, you know, once the beauty of it is once people get it, it's a, you know, very simple methodology. It's just very logical. It just all makes sense. It's almost like, oh, wow. Why was I focused there? I should really be trying to understand the buying decision because the reality is it's very hard, let's talk about technology products. It's very hard to differentiate yourself in a market where a lot if you go to websites, you see a lot of competitors talking about benefits, a very benefit-oriented messaging or they're talking about the same messages. And that's fine. That may get you in the initial consideration set or give you a look. Once you get past that, it all becomes how can you make them feel as good as possible that they're making a really good decision. That's what they want. They want to have confidence in a decision that they're going to get a certain outcome that they want. And to do that, you have to go beyond just, you know, a fictional avatar of a certain role of the decision. You really need to know what they want out of that buying decision.

Mark Evans: Love to get more insight into the customer story and the different ways that that can be illustrated in a buyer persona. Maybe I can ask you about the key elements of a buyer persona and the steps that companies should take to develop them, and this is obviously could be a very long conversation. And then as important, what types of data and insights should be collected to inform the process?

Jim Kraus: Yeah. So this is the crux of all of it. One of the things we at Buyer Persona Institute's been around for fifteen years, and we've probably worked with over 150 companies, primarily B2B, a lot of tech. One of the things that we figured out pretty quickly is we need to come up with a framework that makes buyer personas the information highly relevant and highly logical for both marketers and sellers. Right? And it also needs to make sense in how we collect the data. We advocate talking to recent buyers for a buying decision you're trying to influence. So what that means is, again, I'll just stick with the CRM example. It could be pick any technology or solution or any high-consideration buying decision. You want to think about finding somebody that has made that exact buying decision in the past six to twelve months. Not necessarily your customers. You can go talk to your customers on your own, but these are folks that are you may not have any line of sight on. Right? And what you want to do is in-depth interviews with them. Interviews typically take thirty or forty minutes, and you want to find patterns. You want to just do one interview. You want to do a number of these interviews, and you want to find patterns across all the data that you collect. And what we do is our approach to interviewing is at the very beginning, there really, there's only one scripted question we ask at the very beginning where we say, take me back to the day when you first decided you needed x, using CRM as an example. And then you just ask a lot of probing questions to really understand, you know, how did they come up with the fact that they even had a need for the product? How do they find success? What is success to them? How do they figure out who they're first originally going to look at and how they winnow down their choices? So we take an approach where we really try to understand that entire process in their words because they will self-identify the moments that are really important in the buyer's journey. And that's critical because we're not looking to give them a list and say, you know, which information source did you use the most? We're trying to have them tell us what were the different information sources they used and talk about them so that they self-identify what's truly important. So we do a number of those interviews, and then we look across and define patterns of the data. And our buyer personas consist of five key elements. The first one is called priority initiatives, and that's really just triggers. This is literally what are the things that gets buyers even looking at a certain point in time. You may have had a certain challenge or business opportunity for any number of months, years, whatever. What was the thing that really got you going to get started? That's number one. The second thing we call success factors, and this is absolutely critical because these are buyers literally telling us how they define success. What does success look like for them? Third thing is perceived barriers. This is one of one of my favorites. It's kind of the bad news, but it's something that gets overlooked a lot of times in buyer personas. And perceived barriers are all the reasons that a buyer would not want to make this investment or make it with a certain provider. So, these are high-consideration decisions. They're probably a certain investment. There's other costs that you're taking into, training people how to use technology, for example. If you don't think that buyers are have some trepidation, you're mistaken. They do. And we want to learn what are all those things that they have anxiety about. What are they concerned about? The fourth one is decision criteria, and this is a super powerful one because these are all the questions they're going to have for you. So if you're in the consideration set or they're just trying to figure out who they want to consider, these are all the questions that they're going to ask different providers that they're considering. And then the fifth and last thing is the buyer's journey. So this is literally by them telling us their full story, we're able to really understand what are the steps that they take in the process. Who are the people that have some type of influence or say? What information sources are they using and do they trust? So that we can really paint a picture what that buyer's journey looks like. Think about it. Now you've got a buyer persona with these five elements. It literally tells you everything that you need to know to figure out where do you best meet buyers where they are, what kinds of things do they need to know and experience to have full confidence in you. The other thing going back to what I had said earlier is it helps you really prioritize now. Right? Because now if you have 10 features, you know, I can guarantee you they don't care about all 10 features. If you know what their success factors are and some of the key questions they ask from the decision criteria, you're going to be able to hone in on, you know, this is where we really need to spend some time and make the customer feel really good about this capability and that they can achieve the result that they want.

Mark Evans: Now to be clear, when you're doing this research, are you talking to customers, recent customers, existing customers, customers who have been in the fold for a while, or is it a combination of customers and people who are in the market for a CRM, for example, but a company has never had contact with them. They haven't filled out a form. They haven't asked for a demo. Is it completely cool? You combine the two inputs?

Jim Kraus: It's the latter. So you may end up talking to customers, but we would not suggest that you actively recruit them per se because you want there's a couple of reasons for that. One is you want the buyer persona to be representative of the market. When I say market, I mean the entire market. And the reason that's so important is because, A, it gives you visibility into opportunities that you're probably not even seeing if you're just talking to your current customers. The other reason it's absolutely critical is because one of the key ways to get traction with the buyer personas on the back end is to socialize these amongst the marketing, sales, and product departments. And if you come to them with a market study with rigor that you went out and talked to recent buyers that weren't just your customers, it's impossible to ignore. Right? Because these are things that nobody has line of sight on because they're not your current customers. So when we say recent buyers, we carefully define what the buying decision is that you're trying to influence, and then we go find folks that made that exact buying decision. Many times, it will be people that we talk to that made a buying decision for a deal that you were never involved in, but you would love to have in your sales pipeline. That's what we're trying to really bring to the table here, and it's pretty powerful.

Mark Evans: Well, the $64,000 question, and this may be proprietary information of the Buyer Persona Institute, is how do you find those buyers, people or companies that decided not to buy a company's product? They bought somebody else. And how do you convince them to provide you with insight given the fact that, well, they've already made their decision. They may not be willing to share their feelings or their thoughts, especially with somebody who didn't get their business. What are the tools that you use or the approaches that you take to leverage information from these types of customers?

Jim Kraus: The first thing that you do is you want to define the buying decision and the target buyer specifically as you can. And that sounds very straightforward, but it's not always as straightforward as it would appear. We actually do a one-hour meeting when we do a new study where we bring the marketing, product, and sales folks, and we define very specifically what is this buying decision. Who are we really going after? And it may be that could be a certain solution, but it has to be a certain solution with certain components. And then also who is the target buyer, whether it's, you know, certain industries, sizes, geos, other type of things. So that's number one. Define that very specifically. Then the second step to get to your question is we work with and you can work with outside recruiters that can help find these folks. What you do is you develop a it's just a short questionnaire. It's probably a ten- to fifteen-minute questionnaire typically where we ask very specific questions to find people that were recently involved in that buying decision, and we were pretty stringent about it. Right? Not only must they have evaluated and purchased that solution in the past twelve months, we also make sure that they are heavily involved in the process. Because, again, we're not trying to just get insights on them as individuals. They are literally the voice box for their organization describing to us all the things that went on, all the things that were important for their organization, including themselves. We provide stipends. So these are quote-unquote research interviews. So we provide stipends, honorariums. And, usually, folks are if we find them, if they have the time, they're very willing to talk to us because they get some money. They usually get value out of the conversation. Because, again, remember, this is something that's they have an opinion about because this is something that was really important to them, this decision. Right? They're not guessing. This is not them making things up. This is literally they're telling you exactly what was important to them. So that's basically the way we secure them for the interviews.

Mark Evans: How does that framework fit into the development of buyer personas?

Jim Kraus: It's very similar. I mean, I would say it's a component of our interviews. What it's probably most closely tied to is our success factors dimension as far as what outcomes they want to achieve. But we also see it show up in terms of perceived barriers or their concerns or decision criteria. It'll also come up there as well. But, basically, I would say it's a component of our interview. But the key thing is we're trying to understand what is that job to be done, what is success for them. You know? How do they define it as specifically as possible? Because that's absolutely critical.

Mark Evans: Once buyer personas have been developed, two questions here. How does marketing and sales leverage them, get maximum impact from the value that you've delivered and then the insight that you created? And on the flip side, what are the mistakes or pitfalls to avoid when using buyer personas?

Jim Kraus: How to use them? One of the things I would highly recommend is to socialize the results first. You want to have folks when you're first figuring out what is the buying decision you're trying to influence in your target buyer, you want to have folks in your organization that have any stake in the results part of that design meeting because that's just going to create buy-in for the results right from the start. And then you want to socialize them. And my favorite meetings, quite honestly, are readouts of buyer personas, where we have sales, marketing, product all in the room or virtual room together. Because it's just it's just a great way for people to really triangulate around what is the actual market telling us. What do buyers actually want in the market? The other beauty is it really starts triggering all kinds of ideas. Like, hey. We need more of this. Somebody started doing that. Let's do a little more of that. Maybe we maybe we don't need to do this. Or and all this great dialogue starts that just kind of kicks off a tidal wave of action after. Another thing I'd recommend doing is it's a simple mapping exercise. If you think about a Venn diagram, you know, two circles, intersecting circles, the one circle is everything that buyers want and need, and that's the buyer persona, essentially. So if you do the buyer persona way I described, you're going to know everything you want and need. There's no there's no fiction to it. You're going to know it. The other circle is your capabilities. What are you as an organization objectively, what are you able to do? What are you able to do well? In particular, where are the areas that you know are now important and you can really differentiate yourself? The intersection of those two things are is your sweet spot. Right? Because now you've got two things going for you. A, you know that buyers really want and need it, and B, you know you've got a great story to tell. You've got capabilities to back it up. You've got success stories to back it up. So that's a great place to start, and you can really hone in on your top four or five value proposition themes just doing that exercise. And the beauty of that is these are things you can hand to your sales teams in different forms, but basically say, hey. Look. Here's four or five things. We did our did the work. We know that buyers want and need this. Here we've here's our great story to tell. You can have some confidence when you when you're really starting to have these conversations. And then the other natural place to look at is messaging exercises. And I know folks use different types of messaging approaches in their organization. Literally, this is a must-have. Right? Because it is the cheat sheet for all of your messaging, literally.

Mark Evans: What about mistakes and pitfalls? Often what happens is companies develop buyer personas and they sit in a computer file somewhere or you print out a poster that everyone in the office can see on a regular basis, and then everybody ignores them. They look at buyer personas and they say, you know, they're not terribly useful, so I'm not going to use them. How do companies avoid, or how do they avoid making mistakes? And what kind of mistakes do you find that companies make when it comes to buyer personas?

Jim Kraus: The biggest one is we haven't found many people who take a buying decision approach really fail in terms of them feeling like they didn't get the value from it. The biggest thing to avoid the pitfall is rather than thinking of a buyer persona as this fictional avatar of an individual or role, do your buyer persona so you're really understanding their buying decision. Because I can guarantee you if you do that, you know, the value is going to be there. It's just so logical that it's these are all the things that you want to know to develop marketing and sales strategies. So that's the biggest thing is don't settle for just a profile of an individual. It's not enough to know their... Think about it. If you're trying to influence a CIO and you happen to know their education, even if you know their overall priorities and maybe information sources at a high level, that only takes you so far as far as really making them feel super confident in your capabilities and your solution. So just don't settle for that would be my biggest recommendation.

Mark Evans: In my world, the B2B SaaS world, a lot of companies are leaning into account-based marketing or ABM these days. What's happened is that they're trying to be more efficient with their marketing and their sales activities. The shotgun approach to marketing where you could spend a lot of money is over. Budgets have been pulled in, and account-based marketing has become an attractive option because in theory, it allows companies to be very focused and very targeted. So the obvious question is what is the role that buyer personas play in ABM, and how can companies use them to better target and engage with key accounts?

Jim Kraus: The beauty of it is buyer personas, the way we've been talking about them today, is very well aligned to ABM, account-based marketing. Because, essentially, you're trying to really understand the buyer as well as you can. You're trying to figure out how can I provide to them what they really need to know and really need to experience to feel really confident in the decisions that they're making around different solutions that they're looking into to help their organization? It's one and the same thing as in terms of the objectives. It could be a two-way street. Right? I could see buyer personas feeding into your ABM activities because it's another source of insights about the market. I could also see using insights you're getting from ABM, what you're learning because you're going to be learning so much from these accounts, also feeding into your persona so you can even enhance them even more.

Mark Evans: The other question I wanted to ask you, and this is something that I run into on a regular basis when I'm doing positioning and messaging work, is quantifying the impact and the ROI. I think there's tremendous value when companies have clear positioning and powerful messaging. It helps them tell a better story that resonates and makes an impact with the people that matter to them. But if I had to be honest, it's hard to tell in the short term whether all the work that I've done, the research, the process delivers the ROI that companies are expecting. It's a long-term proposition that some of it can be quantified and some of it not so much. And I have a feeling that the development of buyer personas falls into the same camp. There's tremendous value in them as you've articulated. Companies will do better marketing and sales if they have good and clear buyer personas. But the question is, and, obviously, this has a lot to do with how your business drives and attracts business, is how do you measure the success of your buyer persona efforts? And as important, what are the metrics that should be used to quantify buyer persona success?

Jim Kraus: I think for this buyer persona methodology, I think as far as just number of leads, I think that's an okay metric for this. Right? Because you're going to end up finding the insights that are typically the least surprising is the priority initiatives and success factors. Right? The benefits and the outcomes that customers want. They usually when they do a buyer persona, they're like, okay. We kind of knew these, or maybe there's a wrinkle or whatever. So and those are things that are already captured in their marketing and sales plays. I think a better indicator is qualified leads and conversion rate. Because the reality is if you're taking these buyer persona insights and you're using them in your positioning and messaging strategy, you should be doing a lot better job of when leads get to you, they are leads that just make a lot of sense for both sides. Right? The ideal customer profile or whatever, you know, you'd like to refer to it. So I think qualified leads should improve, and I think conversion should improve. And the reason conversion has to improve is because when you get the things like perceived barriers, all their fears and concerns, and you know all their decision criteria, those are going to lead to things that are going to help your conversion rates. This is middle and bottom of the funnel type stuff. So those are the metrics that I would focus the most on. From a softer perspective, I think one of the biggest things that we see organizations we work with love is it just gets everybody on the same page. You know? It brings the marketing, sales, and product teams all together around a set of facts so that there's this unified front in the things that they're doing. There's more synergy in the different things that they're doing. I think there's some hard metrics to look at, but I also think there's some softer things to look at as well.

Mark Evans: I agree with you, but a little bit of pushback. Well, first, let me start with what I agree with you. I think the process when it comes to developing buyer personas and positioning for that matter delivers tremendous value and insight. Because once people get a deep understanding of their customers and how they think and feel and behave, then that informs a lot of their thinking and their decisions. But the pushback is how do you correlate leads and MQLs with better buyer persona? Because I run into this when I develop positioning is that if we do A, B will happen. In marketing, it's really hard these days. So how do you explain or how do you justify the fact that you've done all this work and we're using qualified leads as a criterion for success. It strikes me as a bit of a hard argument sometimes, especially when you're talking to the CFO.

Jim Kraus: Yeah. It is hard. I mean, measuring the ROI of marketing investment is always difficult regardless if it's buyer personas or otherwise. I think where our clients have had the most success proving the case from a hard metric standpoint has just been before and after things, right, where they do not necessarily an A/B test per se, although they may be doing that as well, which is fantastic. They'll look at different points in time where they have certain performance, and then they made some significant changes. And they looked at that over a period of time. And those are the ones that are able to usually quantify or be able to, you know, make the argument. I think the other thing is for these buyer personas, one of the ways we've seen organizations make the case for them is just looking at what a typical deliverable is, a buyer persona deliverable, because they're so logical in the insights that they give. You look at them and you say, well, this has to help us. There's no way this can't help us. That's not the metrics you're looking for per se, but it's appealing to somebody's greater logic, greater reasoning.

Mark Evans: Thanks for the great insight into buyer personas. It's a topic that I've wanted to explore for a long time. Appreciate the information that you delivered and how to make buyer personas into very powerful and tangible marketing and sales assets. And I particularly like the framework that you use because I think it does a great job of demystifying the fact that you've got these buyer personas that don't offer a lot of value, that most people are making in the process. So thank you for that. One final question is where can people learn more about you and the Buyer Persona Institute?

Jim Kraus: BuyerPersona.com. Pretty simple to remember. We've got a number of different things there. We've got some buyer persona templates, sample deliverables. We have a master class, a self-paced master class if folks wanna really get in the ins and outs of how to do this themselves. And we have a number of blogs up there that talk about all different angles and aspects, including the methodology and the framework that we discussed today if they wanna dig a bit deeper.

Mark Evans: Well, that's awesome, Jim. Thanks very much. Appreciate it.

Jim Kraus: Sure. Thank you, Mark. I enjoyed it.