to the wrong people at the wrong time. You will see that by being helpful and informative rather than hyping, your marketing will come alive. Your buyer will be eager to do business with you and excited to share your ideas with others. The sale will be made more quickly, and your buyers may even be willing to pay a premium to work with you.
Gaining insight into your buyer personas will transform your business!
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First, I want to thank the thousands of marketers who attended my product marketing workshops between 2001 and 2010. If you were among that audience, your plea for practical guidance about buyer personas was the inspiration for the training and research company that I founded in 2010 and ultimately, the reason that I wrote this book. I have faithfully attempted to answer your questions and trust that you will let me know if I have missed anything.
I am also deeply indebted to David Meerman Scott, whose best-selling books and frequent conference appearances are among the reasons that marketers around the world are clamoring for buyer personas. You were right, David; I needed to get these words out of my head and onto paper. I only wish it had been as easy as you described.
Many thanks to my clients, friends, and colleagues for sharing your stories about working with buyer personas. I had hoped to include everything you said and apologize to those whose tales are not included here. Sadly, there was space for only some of your hard-won wisdom.
This brings me to Lana Bradford. You were an incredible coach throughout this effort, and especially in those final weeks, as my ability to construct legible sentences was obscured by a rapidly approaching deadline. I could not have written this book without your skillful coaxing, extensive research, and clarifying edits.
Thank you to Shannon Vargo and Elizabeth Gildea at John Wiley & Sons for believing in this book and entrusting me with its writing. I am honored to be one of your authors.
I also want to acknowledge my fantastic team at Buyer Persona Institute, especially John Fox, Gordana Stok, Dave Barnhart, Frank Della Rosa, and Bonnie Wooding. It was through your commitment and hard work that the research kept flowing and the clients remained delighted in spite of my “book brain.” You are amazing and I am privileged to work with you.
Finally, I want to thank my friends and family, whose faith in my ability to complete this work never flagged. In particular, I owe a debt of gratitude to Betsy Ruth Dayton for the gentle touch that kept my stress at a manageable level, and to our beloved dogs, Arie and Charlie, for insisting that it was time to stop writing and take a walk.
Most of all, I am grateful to my husband, Steve, for your partnership throughout this particular journey and all those that are yet to come. You are my rock.
INTRODUCTION
LISTEN FIRST, THEN SPEAK
“So what brings you in here to see me?”
That question is spoken countless times every day in doctors' offices, car repair shops, bank loan offices, law firms, and hundreds of other professional establishments. What usually follows that question is the customer's narrative describing their problem.
“My daughter is entering college next year, and I want to explore loan options for her education.”
“It's probably nothing, doctor, but I've been wondering about a small change I've noticed recently…”
“The engine has been making the strangest sound when I drive downhill. It all started right after I loaned the car to my brother-in-law, who said he used it to move his large collection of Civil War cannon balls.”
“I'm concerned that my cat has been pacing back and forth at night and making very loud howls.”
Listening is an essential part of any first meeting. It's how professionals learn about their customers' concerns, goals, and expectations so that they can present a relevant solution.
Yet in many organizations this one-to-one communication between marketing professionals and their customers is infrequent – if it happens at all.
How often do you have an opportunity to listen to your customers describe their problems? Do you know how to ask the questions that will make this conversation valuable for you and your customer? And most important, do you know how to apply what you've heard to become a more effective marketer?
The art and science of asking probing questions and carefully listening to your customers' responses lie at the core of the buyer persona concept. It's the key to discovering their mind-set and the motivation that prompts them to purchase a solution like yours.
One marketing professional confessed to me after conducting her first buyer interview, “This is almost like cheating; like getting the exam paper weeks before the final. Instead of trying to guess what matters, I now know not only what the customer wants – I realize how she goes about it.”
This is the power of the buyer persona. Built around a story about your customers' buying decision, the buyer persona reveals insight into your buyer's expectations and concerns as they decide whether to do business with you, choose your competitor, or simply opt to do nothing at all.
This book will show you how you can listen to your buyers' stories to gain insight into the factors that trigger their search, how they define success, and what affects their final decision that a particular approach is the best one for them. We'll show you how the buyer's personal narrative reveals language and phrases that will resonate with other buyers with similar concerns, and how to define and focus on the activities that compel buyers to take action. You will see how giving buyers the clearly articulated information they seek, in the language they understand, when and where they need it, is the essence of effective marketing.
In the simplest terms, buyer personas are examples or archetypes of real buyers that allow marketers to craft strategies to promote products and services to the people who might buy them. During the past decade the term has almost become a marketing mantra.
But as this book will show, the growing interest in buyer personas has resulted in confusion about how they are created, how they are used, and their ultimate effectiveness.
It's the intention of this book to provide some much needed clarity.
The marketer's need to understand the market is hardly new. But the depth of insight required is increasing exponentially as technological advances demand that organizations rethink how they sell everything from music and books to bulldozers and information technology. Michael Gottlieb, a senior director of marketing and business strategy at one of the world's leading software firms, described it this way: “What we are selling is changing; who we are selling to is changing (some are people we've never sold to before); and how these customers want to be engaged, marketed, and sold to is changing, too.”
Buyer personas have a lot to do with attaining that kind of alignment, but not in the way that marketers often use them, which is basically to build a profile of the people who are their intended customers. Rather, the contention of this book is that when buyer personas evolve from authentic stories related by actual buyers —in the form of one-on-one interviews —the methodology and presentation allows you to capture the buyer's expectations and the factors that influence them. Then, and only then, can you truly stand in your buyer's shoes and consider the buying decision from the buyer's point of view. This goes way beyond buyer profiling – but most marketers don't realize that.
As a veteran sales and marketing executive, trainer, and researcher, I've worked with thousands of marketers in hundreds of companies. Not long ago, I met with executives from a large corporation who had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for research on “buyer personas” that was essentially worthless. The company had purchased profiles about the people