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Beware of Buyer Personas - The Cow Is On The Ice

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Kim Albee: Welcome everybody to our webinar this morning, "Beware of Buyer Personas -- The Cow is on the Ice." We're going to talk to you about the truth about how to build and use buyer personas in a way that gets results.

A little bit about Genoo and about myself. My name is Kim Albee. I am the president of Genoo and ContentZap. Genoo is marketing animation for small and mid-size businesses. ContentZap is a professional services content agency.

I was named one of the top 20 digital strategist in 2015 by the Online Marketing Institute, which is an amazing honor. I'm humbled by that. You can follow Genoo Marketing on Twitter. You follow me on Twitter. You can connect with me on LinkedIn.

Now, I want to introduce Adele. I am just thrilled, thrilled, thrilled to have Adele Revella with us today. She has just published a book. The book is called "Buyer Personas -- How to Gain Insights into Customer's Expectations, Align your Marketing Strategies and Win More Business."

Adele is the CEO and founder of Buyer Persona Institute. I consider Adele the top expert in buyer personas that's out there today. With a real commitment to making sure that there is actually a proven process that people can go through to build and use their buyer personas.

Without any further ado, I am just thrilled to have Adele with us. This is going to be an awesome webinar. Adele, over to you.

Adele Revella: Thank you so much, Kim. Thank you again for having me on this session. I am always thrilled to get to talk about my favorite topic. I love the creativity around this title for this session. What does the cow on the ice mean?

It means that there is trouble. I don't have all the history around this. I guess it's a Swedish term. The concept that buyer personas are in trouble may be a surprise to you. I want to talk about that.

I want to talk about what we can do to make sure that if you're thinking about getting into buyer personas that you're doing it in a way that's effective, because people are either going too far in one direction and making this too hard, or they're going too far in the other direction and making it too simple.

Both of those are not boating well for the future of something that's incredibly valuable, and that's going to get the insight that you need to be a much more effective marketer.

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Lets look at a typical Buyer Persona Let's look at what you might have been seeing out there on the Internet around buyer personas. If this picture, if this image looks like the right idea for what a buyer persona is, then, that's what we're here to talk about today, because I'm going to refer to this as buyer profile, which is just one part of the buyer persona.

Sometimes, this is being done because people say, "Hey, we need an example buyer, or we need a fictional buyer that represents our real buyers." Both of those ideas are on target, but missing so many points, and this is how we're getting in trouble as marketers.

What we're seeing here is an example, we have a guy who's an operations manager, we're probably selling him some kind of business product, and yet, we see here that he's married with two kids. I wonder, how is that going to help me market my business solution to Jim?

His goals and his challenges, he wants a raise and a promotion, terrific, don't we all? His biggest challenge is that he's got a lot of new systems, and he's managing people, and he's keeping a lot of balls in the air at once.

I'm down here in the middle of the slide, I can point at these ideas here, I know there's a lot of copy here. That's another problem, there's so much copy here, how do we use this?

But his biggest challenge is we've got all these new systems we have to manage in maybe my plant where I'm the operations manager, and I've got to manage all these people, and I've got a lot of things to do. Terrific.

If you've got to go sell a new technology to Jim, where's the information here that really helps you know how to talk to Jim about that solution? Now, we can go over here to the right, and we can see some things that marketers would like to know about like what are his preferences for communication?

This team that put this together said he likes email and phone communication. That's pretty interesting, most people don't like the phone. He uses the Internet for research a lot. That's good, we can be on the Internet, but how do we talk to him when he's on the Internet?

We're getting here a mere glimmer of what we could do to be able to influence Jim to buy our solution. Now, the reason we know this isn't working is that in our work, we are interviewing buyers about how they make buying decisions.

Last year, we interviewed more than a thousand B2B buyers, people with roles everything from the CEO to the CIO, from engineers to health care professionals, physicians, about how they make busying decisions.

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The very decisions that our clients wanted to influence. What we heard from them is frankly scary. Because we heard that we're not being helpful to them. Let's look at some of the things they told us.

Were too focused on benefits First of all, they told us that as marketers, we're far too focused benefit statements, and they don't use those words, let's look at the buyer's real words, this is coming from a real interview. "Your website has all the same useless information as your competitors. No, I didn't spend much time there."

Now, this is a buyer that we hoped our client would have been able to influence through the marketing materials and the investment they're making in their Web content. We have to think about this.

How did this occur? I loved Margaret and Kim's, Genoos marketing for this webinar, because they said, "Let's look at the approach to buyer personas your competitors are likely taking." They're probably doing what you saw on that previous slide.

What I want to talk about in this session is what we're hearing from buyers, from the normal way to do marketing, and how you can step out of the norm and differentiate yourself, based on being able to provide useful information to this buyer. Let's look at one of the other things we're hearing from them.

Buyers will have specific needs We're hearing that as they go through the buying decision, as they go through their journey, as they go through in their buyers' journey, their customers' journey, all the things we're trying to influence as we develop content, and messages, and as we enable sales for this journey, that what they're hearing about are very obvious benefits.

Things like we're going to help you keep all those balls in the air, we're going to help you be able to deal with all those new systems. If we look at that buyer persona that we saw a few minutes ago, we can understand why. That buyer persona is not providing any guidance that isn't obvious.

We're developing obvious benefits, and we're not talking to these buyers about what they want to hear that's going to help them believe that our company is the most effective way to achieve those benefits. What else are we hearing from there? We're hearing that they're testing us.

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When we help, we build trust That through their entire buyers journey, they're testing us to see, testing all of us as marketers and our companies, to see if we understand their needs. We're trying to find out if they're trying to find out if we're going to be responsive to their needs.

What does this tell us as a marketer? It says that that trust that we so seek throughout this buying decision, because we know when we build trust with the buyer we're going to win their business.

We know that that trust is based on this deep understanding of what this buyer wants and needs. Yet, there was nothing in that profile we looked at a minute ago to help us know how we could build that trust.

Lets see what other influencers need Let's look at another one. I can't make this decision alone. For most of the interviews we're conducting, these buyers have spent weeks, months, maybe years evaluating their options.

There are many different people involved in that buying decision, and if our internal champion, if the person we're trying to persuade wants to make this happen, and usually, they're the person that's charged with making it happen, and getting this decision to happen, what if we were the company that was the one that delivered really useful content to them, to help them persuade their other stakeholders that we had and we alone could address their needs.

Which objections must you overcome? Finally, and I know this might surprise you, because many of you may be building your buyer personas based on input from your salespeople. We hear that even some advice being dispensed, that that's the way to get your buyer personas to build, just to go and ask your salespeople what should be included there.

But when we ask salespeople about why we're losing deals or what matters to buyers, we often hear about price and features, because that's what the buyers are negotiating with your salespeople.

But that's not the truth about how they make decisions. When you have a chance to listen to buyers who have made this decision after the fact, you're going to find out that sure, they cared about price.

They cared about certain features and capabilities, but when it really came down to it, they went with the company that they believed could solve their problem. How do we

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get to that insight? How do we know how to build this bond of trust with our customers, and with our buyers? Let's look at that.

Buyer Personas reveal insights First of all, a buyer persona shouldn't just be a profile of your buyer. Yes, it should profile your buyer, but more importantly, in order to be a tool for you to guide better decisions, it needs to reveal insights. Insights that tell you how, when, and why your buyer makes the decision you want to influence.

I was thinking the other day about a metaphor for what people are doing, because I'm seeing so much advice out there in the Internet about, "Just download our template, fill it in," or "Go ask your salespeople."

I thought this is a lot like taking an old car that's been sitting out there in the junk lot for quite a while, and really, not getting anybody where they wanted to go, putting a nice shiny paint job on it.

Taking out all the dents and putting a nice shiny paint job on it, but not dealing with the inside of that car, the part that gets you to the destination. This is what's happening with buyer personas. People are fixing up all these pretty PowerPoint slides, and putting down what they already know.

I just wonder every day about how taking the knowledge that you already have in your organization, that apparently wasn't getting you where you wanted to go, how putting a shiny paint job on that is going to get you any further than you were already getting, and get you to your destination, which is to build this relationship of trust with your buyer.

That's what we want to do, and that's why I wrote the book on buyer personas that was just released by Wiley last week, is because I'm so committed to seeing marketers practice what I've learned over the last 30 years as a career marketer.

That if we can get inside these buying decisions, and we can understand how, when, and why they make that decision, that we have the same potential to influence that decision as your best salesperson has when they go out and listen to one buyer at a time, and then, know what these needs are, and then, speak directly to those needs.

5 Rings of Buying Insight How do we do this? We need what I call the five rings of buying insight. What we're doing is we're interviewing buyers who have recently made the decision that you want to influence about what really happened.

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Then, we're taking this very unscripted dialog with those buyers, and we're organizing everything they told us about how, when, and why they made a decision into these five categories of insight.

What we are able to do with these five insights is we are able to then segment our target buyers based on the differences in their needs and expectations about how they go through that journey with us, and what they want to hear from us, and when they want to hear it, and what's going to really influence their decision.

That tells us, sometimes, and I saw this too in the promotion for this webinar, I wanted to be sure to emphasize it here, that we might need only for a particular solution to be effective, for a particular campaign to be effective, we may only need to build one buyer persona.

Companies are building far too many buyer personas and that's because they're building it based on their existing approach to demographics, maybe thinking about things like industry, or company size, or geography.

Then, they're layering on this idea of job title and role, just grievously they're looking at things like we looked at on that profile slide. Even down to if they're married or not. Then, coming up with buyer personas, based on how many differences there are in all those demographic components.

This is the biggest mistake we can make around buyer personas is resulting in too many buyer personas, not near enough insight, and certainly, not enough ability to influence buying decisions. Let's go look.

This is a lot of words on this slide, and I apologize for that. You are going to get this deck after the presentation, I believe, and I know you're going to get the recording of this so you can pause it and read these words later. Let's look at the five rings of buying insight over here on the left column. Let's look at what this means.

The Priority Initiative Insight When we get the priority initiative insight, and we deliver that to clients, what that means is you know out of all the buyers that you might be targeting with your marketing activities, you know who among them is actually responding to your demand generation campaigns, saying to the organization, "Hey, it's time to go solve this problem."

It's time to upgrade our plant, it's time to invest in new managed services providers, it's time to invest in the cloud, it's time to invest in a new vacation.

I always loved talking about the fact that we can interview buyers about any decision where they invested at least a day or so, maybe weeks, maybe months, or years making that decision, and then, we can find out these five insights.

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I just started planning a big vacation, we're going to go on a cruise to Alaska this next year. Already, I'm starting to think about all of these factors. How will I define my success? What outcomes do I expect from that investment?

The Success Definition Insight It's a big deal to go on an Alaskan cruise, just like it's a big deal to invest in new technology for my operating room in my hospital, or new technology, or I'm moving all of my solutions to the cloud. What we're able to find out by interviewing buyers is we'll be able to find out what outcomes they expect in their own words.

Now, when we sit down to identify the benefits that we're going to feature on our website or in our email campaigns, we're able to build those benefit statements that we are going to deliver in a way where they represent exactly how our buyers talk about those benefits.

We're not just sitting around in a room, and I've sat in plenty of them and it's an agony, trying to decide what are we going to talk about first, what are we going to highlight most, how are we going to reverse engineer our capabilities to build a benefit statement.

The Perceived Barriers Insight The perceived barriers insight is fascinating, because this is the one that tells us the reasons that buyers either aren't investing in a solution like ours, or why they're choosing the competitors instead of us. This tells us, and marketers are missing this insight, it's usually when we deliver these findings to our clients, it's usually the one that surprises them the most.

I want to emphasize perceived here, because what we don't know inside our companies necessarily, or what are the perceptions that are really causing buyers to believe despite all the evidence and all the truths we might have that things should be different, that our solutions aren't best. These are the exact barriers that we might need to address in our messaging.

As marketers, we are seeing big progress with companies that are actually taking on these barriers and building content, and building sales enablement strategies, building sales training based on these insights, to tell the salespeople, "Here's the objections you're going to face, and here's what we're doing in marketing, and here's what you need to do in advance." We can train our reps, "Here's how to do with these effectively.

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The Decision Criteria Insight What are your buyers decision criteria?" This is what I'm talking about, about the benefits. Our buyers are getting so far along in the buying decision before they contact our sales reps, what they are trying to find out is, can we meet their particular needs?

This gets down to capabilities, maybe features, maybe functions, certainly, attributes of the way you deliver your service, that your buyers want to learn about as they go through their journey.

This allows us to get out of content that's purely benefits focused, and messages that are all about benefits, and begin to deal with the actual features, and the useful information that your buyers are seeking as they go through this journey.

I talked to a client yesterday who said, I had to laugh. He said, "What we do in our marketing," and of course, he's there to fix this and that's why he came to us is that we throw a lot of spaghetti on the wall for all these different marketing activities, and we watch to see what sticks.

We measure that by, of course, the response rates through our marketing automation tools, and then every time somebody responds, they get a few more points.

When they finally total up to their qualified lead score, we throw that over to the sales reps, and they throw the same spaghetti that we've been throwing at the buyers. I had to laugh, how frustrating this must be. Put yourself in your buyer's shoes and imagine how frustrating that is to them.

The Buyers Journey Insight The final insight, the buyer's journey is one that there's a lot of content, a lot of people are talking about the buyer's journey. This is an important insight, it tells you about which buyers are involved in the buying decision. It tells you, in a complex selling cycle, what their role is in the buying decision. Frankly, I turned it over to my husband to decide which cruise we're going on in Alaska.

We're going to go with two other couples, I said there's too many people involved in this decision. You guys go decide, I'll do whatever you want to do. You want to know that, for your technology solution, for your high consideration purchase. Is the economic buyer really the person that's evaluating the options? Probably not.

You want to understand what each of these buyer's role is in the buying decision, and what they're doing and thinking about as they weigh their options. Most of the buyer's journey work that I'm seeing out there on the Internet focuses on what they're doing, not what they're thinking. The other four insights here, what they're thinking about, this is why we write about it on our website.

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What is a buyer persona? It tells you what your buyers are doing, and thinking, not just who they are. That's where the mistakes coming in. Now, does the sound like it's going to be hard to get this information? It isn't.

Ask questions, then listen to the buyers story The way this is done is that we need to conduct interviews with people who have actually been through this journey, who have within the last 6 to 12 months, evaluated a solution like ours.

Maybe not our solution precisely. As a matter of fact, maybe they didn't consider us at all. To find out what their story was, and literally, the question you will see here, please send the script. This is the only bad news in his whole presentation today. There isn't a script. The only question that's scripted is the one that's here on the slide.

Which is, take me back to the day when you first started looking for a new cloud services provider, and tell me what happened. And then, there's silence. And in that silence, we begin to hear the buyer's story, and what the researcher is doing is that we're listening.

Keep probing for insight We're listening to the buyer's answers, and we're asking them to continue to tell us more and more in-depth, how they were thinking, what was occurring as they went through this real decision.

That's why I go crazy when people say this is all fiction, wrong. Maybe the fact that we've aggregated all of these insights and built a profile, sure, there may not be a person in the world that matches that exactly.

But the real content that we're delivering in the five rings of buying insight is absolutely not fictional, it's factual. It's what your buyers have actually been doing, and what they've actually been thinking, and filled with verbatim quotes. Not just about what the buyer's first answer was. This is the other thing I'm seeing, I just saw a post this week.

Here's the 29 questions you need to ask your buyer persona, or maybe it's 39, or maybe it's 99. This is such flawed advice, because the answer you get to any question is always going to be the obvious answer.

Adele, tell me what you did to go out? What was the first thing you did, to go out on the Internet, to decide where you might go, to decide which cruise lines you might consider for your Alaska vacation?" I'm going to say we went to the Internet.

Was that an insight? Hardly. The next questions are going to come on prompted, or they're going to be prompted, rather, by whatever my answer was.

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Now, the researcher is going to say, "When you went out there on the Internet, what did you find that was useful? What was the most useful, out of all the sites you visited, what was the most useful? What where the things that you're hoping to find that you could not find?"

What were the things that allowed you to decide that these were the three companies that you wanted to continue to evaluate? We can't write a script for that, because it's really about following the buyer's story, and it's really about taking them through that story. We don't know how they're going to answer the next question, and therefore, we don't know what our next question is going to be.

If you've been thinking about building surveys to build your buyer personas, consider that problem. When you build a survey, you only get answers to the questions that you are asking.

The problem with that logic is that your questions are based on your own internal knowledge. They're based on that beat up car that's been sitting out in the lot that's not really taking you anywhere.

And so now, we can put a nice package around that beat up car and say, 52 percent of the people responded yes, they went on the Internet, and we've maybe got a little prettier package to all that, to the data we've already had. But it's not going to get us anywhere that we weren't able to go before we built the buyer persona.

I've started to say to people, if that's how you're going to build a buyer persona, based on what you already know, and on your internal misperceptions, and the data that you already have, why don't you just skip a step and not even bother with the buyer persona? Because you already had that knowledge internally, why bother putting a new paint job on what you already know?

Is your solution Easy to use? When we interview buyers, let's just take one other quote that we've had here from some of our interviews. This is a real quote out of an interview that we conducted where the buyer said that they really wanted a solution that was easy to use.

I don't know if you've checked your website recently, but chances are, somewhere out there on the website, you've got in rather bold font that your solution is easy to use, and here's what the buyer said.

Of course, it's easy to use. Everyone says theirs is easy to use. What I want to know is, well it get me to my goal before I have to consult help or call someone? If it's easy to use, then, I should be able to figure it out. Now, this is just one example. I used to share our example buyer persona during these webinars, but it's filled with quotes like this.

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People's eyes would cross and we'd get back feedback, "I couldn't read the nine point font on the slide." No kidding. If you go to our website, and I'll show you a link at the end of the presentation, then, you can download it, the example buyer persona that's over here. That's over on the left, there, that's what the persona looks like.

An example of a buyer persona You'll see here, we do have the profile on the first page. This is Amanda, and then, it's filled with lots of quotes. I intentionally made this so small that you would consider trying to read it, because it's spending time with these quotes, and it's quote specific to your solution that's really going to get you the inside about, how do you talk to this buyer?

Not about ease of use, but how he or she is able, we've made Amanda a woman, how she is going to be able to get to our goal before she has to consult, or help, or call someone. What can you say to her, when you know that that's her decision criteria, when you know that she's evaluating that to decide in this case, what email marketing solutions she wanted to buy?

How can you go out and buy video, content, tools, messages, campaigns that are going to address her most important criteria? That's really our objective. How would we do this? Well, once we have all of these quotes, once we know her priority initiative, what triggers her decision?

Once we know what her success factors are, once we know what her barriers are to choosing us, once we know what her decision criteria is, and who else is involved in the journey, then, we can sit with that content.

Buyer personas show you the intersection We're facilitating this now, because we're seeing so many marketers. I've seen statistics, anywhere from 17 percent down to 10 percent of marketers who say that they're actually using their personas effectively.

This doesn't bode well for the future of buyer personas. Pretty soon, somebody's going to realize that this really is just a paint job on our old jalopy out there, and they're going to go away, when in fact, buyer personas have the most incredible opportunity, and a really unimaginable opportunity to help you find what we call the intersection between what you have to say, what you thought you needed to say when you sat alone in your room.

Or, when you sat with that committee in that meeting. I've sat with hundreds of them, probably in my career, trying to think of what we should say. But what if we now brought to that meeting a very clear story, based on those quotes, based on those interviews, of what our buyers want to hear as they're going through their journey?

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What this does is, it brings a whole new focus two things that the buyer wanted to hear that we weren't even talking about. Oh goodness, we didn't know to talk about that. That's been in the solution for five years, all of our competitors offer that, too. Are you kidding me? That's what's important to the buyers?

Yes, now, we don't have to have that argument. Now, we don't have to sit around with the team and argue about whether that's relevant, because we have verbatim quotes from real buyers, and not something fictional we made up about what they wanted to hear.

There's all these things we want to talk about, and we have real stories about this, where companies have wanted to focus on something that is new about their solutions, something that the company had really invested a lot of time and energy into building into the product.

You may have had this experience where the product managers come to you and say, "Here's what's new in release 6.789A," and go build some marketing content about this. What we're able to do once we, as marketers, are armed with this insight into what the buyers want to hear is, We're able to push back on that.

We're able to say that even though that's new, what we most need to feature in our upcoming email campaign, the themes we need to build are mostly around something that's here in the center section.

The goal of buyer personas Here in the place between, we alone, and different than our competitors, not only know what the buyers want to hear, but we have because of something, hopefully, about the way we present that in the way we achieve that for the customer, we're able to build a far more persuasive message than any of our competitors.

This, then, is the goal of buyer personas. Is to get us to an informed decision around our content strategy, our messaging strategy, all of the integrated campaigns, our demands and activities that we can go out with confidence, not only to the buyer, but also, inside our companies, and to be heard as someone who has real value to deliver to the company around something that no one else in the company knows about.

No one else in the company has these insights, I assure you. Then, what we can do, and this is really, I know I'm out there on the edges a little bit, but I've got to end with this concept. Because in the 10th chapter of my book, I started talking about where companies really ought to be going with all of this.

We don't find a lot of people who come to us with the vision of aligning their sales and marketing efforts using buyer personas, but just imagine if you had all of the information that I just shared with you.

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Imagine getting up at your next, have you ever stood in front of your sales people and presented? Chances are what you're presenting is what the product does, what's coming up in the new product, and/or what's coming up in your marketing activities.

What if, instead of that, you stood up in front of your salespeople at your next kickoff meeting and you said, "We've been interviewing buyers, and we know that there are buyers out there."

Buyers who haven't met yet, who are maybe new. Salespeople are having to call on buyers they've never had to call him before, this could be a pretty scary experience. Why would they go out and call on buyers they don't know? Why not call people they know?

Because we've been interviewing buyers, and we already know that there's a buyer out there, this is our priority initiative insight, and a little bit of the buyers journey.

We know that they want this meeting, and based on success factors, we know what you need to talk about to get that meeting. We built a story about that, that comes out of the work we just talked about, finding that intersection.

You can tell the salespeople that story. You're going to find out through these interviews and through that perceived barrier insight what buyers are saying about the competitor's strengths.

They're going to share things with you that they never shared with their salespeople, because they didn't want to get an a dialogue with your salespeople about objecting handling.

But the buyers after the fact will share this with you, and when you bring that fresh, new perspective on how the buyers think about the competitive insights, and when you've already built a strategy to go build content and a message that addresses the competitor story, then, you bring value to the salespeople that is really unprecedented.

This will wow your salespeople. I've done this in front of salespeople. They're actually off their cell phones and smart phones, and they're listening to marketing. To me, this is like a win all in itself. We can tell the salespeople which positives to emphasize. I was just talking to my son, he's a sales rep for a major technology company.

He says, "Mom, I'm headed back to my annual kickoff meeting. I'm going to be in 14 hours of sales training, looking at what the product does and what the benefits are. Nobody's going to talk to me about what the buyers want to hear, and how we, as a company are uniquely positioned to talk to certain buyers around certain things that they really care about."

We can then, at the end of that presentation, now bring out the campaigns, the sales tools that we build, and these have an enormous amount of credibility when we can

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demonstrate to the sales organization that we built that based on knowledge, real knowledge, of real buyer pain points, and we're focusing on only our most relevant capabilities.

I took away from that call yesterday with my client, please, let's help the sales people stop throwing spaghetti at the wall. This is another quote coming out of some of our interviews.

When the buyers are so annoyed by that, when your salespeople get up and start talking to them about obvious things. We actually had a buyer in a recent interview say to me, "We don't think the company has any differences."

We think that's why they're not talking about them, because there isn't anything unique, and so, we just can't imagine why we need to keep all of these companies in consideration. I want to be able to take questions here. I want to end with this thought. Do your competitors have insight into your buying decisions?

Are your competitors marketing teams going to be the first to be the ones to go to market with real buying insight rather than those buyer profiles that are so obvious? I've had companies come to me and say, "Gosh, we spent six figures." I've actually seen versions of that buyer profile the companies spent more than $100,000 doing research about who their buyer is.

They bring this to us and they say, "Nobody's using this research, what should we do?" How do we use it? Because we have workshops about how to use this. I say, "Send me the buyer personas and I'll have a look at them." Then, I write back and say, "You don't have buyer personas, you have buyer profiles, and I have been news. I don't know how to tell you how to use those, either."

Because yes, we're influencing people, but we're influencing people in the context of a buying decision. We need to seek first, to understand the decision, and then, the people who make that decision. I have not had my window up, I don't know if you guys have been asking questions, but I want to go ahead and take time for that, here we are.

How do you translate this to small companies and B-2-C? Margaret Johnson: Adele, I had a question, actually chatted over to me. This is Margaret. That said, "This seems to work great for big companies, but how do you translate this to small companies and companies in the B to C space?"

Adele: Two differences. Let me take the small-company part first, and then I take the B to C space. Small companies, I'm not clear why this wouldn't work for a small company.

We're working with pretty small companies. Maybe if you think you're a startup, that would be a problem, but most of the time, by the time there's a marketer involved, we've got at least a few people in the company.

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I actually was just talking to our PR firm about the book launch in a story for Entrepreneur Magazine. What I basically sat is, if you're such a small company, meaning, you're the founder of the company, you're really a solo practitioner, then, what you really think about. I think it's true for all of us that are facing buyer personas, do we make this investment?

It is an investment. The question is, what's the risk of being wrong. I love the company, I love a story about it. Gosh, am I going to forget the name of it? It's a wonderful little kitchen tool. Zoho, Oho, blah blah blah, some kind of kitchen tool. You remember, Margaret? Oxo, is that it?

What they do when they build a kitchen tool, it's so cheap to make them, they basically come up with an example. They put it into a few stores, and then, the way to see if people buy it. If they love it, they go ahead and mass manufacture it, and send it to everybody. Frankly, if that can work for you, don't build buyer personas.

When you need to build buyer personas, and it doesn't matter how small you are, it's going to be if you can afford to be wrong. You're going to go out and spend a lot of money for you, a considerable amount of money, launching this product, throwing a set of marketing. There's a story in the very first chapter of this book that's up on the screen right now.

We helped a company that had spent two years building a product, and they were ready to go to market with us, with it. We went out and did a few interviews, this doesn't have to be hugely expensive.

You guys would be surprised, this isn't that hard. We found out that the market didn't want this product. I will go through the whole story right now, because I want to take other questions, but we saved that company.

The CEO of the company actually came back to us and said, "We should have paid you double what we pay you for this, because you saved us not only the cost of this launch, but the humiliation of going to market with a product that nobody wanted to buy."

I don't understand the small-company part so much. B to C, let me take that, because I address that extensively in the book. The research methodology that I just described to you about interviewing buyers about the recent decision that they have made can be conducted with any B to C customer who has invested a bit of time in the buying decision.

That's why I gave you the example of my consumer trip to Alaska next year. That is a high consideration buying decision for me, buying a car, where my going to send my kids to college, or to grammar school these days, for that matter?

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All of these decisions are very high consideration. Here's what I can tell you, the more time your buyer invests in a decision, the more you're going to get out of the evaluation, or out of this methodology.

There is a chapter in the book, it's in chapter three, it talks about different research methodologies, and there is actually a reference to what to do there if you are selling a pure consumer product.

I'm really talking about a retail product here, where I just grab it off the shelves. There's some other suggestions there. In that case, you probably do just have to build buyer profiles and guess. This is why I've always thought that the B to C marketers had the better jobs, they got to do the cool TV ads and stuff.

Now, I'm thinking it's the opposite. I'm thinking that those of us who have the privilege of having buyers who invest real time and interact with our marketing materials and this decision, we're going to be the smart ones, because we have the privilege of having this interview data and understanding how they really make decisions, and being a lot smarter.

Who exactly do you want to interview? Margaret: Awesome. Adele, you go through, and I think there's a couple questions out here that this one question might address. But who exactly do you want to interview? Just go through a list, because I know you have that in your book and it's excellent, but just to give people an idea.

Adele: This is good. I want to interview people, first of all, first and foremost, who have made the buying decision that I want to influence. I want to interview people who chose me and didn't choose me, or people who didn't choose me.

If I've got a new product, I use the iWatch as an example, that I'm going to go interview buyers who have bought cell phones recently, and I'm going to start to understand how they make a decision similar to the one I want to influence.

Apple didn't call it the iWatch, I thought they would. The Apple Watch, I don't want to get my branding wrong here and have the Apple police on me. Yeah, I want to interview people who have recently made the decision, and who match the demographic profile that I think I want to market to.

And so, they are in the right job title, the right role, the right sized company, the right industries, and those are the people on going to interview. There's a much larger version of that story, but do you think that looking at the questions and the way they were worded, is that a good answer?

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How do you find people to interview that have never considered your solution? Margaret: Yeah, I think it is, because the other side of it is OK, I've got to interview these people, and I want to interview people who haven't even considered our solution.

What's a good way to find people to interview that have never considered your solution? How do you recommend, what are some options people have for finding those sorts of people?

Adele: There's really two ways to do this work. One is that you can learn how to do these interviews yourself, and that's why we have the workshop and we have a pre-recorded workshop to do that.

Frankly, if you're going to go through that workshop, I'm going to suggest that you don't even try to interview people who never considered you.

There is a little bit of skill, and work, and tools involved in finding those people. I do talk about it a little bit in the book, a little too long for this, but you probably want to bring a third party into do the research if you're going to talk to people who have never considered you.

What you're going to get out of doing this work yourself is, you're going to get to talk to people who, then your Ephesus is, make sure you don't just talk to the people who did choose you.

Make sure you talk to those people who didn't choose you, and you're at least going to get way more data than you have right now. You'd also like to get those people who didn't consider you at all. If that's a real priority for you, then, I'm going to suggest that you bring in a professional to do that.

How many interviews should you conduct? Margaret: Cool. The other question that we have is, how many interviews would you need to conduct to ensure that the data is represented of your target buyer group?

Adele: Wow, that's such a great question. I get it all the time. I always say, you're going to be really surprised at this answer. Hold on to the edge of your seat. We recommend 10 interviews. This is not a lot. When we do these studies, we charge by the interview, we give our clients the option.

We'll interview as many buyers as you want, but we say don't waste your money on more than 10. Occasionally, clients will want us to do more than 10, and so, we've done that, and that's really allowed us to prove to ourselves that for qualitative research, and this is a type of qualitative research, it's a very specialized kind of qualitative research, mind you.

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And so, traditional qualitative research companies will be familiar with this methodology, per se. But qualitative research generally doesn't do more than 10 interviews. The exception to that is if you want to start looking at segmentation, and that's where the story gets longer and more complicated than we probably have time for today.

But if the client does come to us and they say, "I really want to understand where the buyers are different in different industries," then sometimes, we will recommend more interviews, but we aren't going to do 10 in each segment. We really consult with those companies.

We do a study design meeting, and based on our experience, we help them determine that they usually don't need nearly as many interviews as they think in each of those segments, either. It can be a surprisingly small number.

Who should initiate the interview? Sales or Marketing? Margaret: Here's a great question. Who initiates the interview? Is it the marketing department, or the sales people who are already in touch with the customers?

Adele: Yeah, my favorite. One of my favorite questions. I love you guys for asking my favorite questions. I recommend that the salespeople do not make this contact.

I know that seems like salespeople have the relationship, and so forth, but first of all, you're going to assure the client, and you're going to hold fast to this promise that you are not going to share with the salespeople anything you learn from one individual interview.

The results of what they tell you will be aggregated with the results of other interviews, and only shared an area, and their real identity will never be shared. There is something that happens in the customer's brain when your salesperson's the first contact, where it's harder for them to believe that.

Remember guys, we're dealing with perceptions. I know that you would still adhere to the promise, but it's really best if you are the person who reaches out.

Margaret: Excellent. The one thing that struck me when you were talking is, these interviews are really a conversation.

You're listening to understand, and so, if you start to interview with that broad question, the other questions are going to come right up for you in the conversation so that it doesn't have to be scripted. You're just going with the flow, and you're being interested.

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How much time should be set aside to be ready to implement? You're super interested in what their process was, and how they moved through their buying decision. To that end, here's a question. If you're a small company, how much time should be set aside from the start of buyer persona process to be ready to implement the results in your marketing?

How long does this process take from when you to get started, through the interviews, to having the insights to where you can implement that with your content and your marketing initiatives?

Adele: Great question, Margaret. That really depends on how long it's going to take you to do 10 interviews.

They're 30 minute interviews, allotted time is five hours. The reality is that, if you're going to do these interviews yourself, then, you're going to have to find a list, and you're going to have to schedule those interviews and conduct those interviews.

We have a very specialized methodology. Now, you've got this unscripted data, there's a little bit of work, and it ends up being about an hour per interview, at least. When you're new at it, it's going to take longer to mine those interviews for the five rings of insight, look for the patterns and trends, and build the personas.

If you come to us and ask us to do the study, we're going to give it to you in about six weeks, and you're ready to go. It's really about how you're going to go about doing that work.

Margaret: Excellent.

Kim: Adele, something else has come up as you were answering a prior question. I wanted to jump in and say, everyone please note that what we're talking about here are in-person interviews.

By "in-person," it could be phone or Skype, too, but I actually worked at the company who's entire perception of getting answers to these kinds of questions was to put up a survey monkey.

How do you present interviews to your clients? We've got a couple of questions that have come in about how do you present interviews to your clients? What format you use to present those interviews to your clients, and other than that, I'd love to hear you address that just briefly.

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Adele: That sounds like that's an agency asking the question. The interviews themselves, we're talking about building a buyer persona from the interviews.

We're never going to present the interviews to the clients, and were never going to give the interviews to anyone. The interviews are going to be ours, and what you're going to do, then, it's described in the book, or in our buyer persona master class if you go through our workshop.

We'll do it for you in those six weeks. There is this very specialized methodology to go through, and we have those interviews transcribed and coded around those five rings of insight.

That's that deliverable, that example buyer persona that's on your website is how it's presented, the presentation is buyerpersona.com/example-buyer-persona, or you can navigate to it.

Kim: We'll make sure that we have that in the link when we send you guys the follow-up emails. We'll get that from Adele.

Adele: That's how to present it.

What incentives should you offer the person youre interviewing? Kim: This is a really good question that came in which is, what do you promise to the customer or to the person you're interviewing in return for them talking with you?

Since they're doing you a favor and all that, there's some concern here about, "What do I have to give them? What's the promise in return?" Your answer is going to be great.

Adele: You're going to love this answer. If you're working from your win/loss list, you are going to be amazed that three out of 10 people will just talk to you. It's really almost a cathartic experience to tell their story.

This is part of a skill. This is why this is a skilled effort. You need to go through some training to do this work. It's because it's all about just listening to people's story. People like to tell their stories. If you do it correctly, you will not be able to get these people off the phone.

Now, when we do the research, we tend not to work from win-loss lists, and then, we pay those people an incentive, people that never considered you, they're not going to have that attitude, and then, we pay those people an incentive that's built into our price to talk to us. There's nothing wrong offering an incentive to your win-loss list, we just usually find it's unnecessary.

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Kim: Yeah. Very good, the other thing I thought was really great when I was reading the book, is that the people that don't buy from you, that pick your competitor, those people are happy to talk to you if you've been considered in the purchase.

I was stunned at that, because I would have been shy about really asking, "Hey, will you talk to us about that." But you're saying that your experience has been that they'll totally talk to you.

Adele: Absolutely more likely to talk to you than the people who chose you, because their story, and again, there's some methodology here in just setting up these interviews so that you're telling them and convincing them that you just want to hear their story about what worked and what didn't' as they went through that buying decision."

That's literally how we talk, we want to know what worked and what didn't. I'll tell you, they want to tell you what didn't work, because it didn't work.

Kim: Here's a good question, should the persona conversations be the start of a new product development in your mind?

Adele: Wow, that's chapter 11, that's my vision.

[laughter]

Kim: OK.

Adele: I don't think we're there yet, but absolutely, yep, absolutely, that's my vision.

How long until you see results from the buyer persona work? Kim: We have a couple more, I'm going to try and squeeze them in. Nope, we already answered that one. Besides the six weeks for actual interviews, what's the experience on how long before they see results from these buy personas?

You get the buyer personas, you put that into your marketing content, about what's the typical time before companies start to see results and positive stuff from having done the buyer persona work?

Adele: Now, we're going to get into a cultural issue and change management issue, which is all about how willing is your company to start to make the changes that these personas recommend.

This is why we've now, we weren't doing this as much last year, and now, we've really started to push on. At six weeks, you have a completed buyer persona, sometimes, it can go faster.

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Then, we want to immediately do a workshop with your team to make sure that the team, and we do it online, to make sure the team's really ready to have confidence in their ability to build messaging, build content on that.

And then, it's just a question of where are you going to use it first? You could get it out the following week if you were doing an outbound marketing campaign. It's a function of where our clients are using this content.

Are they going to have to rebuild their Web? They're not going to rebuild their website, but are they going to have to change the content on their website?

Are they going to test it there? How is it going to be used? I don't think I have a good answer to that question; it's really about your company's willingness to move forward.

Kim: Excellent.

Adele: That's why we're getting involved in that.

Kim: It's awesome. We are right at the top of the hour, we have two more questions. I'm going to make sure that we get them answered.

Adele, I'm going to send them to you so we can get them answered in our email out to everybody. We'll get them personally answered to those of you who are asking them, but Adele, just thank you so much.

This has been amazing, and we're going to also send you a link so that you can sign up for the workshop, the buyer persona workshop, we'll do that in our follow up email to you, as well for those of you who are interested in that. We're getting a lot of "thank yous" coming in from people coming in right now Adele, really thank you so much.

Adele: Yeah, thank you for having me, Kim.

Kim: Yep, very good. All right, we will talk to you next time. We have a couple more webinars scheduled that are coming soon.

Please, go to contentzap/events and take a look. There's some coming up on lead nurturing and email marketing that you're also going to want to attend or at least check out. They're going to be hugely valuable in April, those are coming.

Again, Adele, thank you so much, and we'll be sending an email with a replay link shortly, probably early next week, actually, to be truthful.

Thank you so much.

Adele: Thank you, Kim.

Kim: By-bye.

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Margaret: Thanks everyone for being with us today.

About ContentZAP ContentZAP! Is a professional services digital marketing agency. We understand marketing technology and how to leverage it to help grow your business. We work with companies of all sizes to develop and implement content strategies, plan nurturing and follow-up sequences, or to augment content development.

We sponsor events and webinars that provide practical, very useful ideas and strategies that will help marketers be more effective quickly.

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