Persona Puzzles: Overcoming Challenges in Crafting Effective Buyer Personas

Intro VO  00:06

Welcome to revenue rehab, your one stop destination for collective solutions to the biggest challenges faced by marketing leaders today. Now head on over to the couch, make yourself comfortable and get ready to change the way you approach revenue. Leading your recovery is modern marketer, author, speaker and Chief Operating Officer at Tegrita Brandi Stars

Brandi Starr  00:34

Hello Hello Hello and welcome to another episode of revenue rehab. I am your host Brandi Starr and we have another amazing episode for you today. I am joined by Jim Krause. Jim is the president of buyer persona Institute and a leading authority on buyer personas and buyer insights. BP eyes buyer persona research and workshop methodologies have become the gold standard for 1000s of marketers in hundreds of companies worldwide that rely on these studies to reveal everything a prospective buyer needs to know and experience to have confidence in their solution. Jim is also an avid blogger and the author of the business persona buzz newsletter and is currently working on a second edition of the book buyer personas. Outside of work. Jim enjoys travel, reading sports and spending time with his family. Jim, welcome to revenue rehab, your session begins now.

Jim Kraus  01:34

Thanks, Brandi. Really excited to be here.

Brandi Starr  01:37

Yes, I am excited to talk to you. We're talking about a topic that I have very strong opinions on. But before we jump into that, I like to break the ice with a little whoosah moments that I call buzzword. banishment. So what buzzword would you like to get rid of forever?

Jim Kraus  01:59

I love this question. I don't have a word I have a phrase that I we hear quite often and in our world, and that is a fictional avatar of your ideal customer profile, which is how a lot of folks describe what buyer personas are, we have a little bit of a different definition for buyer personas that we think are can be much more helpful for marketing and sales professionals. So that's probably that's probably the one that that I would love to eliminate from from the vocabulary.

Brandi Starr  02:32

I am with you there, I hear that and to me is if you are creating a fictional avatar, then you're kind of doing the opposite of what we're actually trying to do. We're trying to model real people and not fiction. But we'll dive into that in just a moment, at least for now, we will put the phrase fictional avatar in the box, and we won't use it at least for the next 30 minutes or so. So now that we've gotten that off our chest, tell me what brings you to revenue rehab?

Jim Kraus  03:07

Yeah. So I think what would be great, hopefully, for your listeners is just talking a little bit about, you know, I love the name of your podcast, revenue rehab. And I think one of the ways to think about this is how can we rehab buyer personas and how a lot of people think about what they are, and also how they think about what the value of buyer personas are. You know, I would love to maybe get into that a little bit. There's a lot to untangle there, but maybe come up with a another vision of the value of buyer personas and what they can really be for your business.

Brandi Starr  03:41

I love it. And I'll share my own experience with personas. And why think I'm, like a lot of people probably a little jaded on the topic. But I believe in setting intentions, it gives us focus, it gives us purpose. And it also helps our audience to understand what they should expect from our conversation today. So what are your best hopes? What would you like people to take away from this conversation?

Jim Kraus  04:09

I think there's two things I'd like them to take away. One is just another definition for what buyer personas are and aren't. And then the second thing is coming away with an understanding about some basic approaches for how to build buyer personas that deliver more value. I think if the audience comes away with those two things, that would be very beneficial.

Brandi Starr  04:32

Awesome. Well, you started your number one thing is generally where I start, I always like to ground us in definitions. Because I do think so many words, in our industry in life in general, people interpret differently. So from your perspective, what is the buyer persona?

Jim Kraus  04:52

So yeah, let me approach it this way. I mean, if from a marketing and sales perspective, or anybody that's worrying a revenue This generation hat, right, who's trying to influence prospective buyers? You know, at the end of the day, that is your objective, you're trying to educate, influence buyers, make them feel confident in you and your particular solution. So from our perspective, a buyer persona is not just a, you know, as we talked about earlier, I hate to use the word fictional avatar of a particular role or individual, those are fine. And they provide some insight into how you might approach different people. But particularly when you're talking about higher consideration decisions, what a buyer persona really should be, is really deep insights about that buying decision, right? Because if you're trying to influence that buying decision, it's real people making that decision, they have real goals, they have real concerns, they have real needs, they have real questions that they're going to ask, as far as the different solutions they may look at and who they're going to evaluate and how they're going to make final decisions. So unless you really under unless you define your, develop your buyer personas around the buying decision, you're going to be lacking the insights that you really need to develop effective marketing and sales strategies.

Brandi Starr  06:10

And, you know, that has been my exact experience. So my first introduction to buyer personas was fairly early in my career. And I was a part of a team, you know, had a very small role in supporting the development of personas. And it was a really extensive exercise, there were some conversations with customers, you know, some that had bought some that were lost deals, there was like a lot of work that went into it. And the output from that was a really robust profile that included a lot of what you just mentioned in having like, what am I really considering? And it covered the spoken. So what are people actually saying in the sales process that is important, and kind of the unspoken, because as individuals, we all have those intrinsic motivations and concerns. And so I was to buyer persona after that exercise, like, even as a very junior person, I was like, This is amazing, because now I know who I'm talking to, and I can craft everything I'm doing around that. Fast forward. And I'm gonna give you one more thing, and then let you jump in fast forward to when I've been a part of this in other companies. What I see is people putting together demographic profiles, where it's some folks in a room, and by folks like marketers, and maybe you know, a representative from sales, and they're coming up with, you know, they spend more time, you know, coming up with oh, we're gonna call her Mary marketer than they do on and you know, that she's between 35 and 45, or, you know, these sort of superficial things, that what comes out of it. I'm like, What's the point like, this is just some PowerPoint that gets circulated of some stuff that marketers made up? And I think I've grown to kind of like, be like, Yeah, you know, this is kind of hit or miss. So I'd love your take on kind of both of my experiences. And you talked about what it is, but also what it's not. And maybe I've just observed it incorrectly.

Jim Kraus  08:21

Yeah, no, I mean, I think the mantra around buyer personas over the last decade is that's the definition that a lot of people have and say most of it, a lot of people have that. And more times than not, they end up being a little disappointed with the insights they get. Because what'll happen is you'll end up having just too many buyer personas, because you're trying to figure out how do I influence everybody in the buying decision, which just adds a lot of complexity, even if you have the resources for it. The other thing is you just lacked the insights, you need to really influence that, that buying decision. So if you think about the role, particularly of marketers sellers to but particularly marketers, if you think about their job and influencing buyers, they really trying to do it with one hand tied behind their back a lot of times because they're not talking to buyers, right. So if you're a seller, you know, you have the luxury, if you will, or the opportunity to talk to prospects and your current customers on a daily basis. And you start developing this innate understanding about their needs and their concerns. If you're a marketer, and you're trying to develop marketing strategies, content messaging campaigns, you don't have that luxury. So what ended up often happening is, you're either taking anecdotal information from the sales sales folks who don't have a full view of the market, if you can get it or you're just making the stuff up. So what a buyer persona can and should be is, first and foremost develop them by going out and talking to recent buyers. That's how you should get the insights. There should be no guessing at all. It should be completely factual information. And when I say recent buyers, what I mean is if you're trying to influence a particular buying decision, so let's say you, you know, you manufacture different or you offer different IT security products as an example, you know, you can go out and find people that have made that exact buying decision in the last 12 months or so, you know, recent buyers, again, these aren't your current customers, these are recent buyers that have made that decision, these are folks that you would have wanted in your sales pipeline. And there are approaches you can use to find these people. And then you do interviews with them. And the interviews that we would advocate that you try to do is not surveys, where you're asking them to rate and rank questions, what you want to do is really talk to them to understand their entire buyers journey, from the moment that they had an initial need for our particular solution, all the way until they made the final decision and all the points in between, so that you can step by step have them take you through, what did they initially do when they first started looking? How did they come up with their consideration set? How did they winnow down their choices? What were their needs and attitudes during that process? Who was involved? What were their concerns? So do those interviews. And then what we'd encourage you to do is think about how do you add, the second part of the equation is once you do those interviews, and look across all the ones that you do, there's different approaches or frameworks that you can use to analyze the results so that what you get back will literally inform just about every marketing and sales decision that you're going to make. That's really the key, and they're and they're game changers. That's their complete, they're very logical, and how they're laid out. And they inform a host of all different types of key decisions that you're going to make from a marketing and sales perspective.

Brandi Starr  11:44

Okay, I want to dig into two things there. So when this is done, well, give me an idea of what sorts of things are included in that persona.

Jim Kraus  11:58

So we refer to them as the five rings of buying insight. It's just a name that that that our organization put to them, you can think about them however you'd like. But let me go through them. And hopefully, the logic behind them is if you're a marketing or sales professional, it's going to seem pretty, pretty logical, which is one of the good things right. The first thing that we identify through these interviews is what we call priority initiatives, and priority initiatives, you can think of these as what are all the triggers? What are all the things that are getting people to actually start looking right, when they you know, what is the thing that's causing them to say, Hey, enough, is enough, or we need to do something, right. So that's one thing that should be a key part of your buyer persona, there should be no mystery in that. The second key area of insight we call success factors. And these are desired outcomes or results, right. So particularly for high consideration buying decisions, you know, these are really important decisions, and they're and there's usually a significant investment behind them. And you want to understand it, and how buyers are talking about the results they need in their in their language on their terms, what's important to them. The third area, which is one of my one of my favorite areas of insight, is what we call perceived barriers, and perceived barriers are all the concerns and trepidations that buyers will have making the investment with anybody, right, because guess moving away from the status quo. A lot of times that's the biggest impediment, or the biggest concern that sales folks have. It's not even losing to the competition, it's more of how do we beat the status quo. So that's one is finding out what all those concerns are. And also in perceived barriers, we identify what are their concerns with different types of providers, maybe there's certain characteristics of providers, you certainly from a marketing sales perspective, want to know ahead of time what those are, so you can address them proactively, and create that that vision for your for your prospects that, hey, we can these things can be overcome, you don't need to be concerned about him. But the first step is knowing what they are. So that's number three. The fourth part of your persona is what we call decision criteria. And we always a week, we do persona studies, we always share results in the form of decision criteria as in the form of a question. And the reason we do that is because these are literally all the questions that you can expect prospective buyers to have, as they're deciding who they're Who are they going to consider and all the questions they're going to use to evaluate winnow down their choices and come up with a final decision. And again, we uncover all these insights, talking to buyers about their buyers journey. And then the fifth and final one is buyers journey, which is literally all the steps that buyers take for that particular buying decision. Who are the key influences that are involved? What are the different sources of information that they're using both internal and external to form a basis their decision? So once you have those five areas of insight, the final piece of this is you want to add an abundance of buyer quotes to all of these insights Right, so as you're developing them, and by providing binding insights and your persona, it does two things. Number one, it adds an immense amounts of credibility to the findings. So when you share these personas with your internal folks, whether they're sales marketing product, folks, it's going to just ring true, right? Because it's it's, it's just becomes very evident very quickly that these are folks that you want to be selling to, right. This is your target market. The second major thing that it does is if you're a marketing and sales professional is it puts you inside their mind, you hear how buyers think about these purchases, you see how they talk about them, how they refer to them. And it's just incredibly valuable when particularly when we're developing content strategies and messaging and thinking about your positioning. It's just incredibly useful. So those are those are, those are buyer personas that you can you can really start to do something with in terms of generating additional revenue opportunities.

Brandi Starr  16:00

Yeah, and that is so much more than the generic profiles that I see people try to, you know, take a stab at guessing at. And then the second thing that you had said, and you kind of touched on some of this in your last answer, but I would like to have you dig into it a little more, is, once you have these personas in place, you talked about how it really will inform decisions, and, you know, really help some of the challenges that marketers face. And so I'd love to hear you dig into that a bit more.

Jim Kraus  16:32

Yeah. So, you know, there's a couple there's a couple areas, we can go here, I'll just mention a couple that are off top of my head, particularly, you know, with today's economy, I mean, one of the challenges marketers often have is they're, they're being asked to do so many things. And they're being asked to do things very reactively. Right. So they're trying to put out stuff, you know, whether it's campaigns or thought leadership or new messaging or sales plays, you know, they're being asked to do a lot, right. And one of the things that buyer personas does is it really helps you focus and prioritize, because it is the answer sheet, it is fact based information about what buyers want need, and how do you influence their decision? So what ends up happening is, it ends up helping you prioritize, what are the things that we need to be doing that we're not doing right now? What are some things that we should be doubling down on? And maybe the most important thing is what should we stop doing? Or what are some things we're doing that as you know, it, maybe maybe it's marketing stuff, but it's not really, it's not really moving the needle in terms of influencing buyers and making them feel competence in their capability. So that's one major area. The second broad brush area, I'll mention three, the second one I mentioned is, you know, thought leadership content. It just provides all types of opportunities as far as where you should really focus, your thought leadership, one of the one of the great places to pull from your persona is the perceived barriers, one, which I mentioned earlier. And these are concerns that buyers have about just moving off the status quo. If you know what those are, you can think about these things in a very proactive and positive way. And develop a compelling point of view that helps get buyers over the hump, right. You know, it's the classic Win win scenario, right? It's, you can see it clearly because you know, you're offering you know, the capabilities, you know what their world could look like versus status quo, but they need help, they need somebody to help them see that vision. So that's another great way to use personas. And then the third way, which is maybe the most obvious is around messaging. So one of the things that you can do is an exercise we actually offer offer it as a service, but it's something you can also do internally yourself is once you have your persona, a great exercise to do is with your persona, you have everything your buyers want and need right now you've got the answer to that. But the second thing you need to overlay on that to create effective messaging and messaging and messaging themes is what are your capabilities, right? Because buyers are going to want a bunch of different things. But what you want to do is overlay that and find that middle ground, because then what you're going to have is you're gonna be able to go to your sales teams as an example and say, you know, here's five or six, six things that we know buyers want to need. And we did our due diligence, and we map them to our capabilities. And here's all the proof points, you need to go have a conversation about these things. And you can feel really confident in it. Because we did our homework, we've got a good story to tell on these things. And a lot of times the sales folks, you know, that's one of their big needs is just figuring out when I have a new prospect, what are some things I can talk to them about they're going to be interested in and what story do we have to tell that can really put us in a positive light and differentiate us? So those are just three, three ways. And there's other ways you can use these buyer personas, but those are three big ways.

Brandi Starr  19:44

Yeah, and I think the other thing when it comes to that overlay of messaging and capabilities, it can also help to drive product or service developments like if there are places where I mean not every want or need of the buyer is going to be something that's in your lane like We can't solve everything for everybody. But it could also identify gaps in what you're offering that you may actually want to fill as well.

Jim Kraus  20:09

Yeah, no question. And I'm glad you brought that up, Randy, because the another great areas product, right. And it's, it's usually not the reason somebody does a buyer persona, as we've described them here. But it ends up being a really strong ancillary benefit, and oftentimes is either two things that happen. One is what you just said, which is you identify maybe a gap in your offering or a place maybe not as strong as it really needs to be. The other time we see it is we find that, you know, you find that something that you're really hot on, and you're really trying to push because it's a new feature, you know, maybe one customer asked for it, you developed it, and now you're trying to market it to other folks, we'll find we'll go out and do these personas. And we find that buyers just don't maybe care about it that much. Or it maybe it's before it's time, right? It might just be a timing issue. So that would also tell you to just back off that a little bit, right? It's not that it's meaning meaningless, but maybe it's not as important as you thought. And it shouldn't be your you know, you shouldn't be leading with it. There's other there's nine other things on the buyers mind besides that.

Brandi Starr  21:12

Yeah, and I have definitely seen that, especially in software where they have the shiny, cool thing. And that's what they message around when in some cases, it's, you know, the unsexy feature. That is what people are clamoring to get. And so there's an opportunity there. We've talked a lot about marketing, obviously, the revenue rehab audiences, primarily those that lead marketing or other revenue functions. But who should own the process? Is it marketing that should own the development of the buyer personas? Is it a collaborative effort? Like where should that sit?

Jim Kraus  21:49

There's no, there's no right answer to this, right. I mean, I think we've seen marketing sales and product are the most common people that own it. My bias is to the marketing folks to own it, for a couple of reasons. Number one is it really helps marketers get more of a seat at the table, because they're essentially going to be the voice of the buyer. Right, if they're the sponsors of the one of the champing at and using the approach I just mentioned to you the the beauty of it is, it's based on the buyers, you it's not the marketers opinion, these are what buyers are telling you, right. So it's a great way for marketers to align marketing sales and product and get everybody on the same page. And there's huge value in that for marketing. The other reason was that reason I mentioned earlier is that, you know, sales folks have the opportunity to talk to prospects and customers all the time, or at least more than marketers do. So this is an opportunity for marketers to go in there in a really objective way and have these conversations. And the focus is not on your company in your offering. The focus is understanding from the buyers point of view, everything that they went through, including competitors that they looked at. So it's just it's a really just a really strong place. I think the only thing I'll add to that is we typically don't recommend that you share the buyer's persona, as we've been talking about directly with your Salesforce. The reason for that is because you know, it's a study, right, you're getting all these different insights, it's better to work through them and bring them to the Salesforce in a way that they can actually do something with it. Right. So maybe it's a frequently asked questions or common objections, you're gonna find out using these buyer personas. I mentioned earlier, doing that exercise, you can identify messages and message themes and things that buyers can talk about, you know, whether their sales play or additional conversation starters. That's a way to bring the information to the Salesforce in a way that's a little bit more actionable for them. And it's less academic, if you will.

Brandi Starr  23:48

Okay, yeah, and I would agree there, you know, I've always believed that it should sit in marketing for those same reasons. But I always like to ask as well, because in some cases, you know, things are changing, that I'm not aware of. And so that is helpful. The last question that I really want to ask is, what should be the realistic expectation of the level of effort that needs to be invested in doing this? Well, like, typically, how long does this take? You know, how much resources like if we're going to really do this right, I want to set realistic expectation of what people should be prepared to invest.

Jim Kraus  24:33

Yeah, so the biggest the biggest challenges, so the biggest challenge is probably twofold. One is identifying recent buyers, right? And more likely than not, you're gonna have to work with recruiting firms to help you do that. It's very doable. If you don't know how to do it, if you don't have any in house that knows how to work with recruiting partners or you don't have a research function. That could be a challenge. The second is doing the interviews So, you know, these interviews are, they are open ended, right? There's a certain method to the madness as far as how you get these insights. But that's another skill that you kind of have to learn. And we can talk about available resources that we can, you know, I can help point people to or the other. The other option is just to outsource that work to folks that that do that.

Brandi Starr  25:23

Okay, yeah. And I'd definitely like to hear what resources are available. I know BPI does a lot and offer some consulting services as well. But in general, if people want to get more information, where should they look for support on this?

Jim Kraus  25:40

Yeah, so a couple of things, our website, buyer persona.com. Feel free to go to that website. And there's all types of free resources that we put out there. We have example, buyer personas and templates you can use. We have sample interview guides. The other thing that we offer is a masterclass, which is an online self paced class that you can take and it will really get you into the weeds as far as how do you execute one of these studies. So if you're a do it yourselfer, that's definitely definitely use those leverage those resources. In other places, Adele Rivella, who was the founder of BPI wrote the real buyer personas about 10 years ago. And it's still a great read, it still gives you a lot of great insights about just about how to think about buyer personas and how to execute them. We're actually coming out her and I are coming out with a second edition of that book next year that we're very excited about. But if you're, you know, in the need now, and you really want to get even deeper, that book is still a great a great resource. And that's called buyer personas, and you get that from Amazon or any other place. And then finally, feel free to link in to me Jim Krause on LinkedIn, I do the buyer persona buzz newsletter, where I'm constantly putting out material about, you know, thinking about buying insights, ways to go about doing it. So that's another resource you can tap. Okay,

Brandi Starr  27:00

awesome. Well, talking about our challenges is just the first step and nothing changes, if nothing changes. In traditional therapy, the therapist will ask the client who will give the client some homework, but here at revenue rehab, we like to flip that on its head and ask you to give us some homework. So for those who are listening, and recognize that they really need to tap into the power of buyer personas, and do this thing, right? What's their one thing? What's the first step that they should take in moving in the right journey?

Jim Kraus  27:34

You know, just foundational, you know, before we even get into the topic of buyer personas or anything like that, or how to do them, or what's the right or wrong approach, I think it would be a really great exercise for if you're a marketing or sales professional just to sit down and just jot down a list and say, what are the things that I really need to know about the prospective buyers that I'm trying to market to? That would help me do my job? Really well? Or better? Right? Just write down a list, like if I knew this about them, if I knew that about them, right? Don't look at anything else. Just write all those things down? And then once you do that, think to yourself, Okay, now what do I do to help go get those insights, and I will tell you that I'm guessing some of the stuff we talked about today will be some of the things you jot down. But rather than take my word for it, I think a great exercise is just do it yourself, you know, your job and, and the things that you're responsible for better than anybody. But I think that's a real great way just to kind of take a step back and think about what are the buying insights that you really need to do your job? Well,

Brandi Starr  28:37

I love that. And I think that's a great action item, you know, for folks to grab a pen and a piece of paper or digital notes, or however you brainstorm and go through and really think about, what do I need to know. And it you know, I also think it's a good exercise to have those same conversations with people on your team, because they may also have ideas of insights that they'd like that would be useful in their role. And I do think that that's a great starting point, you know, whether you're mean, it becomes good requirements if you're outsourcing or a good starting point. If you're more of a do it yourself, or Well, Jim, I have enjoyed our conversation. But that's our time for today. Normally, I'd asked you where people can find you, but you told us your LinkedIn and the website and the book. So we're already ahead of the game here. So we will make sure to link to link directly to the site and to your LinkedIn in the show notes. So wherever you are listening or watching. If you would like to stay connected with Jim or learn more about BPI, you will have the opportunity to do that. Jim, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you, Brandi. I enjoyed it. Awesome. And thanks everyone for joining us if you want to listen to another Episode to connect the conversation I'd say scroll on back to Episode 19, where we talked about voice of customer. And this was another place where we really started to dig into what we can learn by actually talking to people. So, you know, in Jim's case, we're talking about talking to recent buyers. There's also a lot of insight that you can learn from talking to customers. So I would recommend recommend episode 19. I hope that you have enjoyed my conversation with Jim. I can't believe we're already at the end. I'll see you next time.

Outro VO  30:37

You've been listening to Reverend rehab with your host Brandi Starr. Your session is now over, but the learning has just begun. join our mailing list and catch up on all our shows at revenue rehab dot live. We're also on Twitter and Instagram at revenue rehab. This concludes this week's session. We'll see you next week.