Marketing shares finding new profitable customers with the sales organization.  To attract new customer the sales and delivery teams must be able to articulate the business benefits. These groups often rely on marketing to create the tools to support the sales process. These sales enablement tools help the sales organization improve their effectiveness at generating revenue and earnings by giving salespeople the right information at the right time to increase their rate of success. One tool more and more organizations are leveraging is buyer personas.

What Are Buyer Personas?

Buyer Personas are archetypal users that represent the needs of larger groups of customers, in terms of their goals and personal characteristics. Think of them as “stand-ins” for real customers. A buyer persona seeks to zero-in on customer behavior and characteristics. It is a concise description of a specific customer type.

It’s important not to confuse buyer personas with profiles. A profile contains information about the type of user/buyer relevant to product being offered. Profiles contain general characteristics about your groups of users/buyers. Profiles are the foundation for constructing personas. And while these two concepts seem similar, they are different. Profiles describe types of prospects, customers, or users.

Profile Example:

Buyer Personas describe specific people and sound like people you know; they take on a reality that encourages empathy and facilitates thinking from the customer’s perspective. Think of personas as narrative descriptions that bring user profiles to life. Personas present and communicate an alternative representation of user profile data that is easy for the sales team to keep in mind during the buying process. A good persona helps the salesperson recognize and identify with the prospect as people rather than as a collection of facts.

A Persona might begin this way:

Helen is a director of sales growing, mid-sized manufacturing company. She’s 32, works long hours often coming in before others and leaving well after the sales team most nights.  Helen is single, a competitive

runner, and is partial to 80s rock. She drives a new BMW convertible. She struggles with managing a dozen salespeople, many who are 10 to 15 years older than her. Helen wants the company to invest in a new CRM system to replace the contact management they long ago outgrew, but wonders how she’ll convince the company’s CEO and CFO to spend the money.

Why Go to Effort to Create Buyer Personas?

Buyer Personas bring customer to life by giving them a name and/or title, personality, and in some instances even a photo.  They are an ideal way to help guide decisions about product functionality, design, positioning, messaging, and overall marketing. The purpose of a persona is to identify a customer’s motivations, expectations, and goals. Even though personas like the one about Helen, are fictitious, they are based on knowledge of real customers. A well-crafted persona enables you to stand in your customer’s shoes and take a more customer-centric view.

Using buyer personas has a number of benefits, they often provide:

• the organization with a common point of view about customers’ goals and needs,
• provide valuable insight into the motivations and personalities of specific buyers and users
• serve as a vehicle for helping develop an initial set of market requirements,
• a process for prioritizing development efforts

While they are simple in form and structure, the information they contain is powerful; it can be applied to decisions throughout the sales-enablement process. When well-crafted, personas can help with understanding specific requirements, facilitating alignment, and expediting the sales cycle.

Creating Buyer Personas

It often takes some research to create personas because you want your buyer personas to actually represent the customers rather than reflect internal opinion. Design you research to identify trends or patterns in user behaviors, expectations, and motivations. One of the best ways to gather this data is to interview real customers. If you decide conducting customer interviews is the route to take, your first step is to decide who to interview.  We recommend including current as well as potential customers. Plan to conduct at least 15-20 one-hour long interviews for each persona type.

Structure your discussion guide so that you can learn

• basic demographics,  job responsibilities and major tasks
• what the person likes best and least about their job
• what a typical day is like and how the person spends their time
• what frustrates the person and what makes for a good vs. a bad day
• what kinds of fires they put out and how often
• their goals, attitudes and beliefs

Once you complete all of the interviews, analyze the data to find patterns and clusters. Give each persona cluster a brief description that captures the persona’s goals, needs, behaviors, concerns, experiences, likes, dislikes, etc.

There is no ideal number of buyer personas; however, we suggest keeping the set small—perhaps four or five primary persona clusters. Combine details from the customer interviews in the same cluster. Select and include details in your narrative that will help the sales team understand what motivates this person and how they buy. Then give each persona a name and a photo or graphic representation.  Try to keep the person to one page. Develop a messages map that resonates with each persona and customize sales presentations and materials accordingly.

Turning Personas into a Sales-Enablement Tool

Using personas allows you to better focus your sales and marketing training and materials, improving your overall effectiveness.  They enable the sales team to identify and communicate customers’ needs efficiently and effectively. These “stand in” customers, based on real customer data, help the sales organization connect and engage with prospects.

What do you think? What’s your experience using buyer personas? Have they been helpful as a sales enablement tool?

Photocredit:  Some rights reserved by meedanphotos

Over at {grow} this week, Mark published an article, Six ideas to get your blog out of the fog, that served as a case study. Thanks to Christina Pappas, a blogger with Zmags.com, she graciously offered up her blog for review. Check it out as there is a lot of very practical advice and guidance in both Mark’s article and the comments.

The company, Zmags.com hired an outside consultant to help to try to advise her on ideas to drive more readership and comments. One suggestion:

“Create specific industry-specific customer “personas” and tailor posts to each persona over a period of time.”

I think wisely, based on all the current advice and ideas, Mark suggested at this point that “personas” suggestion wasn’t necessary. But it did lead me to leave the following comment on the post that I thought I would share here with you.

You don’t need buyer personas for your blog! You need buyer personas and the process of developing them to understand the following:

1. The buying process (buying lifecycle) of your products itself.
2. Who are all the people involved in the process of purchasing your products and services. The decision makers, the influencers, the users, and the evangelist/champion.
3. What the people identified in two above go through in the buying process.
4. Where (and if) the people identified in two interact on the social web.
5. The challenges these people face in the jobs that your products address.
6. The types of things these people are interested in. What makes them tick? What keeps the up at night?
7. How and where these people consume content and their preferences for doing so.

Once you have these answers, you’re able to begin the process of developing an integrated marketing strategy that includes content marketing and social media – of which one tactic is a blog. Sure the information above will feed your editorial approach for the blog, but that is just one small piece of how buyer personas help.

By far the largest benefit to your business of creating buyer personas is understanding how to develop content for all channels – print, web, social, email, events (webinars, live, and virtual), that moves each person involved in the buying process through each stage of its lifecycle and to the ultimate outcome for you – a new, lifelong customer.

So now you are armed. If a consultant tells you need buyer personas just for your blog, simply ask them, “What else are they good for?”

If they don’t respond with something like the above, you may just be talking to the wrong consultant.

Here are a couple additional posts I’ve written on Buyer Personas:

• Humanize Your Marketing With Buyer Personas
• Buyer Personas: Where (and How!) to Start

Buyer Persona development may just be the most important element in a content marketing strategy. Having a deeper, more personal understanding of your customers leads to content creation that not only builds trust, but also demonstrates your willingness to spend the necessary time to learn the actual circumstances that affect your customers.

With well-defined buyer personas, your content suddenly becomes for *someone* versus *everyone*. And that makes all the difference when trying to build a relationship with your customers through your content marketing strategy.

What is a buyer persona? Here is my buyer persona definition:

A buyer persona is a description of a specific person for whom your products and services are intended. It goes beyond statistics and demographics, and defines behaviors, motivations, likes/dislikes, traits, etc. Its intent is to help you reach your customers on a human level.

Ardath’s Albee,, author and B2B marketing strategist, provides a definition in her outstanding book, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale, – (a recommended must read).

A persona is a composite sketch representative of a type of customer you serve. Personas extend beyond the traditional demographic profiles commonly used to summarize an ideal customer.

The common element of these definitions is that they suggest that you see your customers’ challenges through their eyes and begin thinking about your customers as human beings with feelings and emotions, not statistics and metrics in a spreadsheet.

This change in mindset provides you a more detailed answer to the question, “For whom am I creating this content?” It narrows your focus. Your marketing shifts from being product and company centric to useful, customer-centric content that is for a person – not a target audience. Your content begins speaking to what motivates your customers, what their priorities are, and most importantly, the real world problems that you can help them solve.

In addition to directing your future content creation efforts, buyer personas also provide you a tool to evaluate your existing content. Use your it to ask which buyer persona(s) does this content speak to (if any). You then have a guide for how to edit that content to fit the needs of your new buyer personas.

Bottom line, as David Meerman Scott first told us in The Goobledygook Manifesto, we are in desperate need of humanizing marketing … buyer personas are useful tools and are your first step in achieving that outcome.

Remember, we’re all people first. Bring that mindset to your content marketing strategy and you will create meaningful, lasting relationships with your customers.