202#: Killer Buyer Personas, with Jim Kraus

Speaker A: Foreign. Marketers. And welcome to the if you market podcast brought to you by Mountaintop Data. We are the only podcast that markets the, uh, out of it. I'm your host, Sky Cassidy, and today we'll be talking with Jim Krause of Buyer Persona about buyer Personas. Jim, uh, is the president of Buyer Persona Institute, bpi, and a leading authority on buyer Personas. We're going to be hearing that word a lot today, so I hope you're strapped in. I believe it'll be, uh, some version of the name, um, of this episode as well. Uh, he's also a blogger, author of the Buyer Persona Buzz newsletter and is currently working on the second edition of the book buyer Personas with BPI's uh, founder, Adele Revella. Jim, thanks for coming on today.

Speaker B: Thanks, guy. Uh, great to be here.

Speaker A: I feel we're like, we're at the International House of Pancakes and the only thing on the menu is pancakes, pancakes and more pancakes. And, uh, I'm ready for it.

Speaker B: Awesome.

Speaker A: So, buyer Personas, uh, let's dive right in. The listeners probably all have an idea of what that means, but I think you, um, guys get pretty specific about it, like an Eskimo with snow. So, um, can you kind of give, give the listeners a idea of what is and isn't a buyer Persona?

Speaker B: Sure. So we've been around Buyer Personas has been around for 15 years. And one of the things we've really focused on during that time is, um, really coming up with a framework for buyer Personas that, um, will serve marketing and sales functions and provide a heck of a lot more impact as far as the insights in terms of really informing just about every marketing and sales decision that you're going to make. Um, a lot of folks, when they hear the word buyer Persona, they think of, uh, profiling a particular individual or a role. Right. So you may have a buyer Persona for. If you're in a, if you sell it tech solutions to businesses, you might have a buyer Persona on a cio, for example. And that buyer Persona may tell you things like their average age and education and their top challenges and priorities and maybe a little bit about where they get information from. Um, and that our definition of a buyer Persona is a bit different than that. Um, one of the things that, uh, we, that is really important to understand is that if you're a marketing and sales profession, at the end of the day, your real goal is to educate and influence prospective buyers. Um, particularly when you're thinking about high consideration buying decisions. These are the type of decisions that often have multiple people that are influencing the decision, larger sums of money decision, uh, probably takes longer to take. You're looking at multiple options. When it comes to those kind of decisions, you really need to understand those buying decisions very specifically because. Because the only way to really gain the trust of, uh, buyers and give them the confidence in their buying decision is to know certain things about them. So what our buyer Personas are, unlike the profiling, a role or individual, um, buyer Personas really is really deep buying insights about a specific buying decision. So the best way to think about this, if anybody listening to this podcast, if you think about your particular product or service, um, what you want to know is really five things, right? Think about the product or service you sell and think about the prospective buyers that are making a buying decision around that. They're figuring out who they should consider, they're weighing their options, they're coming up with final decisions, et cetera. Um, so the buyer Persona is really five areas of insight. We call them the five rings of insight. Uh, and let me go through each one because they're all very important. The first one we call priority initiatives. And what this is, is this is understanding what the triggers are that causes one of your prospective buyers to start looking for your product or service at this moment in time. What is the thing that really got them, you know, off the bench, so to speak, where they said, hey, look, you know, at this point, we really need to do something. The status quo isn't working. What. What are those things? Those are your priority initiatives. You want to know what those are?

Speaker A: So, so quick question to the, uh, I feel like I'm just sitting back and listening here, uh, and absorbing everything. But, um, your buyer Personas, are they all about these insights? Do they include the technical information? Not, uh, technical, but just the specific information of somebody's title in the company and those kind of things? Or is it more about, um, uh, these specific insights and that's all you're really looking at?

Speaker B: Yeah. So what you're trying to get is insights around the buying decision that they make. Right. More so than you're going to pick up in. You're going to pick up characteristics of the decision makers. So we're not suggesting that's unimportant by any stretch. Right. You need to know who are the roles that we're targeting. For example, knowing something about them at an overall level is important and has value.

Speaker A: Kind of gets you in the general ballpark.

Speaker B: Exactly right. So what we're talking about is saying, that's great. But because I know these general characteristics of a cio, for example, just to use that same example really doesn't give me any insight into how should I best market and sell a specific product or service. Right. Because once you get into a decision, the CEO gets into a decision, there's a lot of details in that buying decision, what's important to him or her and the buying committee overall. Those are the things you have to know, and those really comprise what a buyer Persona is.

Speaker A: Interesting. So with a particular product, maybe they solve a particular problem. Um, uh, you know, whether it's. So are we getting into, and I'm sorry if I'm jumping ahead here, things like with this particular CIO, let's say you're. You're targeting CIOs, but you want to know if the CIO is, if it's. If cost is important to them or if it's saving time that's important, or if it's kind of like different pain points. You might particularly solve for either how you approach or whether you even look to sell that person, depending on your product, I guess. If you're Walmart, you're not going to the CIO that doesn't care about cost. Um, you're focused on other, other buyers. Is it, uh, is it that kind of a thing?

Speaker B: Um, yeah. But again, I want to move off the roll here because really what you're doing is you're trying to get insights around the buying decision. So you. Do you want to know what the CIO thinks? Sure. But what you really want to know is you want to understand what the entire buying committee, what's important to them, what are their concerns, what are their risks, what are their decision criteria? So it takes, it doesn't take all the focus off roles, but it puts more of the focus on the buying decision. Because at the end of the day, that's where the rubber meets the road. Right. If you don't understand what are the drivers, motivators, fears, buyer's, uh, journey for a particular buying decision, you really are going to be guessing at a lot of the marketing and sales activities you're doing.

Speaker A: I see. So you were giving us the five rings of insight. I kind of jumped in there. I got one more thing to throw in, though. How do you find this info out? Uh, like data, you can just find out, oh, this is somebody's title. This is. But this seems like it's much more, uh, detailed kind of, kind of info. Where. Where do you get that info from?

Speaker B: Yeah. So let me, um, if I may, let Me talk about the five rings first because then that your next question is a perfect follow on to that question because it'll make, it'll, it'll make more sense if I answer it that way.

Speaker A: Excellent, excellent. Uh, so back to as we were, I think you just said, what was the first ring again?

Speaker B: Yeah, so the first ring again. Focusing on the buying decision you're trying to influence. If you're listening to this, just think in your mind's eye about, you know, the product or service you're offering. The first thing is the priority initiative. So you want understand what are the things that are triggering, getting people to even start looking for, for your solution. And when I say your solution, I mean not your companies, just overall what's out there. The second thing you really want to know is what we call success factors. And these are goals, outcomes, the results that your buyers need from this investment. Right. So they're, you know, this investment needs to produce results. What are the results that they truly care about the most when it comes to that buying decision? The third thing is uh, perceived barriers. And this is a really important one that gets overlooked sometimes and that is um, for these types of high consideration buying occasions there's going to be a lot of fear and trepidations and you know, nervousness about moving away from the static quo concerns they have about certain providers or solutions. You want to know what all of those are so that you can proactively address them in your marketing and sales activities.

Speaker A: Right. So kind of the, nobody uh, ever got fired for buying um, IBM or something like that. I think uh, was that, that would be the, you know, if you're not IBM and there's a fear of that from the people. That's the kind of thing you want to know that against.

Speaker B: Yeah. So a barrier could be, it's a good example of one of the barriers might be um, we don't really, uh, we eliminate or we don't look at any companies that don't have a strong reputation and a ton of industry experience. Right. And you know, things like that. So that could be in fall in that IBM type thought.

Speaker A: Right. Okay. So playing up how many years you've been in business and how stable you are and that kind of stuff.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: That could be another company doesn't want that. They're looking for somebody that's, that's nimble and going, uh, to give them more attention because they, they need it.

Speaker B: Right. And it depends, it depends what you learn when you're, when you're going and we'll talk A little bit about how you get these insights, but it all depends on what you learn for your particular buying decision.

Speaker A: So we got what's their triggers to get into the looking for a solution in the first place? Um, the results they're looking for, perceived barriers, the first three. Um, so number, um, four. Ready to move on.

Speaker B: Yeah. So the fourth one is decision criteria. And decision criteria is all the things that they're, all the questions they're going to have of you and the other competitors and options that they're looking at when they're making their choices. So these are literally the questions that you can expect that you're going to be evaluated on for that buying kind

Speaker A: uh, of the must haves for them.

Speaker B: Correct. Right. These are the things that really matter like once. And that's why I was talking about earlier how if you know some general things about the cio, that's all well and good, but unless you know what are the key things they're going to them and other folks on the buying committee are going to be using to evaluate you, it doesn't really matter all that much. Right. Because that's where things really come into play.

Speaker A: Right. So that, that could get down to features, get down to how financing is handled, get down to uh, all the details they may care about. M. Possibly because of their specific needs or maybe because of some, uh, way they've been burned in the past and they're just like, we're not doing that again.

Speaker B: Right. So this is, you know, middle bottom of the funnel stuff. Right. When you really start getting into, you know, being competitive. Right. When you're, they're looking really closely at the different options that's in front of them.

Speaker A: Right. So going to a consumer product, and I hate doing that, but you know, something like a vehicle, it may be they need a certain amount of towing capacity or something like that, or storage space or, or whatever it is. And that's just one of the things they're looking for in their, you know, call it a dating profile or something like that. Can't, uh, be a smoker. You know that ahead of time.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Take down your smoking pictures.

Speaker B: Maybe one of the interesting things that we often find in the studies that we do and we'll talk a little bit about approach and how we do this, but one of the things that's always interesting is when you talk about the priority initiatives and the success factors, the first two, you know, these are triggers, benefits, results. They want more, um, times than not, you're not going to get a ton of surprises There you're going to get a lot of confirmation based on what you know about your customers, uh, based on just looking at competitors and how they're talking about their products and services. But once you get into perceived barriers and decision criteria, that's where you start learning a whole bunch of things, right? Because now all you and your competitors could be talking about the same two benefits, um, that customers want and that could be totally accurate. But once they get into the buying decision, now all of a sudden the buyers are getting smarter, right? They're starting to say like, hey, wait a second, we didn't know we wanted that, um, we need that now, right? Or maybe, uh, we don't need this so much.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker B: So again, a lot of these buyers with high consideration buying decisions, this is either the first time they've ever made this buying decision or if they have, they probably haven't made it a lot. So it's new for them. So they're learning. So by the time you get to decision criteria, when they're really evaluating their options, now all of a sudden you're getting into the nitty gritty about here's some things that you get into. Features, for example, that maybe wasn't even on their radar when they first started looking.

Speaker A: That's something maybe a good salesperson can influence what they're strong in as well and be like, hey, we got really good cup holders. Let's push that.

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker A: And convince them that they really care about this feature.

Speaker B: Right. Um, and then the fifth and final one is Buyer's Journey. Right. So Buyer's Journey is just that. So key things you want to know is what are the typical steps in the buying process? Right. No, buying process for every company is the exact same. But by doing, uh, certain types of research, uh, and we'll talk about that in a minute, you can really identify what are the major types of activities that are going on in the buying journey for this particular product or service.

Speaker A: So this is kind of what can we expect as far as how long it's going to take to make a decision, how many people, whether it's going to go to another committee once the first people make their decision, all those kind of, uh, what's, what's the path through to here?

Speaker B: Yeah. So what are the information sources they're using, how are they interacting with vendors, what information sources that are using to figure out who they're even going to consider what sources they really trust, who are the influencers versus the ones that are doing final sign offs and the buyer's journey is really designed to help you figure out, like, where do I need to set up marketing and sales mechanisms along that path to optimize the journey of the buyer. And it also helps you figure out where do you need to be? Right. Where do you need to get your message out, out there?

Speaker A: So here's all the next steps that they're going to go through. You can make sure you're, you're making those steps and that you're there along the way.

Speaker B: Right. So now let me just take one step back here, because one of the ways this clicks with folks often is now comparing the two. You know, the common definition buyer Persona and the one that we just talked about. So if you had a choice, Right. If you could take buyer Persona option A, where you've got profiling characteristics of roles that may be involved in the

Speaker A: buying decision, you have your ideal customer profile.

Speaker B: Yes. Or I could give you what we just talked about, specific buying insights around a buying decision that you're trying to influence. Which would you take? Right? You would, right?

Speaker A: But for one, it seems like we need a crystal ball or to wiretap their office or something like that. Uh, need to hire a private investigation firm. Wait, is that what you guys do? Is this just a, uh, B2B private I firm that you're running over?

Speaker B: No. No.

Speaker A: How are you getting this info?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So what's the magic here?

Speaker B: Yeah, so the way to go about doing it, whether we do it or you do it on your own, is to talk to recent buyers. And what I mean by recent buyers is let me give you a really specific definition, uh, about what that is, because it's really important. A recent buyer does not necessarily mean your current customers. We wouldn't discourage you talking from your current customers. But ideally what you want to do is you want to find recent buyers that usually we like to say in the past 12 months, past six months is even better, has made the exact same buying decision that you're trying to influence. So as an example, if you're somebody that sells CRM software, right. You want to go out and find people that have recently, uh, made that buying decision, evaluated different options, et cetera, et cetera. And once you find them, you want to have in depth interviews with them. And these aren't survey interviews where they're rating and ranking things. These are typically 30 to 40 minute discussions. The only scripted question that we ask in the interviews is at the very beginning. We say, take me back to the day when you first decided you needed X. Let's just say cuz you have them

Speaker A: walk you through the buyer's journey. They went on very. Yeah, not um, you're not figuring out exactly like, you know, what, what they like in their coffee. Kind of for the existing target, you're coming up with a general Persona. Uh, like you can still be surprised during somebody's buyer journey that they, they're going off. But you're kind of archetyping your typical customer. The way they behave, tend to behave.

Speaker B: You're archetyping a buying decision.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: So that's. So as an example, the example I just gave you, it wouldn't be the CIO buyer Persona you'd be creating. You'd be creating a CRM buyer Persona because your buyer Persona is buying insights about a specific buying decision.

Speaker A: It's like a product Persona Persona, not a target person Persona.

Speaker B: Certainly closer. Yeah, it's not a target person. Now the other part of this is we, you do want to include, we call it a buyer profile, which is simply characteristics of the, of the decision makers involved in the decision. And it does include some of the things we talked about. So you're not ignoring that. You still want to include that. But that's just a small, small piece of your Persona. The five rings of insight is the real meat on the bone, so to speak.

Speaker A: So it's kind of, I mean a good salesperson seems like kind of does a lot of this naturally. It's like if you're selling truck nuts, um, you're not going to wear uh, you know, an Obama ball cap. You might wear a maga ball. Like, you know, the audience and what they, you know, how to uh, how to approach them because of experience. This seems like you're kind of saying instead of having a salesperson and having our whole team, um, you know, get wise through a decade of experience and apply those things. You're saying, let's jump ahead and just find these things out. And then we don't have to find out through failures. We can kind of know the atmosphere we're going into ahead of time.

Speaker B: Yeah, it. So if you think about the plight of the marketing professional, right. You know, they, a lot of times they're doing, trying to do their jobs with one hand tied behind their back. Right. I mean sales folks have the luxury of um, ideally talking to customers and prospects every day and they start to learn about them. Right. Develop a sixth sense about them and they use that in their daily things and they may feed some anecdotal things back to uh, back to the organization, but there's generally there's usually no really good systematic way of doing that. Some companies do it better than others. But for marketers, they don't have the luxury of being able to actually talk to prospective buyers. Buyers that are literally been through the exact same decision that they're trying to create campaigns around, they're trying to create messaging around, thought leadership around, sales enablers around. So why guess at that stuff? Go out and go right to the source. Now the beauty of it is when you come back with the insights. The other thing the Persona includes is you want to include a lot of buyer quotes. You want to develop insights from everything you learn in the interviews, but you want to include a lot of buyer quotes. And what happens is now you come back from a marketing perspective and you're championing the buyer. You know, I, uh, the beauty of the Personas is, you know, our favorite meetings are readout meetings because when we have marketing, sales and product all, you know, in the room, if we're reviewing results, it really brings everybody together because you can't refute what you're hearing. Like it's so obvious so quickly that these are our target buyers and it just brings everybody together and it takes all the guesswork out of everything you're doing. There's no reason to guess. Just go. And by the way, they love talking about their buying decision. Um, there should be no fear talking to them. They love talking about it.

Speaker A: Awesome. So you're making this buyer Persona now? I guess I'd say are you making a buyer Persona or when you get into this, do you identify multiple buyer Personas or are you looking to narrow it down to a single. Here's our, let's say take uh, the ICP thing and say ideal buyer Persona instead of ideal customer profile.

Speaker B: Yeah. So the buyer Persona is all buying decision based. So it all depends. Right. So you may be, you know, typically, especially for a company that has a lot of products and services, they wouldn't do a buyer Persona. For every product and service that they have, they may choose some of the ones that are the most important to them.

Speaker A: The highest value. I mean if you're selling value 1999, uh, product, you're not going to be good. Right.

Speaker B: Something that's, yeah. Something that contributes to sales or the other place that's really great to do. A buyer Persona is either a, you're entering a new market and you just don't know a lot about the buying decision in that market, or B, you know, that, you know, in the coming six to 12 months, you're putting some resources behind that particular product or service. And you want, you know, a foundational level of insights that can inform all those activities. That's another great place to kind of focus your attention.

Speaker A: Interesting. It seems like, um, you're basically immersing yourself in the buying culture for what you're trying to sell, to understand it and be able to make, uh, decisions on how you're going to market and how you're going to sell, um, from experiences you haven't had yet, I guess.

Speaker B: Yep, yep. It's a, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a game changer. The one thing that's good about it is that it's very logical. Right. So once the light bulb goes off and you start really embracing buying decision based Persona and the five rings that we talked about, um, it becomes, a lot of times I get the question, well, what do we do with the insights afterwards? And I'm happy to talk about that. But one of the things that's great about them is if you're a marketing or sales professional, particularly if you're in marketing and you have all these responsibilities to educate, influence buyers, it becomes pretty obvious what to do with the findings. Because now you know exactly what are the things that are going to make, what are the things that are going to influence a buyer's behavior the most. You now know those are. Right.

Speaker A: One, a big thing I'm always pushing and marking is to keep things simple, keep them short. And if you have no idea which of your 50 features or if any you should be mentioning, or if you should just be talking about how much you love cats, it's, it's like what's going to uh, influence these people? What's going to get across? What are they going to notice and care about? Having something like this, you say, oh, here's the three main points we need to focus on. This is what they care about, or at least this is what gets them into that first trigger. Maybe, uh, although I think I, maybe I'm misspeaking here. When you talk about the first ring there being the triggers, that's not necessarily what triggers them to notice you, but what triggers them to be looking to buy something in the first place. Is that right?

Speaker B: Uh, literally it is what is the thing that got the actual ball rolling? Right? So a lot of times they have

Speaker A: a new hire and they needed something new for that or product launch or whatever it is.

Speaker B: Right. Or uh, a lot of times it's a pain point they've been dealing with for a long time and Enough is enough, right? Like, it's just, okay, we can't, we can't deal with this anymore. We got to do something. Right. Our business is growing and now this. Small problems become a big problem. Right. Or, you know, we're working, we need a CRM M. Yeah, right, exactly. Something like that. Right. So it could be anything and it could be you. You brought in a new, um, a new manager, executive. They wanted to make a change. You know, it could be anything, really.

Speaker A: New hire, a huge trigger. Absolutely. Uh, all the time.

Speaker B: Yeah. So you just want to know what those are? I mean, why wouldn't you want to know what those are? Because now a lot of times the biggest challenge that sales people have is, you know, what are the top three to five things that I can drum up a conversation about with people that I'm calling on? Well, if you know the priority initiatives and you know, the success factors, you've got a big head start. Right. Because now, you know, like, all right, we've identified 10 of these things. Um, you know, I can now be equipped to have a conversation about, about any of these. Right. I know going in and I have that flexibility. And if you've done your homework and actually map those to your capabilities, you know, now you've got proof points to walk in with. Right. And that's going to lead to a productive conversation.

Speaker A: Interesting. It seems like I remember with sales teams, uh, a lot of people would watch movies about sales and think there was some magic line that they would say, and then people would give them their credit card number. Um, and this seems like it's almost edging towards that. Like when you're, when you're reaching out to people, you are poking them with that thing. Um, that is BS and made up in these sales con movies. But, um, knowing the type of problem that may have brought them to look in the first place and bringing that kind of thing up, I can, I can really see how that would connect with somebody. And they would immediately think like, oh, I'm on the same page with these people.

Speaker B: Correct. And now think, take it. Extend it even farther now. Because now, I mean, at the end of the day, the biggest thing you're trying to do is you're trying to have buyers feel as confident as they can in their decision. That's what they're looking for. Right. Because this is probably a, you know, pretty high stake decision and they want to feel comfortable that things aren't going to get screwed up. So if you extend what you just said even further, once you get into knowing Their perceived barriers and the decision criteria. Now you can continue that dialogue because now you can anticipate, hey, here I know the things they're going to care about. So I can be proactive and bring those up in the right way and I can be the trusted advisor because I am talking about these things like I'm not, you know, they don't have to bring them up. I can help bring those up in the right way with them and gradually make them feel confident that, hey, if they go with us, we know what we're doing. We know the questions that, you know, uh, that if you're the customer, you know, they anticipate the questions you're going to have that's going to make them feel great. Right, that they're going with the right, the right solution and the right provider.

Speaker A: So even if you aren't particularly inexperienced, experienced, they feel like you've been there before. Um, because you've again, you're cheating a bit. You've mapped out, you've done your research, um, that, that's fantastic. So we're making this Persona of kind of, uh, I think you'd mentioned there may be multiple buyer Personas and you may have to find out along the way what path, um, a particular company tends to be. Seems to be like, um, doing the market research to find this information out. That's great. Um, are there any other steps to executing, uh, the, this buyer Persona? I mean you have to, you have to do the research, you have to do the work, but putting it into, into practice.

Speaker B: Yeah. So, um, one, I'll make one comment on the research part and then talk about one of the things you can do after you develop your buyer Persona. Um, but the question I often get is how do you find recent buyers?

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: If, you know, we're trying to, you know, so if you're not going to your current customers and you're just trying to find people that made this buying decision and either didn't consider you or maybe considered you went with somebody else,

Speaker A: bought from a competitor.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: And now you gotta talk to them. It's gotta be a little.

Speaker B: So the way to, the way to do it is, um, uh, you first want to define the buying decision very specifically and you want to define your target market. Right. So we'll stick with the CRM example. Let's say CRM is the buying decision. Um, you may be, you want to define what your target market is. Right. So maybe you just sell in the US and maybe it's certain size companies or certain industries you want to Define all of that. So once you define who. Who your target market is, what is the buying decision? Um, you can work with different, um, there's different qualitative recruiters, um, uh, in the US and abroad that you can use that can help you find these folks. Um, and it's for a fee, so there is some expense included.

Speaker A: So you're going to a market research company they know.

Speaker B: Correct? Right, Exactly. So, like, for example, when we do studies on behalf of clients, we have a network of, like, 40 recruiters that we use to find these folks. We don't use all 40 in a study. We'll just pick and choose ones that we know have a good success rate for a particular audience. But that's how you do it. Um, and then in terms of next step. So now you have your buyer Persona. Right. So you've got. We'll, uh, stick with the CRM example, just as an example. You know, all the triggers, all the outcomes they want, all the barriers, you know, all the decision criteria, you know, the buyer's journey. Now what do you do with it? Right. So a great exercise to do. Um, we call it. We call it a Persona activation workshop. You can call it whatever you want. The exercise is what's important here. Um, if you picture a Venn diagram with two circles, two intersecting circles. Yep. Um, let's say one circle is what buyers want and need. Um, this is your buyer Persona. Right. So that circle, you've now got tons of insight. You know, everything but what buyers want and need to feel really confident buying from you.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: The right side is the part that you need to overlay, and that is your. Your organization's capabilities. Right.

Speaker A: Hope it overlays at least a little bit.

Speaker B: Uh, hopefully a lot of bit or a little bit, or at least in key areas. So let's say, you know, a typical study, we may come up with, I don't know, 30 to even 50 insights. Buying insights. You don't need to cover all 30 or 50. What you want to do is methodically do an exercise with stakeholders in your organization, Product experts, people that know competitors, maybe some marketing and sales folks. Go through each one and literally write down where. What capabilities you have to meet that specific buyer need. It's great exercise to do just in and of itself. It's a great exercise. Then what you want to do is, um, you want to see, where do you feel like you have, uh, competitive differentiation? So you go through that list and you say, all right, you know, we can do this well, but everybody else can too. Uh, you Know, doesn't mean we hide it, but, you know, maybe it's not accentuated, but, hey, we go through this.

Speaker A: We're a commodity. Everyone else is a commodity. We're the same as everyone else. Not great marketing.

Speaker B: Correct. But if you find five to ten things that are, we, you know, are really important to buyers and you have a distinct competitive advantage, that that's a place to really work with. And what you do is you do that overlay. And what you can do is develop, um, what we call the message themes and basically identify five, six, seven things. Usually we find five to seven overall themes that you can really rally around and develop proof points around. And it's not messaging, but it's literally one crank, one turn of the crank away from messaging. And you can use those a lot of different ways. One of the ways that is, uh, that we see a lot of companies use these message themes is, um, for sales enablement. Because going back to what I said earlier, they can hand their sales folks, hey, here's five things that we did the work, and we know buyers care about all of these, or at least some of these. And oh, by the way, you know, here's all the proof points we're giving to me right now so you can talk really confidently about our capabilities right now. Salespeople go in and they feel great, you know, so.

Speaker A: Right. Again, really helps marketing, but it really helps sales both. I mean, it helps the whole, along the whole pathway. It's the whole getting them hooked in, pulling them through the buyer journey all the way through.

Speaker B: Yeah. And like, for these, like, message themes I was talking about, you know, they're great to use for campaign ideation. They're great for thought leadership. Right. If you're trying to figure out, well, I could write about 20 things. You know, these message themes are a great place to focus and say, let's write about this because we know buyers want it. And by the way, we did the work and we know we have a good story to tell here.

Speaker A: You got content there. You can write a blog post about every single one of them, uh, that kind of thing. Instead of trying to cram everything into one bumper sticker ad, uh, you can make some people can actually read.

Speaker B: Yep. So it's a great exercise to do. Um, it takes, you know, you got to bring some key stakeholders together to do it. We tip. When we do these workshops, we typically have six, five to six key stakeholders. Um, with the companies that we work with that'll be in the room, we love to have product experts, folks that are just really objective and they can

Speaker A: tell you people from product, from marketing, from sales.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: I love that because, yeah, you know, they're going to be, you're going to be able to actually show them why they need to tweak the product maybe to make it marketable. Even like, uh, we understand this isn't like super necessary, but it's super necessary to get through this one step of the buyer journey. So we got to add this widget or this button or this color or if you're ketchup, you're like, we got to change the top of the bottle every six months. So we have something to say is different from our competitors.

Speaker B: Um, and it makes the buyer, it makes the buyer the champion in the room. And they should be, they should always be, they should always be the focus.

Speaker A: You mentioned CRMs and it made me think, how long is it? I mean, CRM is one of those products where once people are in, it's really hard to get them to switch over. I'm just picturing, uh, you're going to have CRMs on cereal boxes and stuff eventually where they're just like, we got to get them when they're young.

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker A: Too late. We got to get them when they're young. We got our little CRM toy inside and everything. And your fruity flakes.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: It's just that they're like, that's when the triggers, that's when we're starting is right there. Exactly. We got to get the branding dug in. Right. Uh, fantastic. Okay, we've been through a lot on this already. Um, what are we leaving out? What do people need to know? I guess before that, even the, the size. This. Some people are listening, thinking like, whoa, this is a lot. And it probably is a lot for them and doesn't really apply to their business. What size company typically. Does something like this make sense or what? What size product? I guess I'd say you could have a one person company probably that's selling a very high value course or something like that. And they really need to understand this better. It could, could make a lot of sense to do this. Um, so what kind of product? Uh, size.

Speaker B: It has literally nothing to do with company size. Zero. Um, it all comes down to the buying decision. So this, the approach that we are talking about is really for more high consideration buying decisions. The ones like multiple decision influencers, takes a longer period of time, et cetera, et cetera. Right. So if you're talking about a transactional commodity purchase, like you know, buying a can of soup Right. That's. This isn't going to be very relevant

Speaker A: or software as a service where you're making, even paying a monthly fee maybe of you know, 1999, that's not gonna. Buying a domain. This is not going to be something that's uh, necessary probably if think about it.

Speaker B: If, if you have a product or service where your buyers more often than not are looking at multiple options, right. Like they're really evaluating in multiple options. There's at least a couple of influencers. Um, then this is, then this type of methodology is going to work really well for you. And it doesn't even matter what the size of the deal is. Right. It really matters if you know, is there ROI in doing this work relative to, you know, the value you potentially get by improving your marketing and sales. That's the key criterion. We work with um, and have seen companies do these Personas on their own. From really small companies to huge companies. Right. You know, top, top five companies in the country. So it really just depends.

Speaker A: It seems like um, is it typically a product that is kind of contracted in versus uh, something people may buy and then later buy it? You know, switch here and there, kind of uh, not so much an impulse buy but you know, you know, I mean like a CRM. You get locked into the CRM type of a thing. Some other products maybe you can, you know, data. Sometimes some companies lock you into a contract, some companies you go and you buy and you're, you're done. It's a one time and, and it's easier to jump around. Um, is this.

Speaker B: It could work for both.

Speaker A: It's not necessarily the, the lockdown, long term contract type sale.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean so for example, we're just finishing up a buyer Persona for MRI machines. Right. The, you know, the, the kind where you kind of lay down on the movable table and you go in that big tube. We're just doing one for that. That's a pretty big.

Speaker A: I never thought there was more than one MRI machine.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, I, there are. We've learned. I didn't know. Yeah, there are actually five or six major providers of those machines and we're in the middle of a really interesting study right now and that's a large capital expenditure, typically a million, $2 million for that. And they don't change them every year but you know, they do like everything. The technology improves and you know, things wear out. But we've also done um, a lot of studies for software as service where it's a contract type thing and maybe not even For a huge amount. But companies are looking at multiple options. It's a high consideration buying decision for them.

Speaker A: Well, and if they map this out, it may help them. Maybe it is A$50 a month software as a service product, but if you're selling, you know, very large volumes of these things, uh, that's really what matters is you're sending out this amount of marketing messaging, Is it getting people in the pipeline and then are you able to move them through or not?

Speaker B: Yep. Um, the other thing to think about too, as far as size is, um, you don't need to do a million interviews. Right. A typical buyer Persona study. We recommend doing 10 interviews. Of these in depth interviews, you can always do more. So we would never discourage anybody from doing more. Minimum of 10 is what we find that, you know, what we've done in the past is we've done 10 interviews and then done survey research after to confirm and validate. And every time we've done that, it's been very confirming. Um, if you do any more than 10, you start learning the same things. You don't learn, you don't necessarily learn anything net new, so to speak, anything less than 10. And then sometimes what happens is you'll have insights that you're not really sure about because maybe you heard it from one person.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: But if you do 10 good interviews, you'd be surprised how much, how much insight you can get around that buying decision. So it's not like you got to go to 100 people, right?

Speaker A: If you have that much variation where you do 10 and you have 10 completely different scenarios, then it seems like you have a different kind of a problem when focusing the product or something. It's a, it's a crazy market to target if you're getting that much variety for the same product in, you probably

Speaker B: haven't defined the buying decision discreetly enough.

Speaker A: If that's maybe the ideal customer profile. If you're, if you're splattering all over the company and different companies are getting different buying groups, um, you may be different, getting very, uh, different or different industries that maybe work differently for that particular product. You, uh, got to focus down a little more. If you're, if 10 isn't getting you, like you said, uh, so much answer overlap that it's obvious you're on the right path.

Speaker B: Right? Yep.

Speaker A: Excellent. Um, what's a common thing that, I mean, you said the tenant interview thing and then they start to look all pretty similar and you're like, okay, I think we've nailed it down. That seems like an area where you could go terribly wrong if you were like, I'm going to do 10 interviews and you did them and they're all over the place, um, and you just move forward. Are there any other. What other areas? I guess it's a, um. Can people go terribly wrong and have this blow up on them? Like, what are the major mistakes they look out for if they're going to do this?

Speaker B: The biggest thing is how you conduct the interviews. Um, and we can talk about resources that I can point you to for, for the folks that want to, um. Folks want to do this type of approach on their own. The biggest thing is to. Is how you conduct interviews. So it is, quote, unquote, qualitative research for people familiar. Familiar with that research lingo, where, you know, they're unstructured conversations. The key. The key requirement, I always say, for good interviewers for this methodology is just having a really curious mind, uh, and being a good listener. Because if you think about. When you get on the interview, if you think to yourself, okay, my whole objective here is almost, uh, think. If you're a journalist, my whole objective here is an. Understand the buyer's story, right? The person you're talking to is the star of the show, right? You want to know, you want to understand everything they did. The beauty of this is they're not making it up. They're not pontificating, they're not telling you what they think about it or an attitude they have. They are literally retracing their steps and telling you, here's all the things that happen.

Speaker A: Here's what happen.

Speaker B: Here's the things that were important to us, right? It's almost like they're reciting back to you everything that happened. So what you want to do is just ask the right questions, right? So like, priority initiatives, your triggers. Great first question is, you know, what were some of the things that even got you to start looking for this particular solution? And then keep probing. You know, they say something and say, is there anything else that got you started? Right? And then success factors, you know, the outcomes. You say, like, okay, so, you know, you. You made a decision that you wanted to go do something here. Um, what were the really important outcomes? Right? What were the things that you needed to show, um, that you had that changed or there was a positive result? Tell me a little bit about those, right?

Speaker A: What kind of person usually conducts. Let's say you're having somebody in your company. Like, would you have somebody in sales, somebody in marketing, somebody in product? Um, I guess what I'M kind of, I'm leading you here. Uh, or trying to almost is. It occurs to me that if you're leading the person you're interviewing, it could be dangerous. Like, if you have a certain feature or the product person's interviewing that they really think is important, they're going to want to get that person to say, that's what really influence them. Uh, you know, whether it's, oh, we're low price people, or if you're not low price, and you have a person who champions the fact that we charge more than anybody else because we're worth it, they're going to want to like, really get the person to be like, yeah, price doesn't matter as long as it's high quality or something like that. So, uh, leading the witness seems like it could be really dangerous. And that might really depend on who's doing the interview. Is there an ideal person to carry, uh, these out?

Speaker B: Yeah, it's not, it's definitely not a. I wouldn't make a blanket recommendation on a particular function or role that that takes the charge here. It is the individual, right? Is it, you know, it's the type of individual that can say to themselves when they're getting on one of these interviews, my whole objective here is to ask good questions so I can understand the buyer's truth, right? That's what I want to know. It doesn't matter what it is. It could be off the wall, for that matter. But, uh, whatever it is, it's theirs, right? That's what you want to understand. So that could be somebody in your marketing area. Could have a researcher. Could be someone in your product area. Product could be a little dangerous sometimes if they are thinking about features, right.

Speaker A: They're in love with a certain thing they really want.

Speaker B: But again, you could. We have found people in product areas that have been great interviewers, right? So it's an innate curiosity. It's a, you know, being able to say, the buyer is a star here. Not me, not my, my company, not my product and features. All that stuff doesn't matter. We can talk about that after we find out what the buyers think. What's important right now is understand what they think.

Speaker A: Maybe you'd want to ask your people, like, what's your favorite sports team? And if they had a team, you'd be like, okay, what if your quarterback, you know, robbed a bank? Should he be arrested? Or, you know, uh, basically, are you in love with your team? If somebody's like, oh, yeah, I watch sports, but, you know, I just want to Watch a good game. You're like, okay, that's our person. That's our person right there. I, you don't want somebody who's married to a particular brand or a particular team or something like they got to be open minded enough to uh, um, you know, to not just lock down and try to have their, their agenda being pushed there.

Speaker B: Yep. I mean if you really understand the five rings of insight, what you're trying to get at in each one of them and you have good listening skills and you can step and not be the star of the show, you're 90% of the way there because now you go into the interview and you have a good idea about the insights you need to pull from them. So that's going to guide the questions that you ask. And the other, you know, tip is, you know, when we see interviewers that probe very effectively, they don't take a first answer for that. So let's say for example, you're probing on success factors and you're trying to figure out what are the key outcomes they're looking for. And they say improved efficiencies. Well, improved efficiencies. What do you mean by that?

Speaker A: They just write it down, move on to the next question.

Speaker B: Yeah, the buyer. If the buyer starts saying, well, what we really want to do is we've been blah, blah, blah in this area and we really think we can take cost out of this area. Now all of a sudden you're getting to a place where now you're really understanding the buyer. Right. And that can fast forward, that can run through your marketing and sales is a lot more effective than improve efficiencies. Where I can, which I can assure you, you and all your competitors are saying the same thing. Right.

Speaker A: Almost like no matter what they say. Can you tell me more about that? Can you tell me more about that?

Speaker B: Yeah. Right. We call it in the uh, uh, in the research business we call that laddering. It's a laddering interview technique. But it's, there's no mystery to it. It's just probing until you get the, you know, the real answer that you're looking for.

Speaker A: Excellent. Give me something deeper. I don't want that surface answer. Uh, uh, now what about if you do get somebody who's just not giving you good answers? Do you just kill the interview and okay, thanks. And move on to the next person? I mean, I'm sure there's some people you could get in and you're just like this, this is a throwaway, this is not going to be useful. Information they're giving me. Yes. They don't want to be here or whatever it is.

Speaker B: Yeah. So I always. In any study, I always talk about this as a bell curve, right? You're in any study that you do. Let's say you do 10 interviews, you're going to have one or two star performers that are just outstanding, right? They really know what happened, and they articulate it very crisply, and they give you a lot of depth and they do it efficiently. Then you usually have one or two that are, uh, maybe like you said, right, not very talkative. You got to really pull teeth to get it out of them. Um, the most of the people are going to be somewhere in the middle, right? Where they're going to be. You know, you have to pull a little bit, but they're going to give you a little bit. And the other thing, too, is you don't need ten perfect interviews. Right. Again, the. You're trying to. The buyer Persona is the buying decision. You're trying to create the insights. The way to look at the interviews is they're all a little piece of the puzzle, right? You know, there's 10 pieces of the puzzle. They're going to add their.

Speaker A: Some people contribute more and some people contribute less.

Speaker B: And if you get somebody who's the worst type of interviewee is we get somebody on who we screen rigorously. They told us they were involved in the buying decision, um, blah, blah, blah. And then we get on and we find out that they know nothing about it.

Speaker A: They wanted a $10Amazon gift, right?

Speaker B: And then we terminate them, right? We. We. We terminate them nicely and say, you're not, you know, unfortunately, you're not right for this study. And, you know, that's it. You don't want to waste their time, you don't want to waste yours. But that's. There's some things you can do to avoid that, minimize that.

Speaker A: Right? So, um, you're in the middle of rewriting a book on buyer Personas right now. Um, I suppose people listening should, I mean, maybe go out, buy the book, and then when it's the new edition comes out, buy that one as well. So you can compare and contrast the differences. I don't know, but maybe wait till the new one, new, ah, one comes out. Were you involved in writing the original or are you involved in the rewrite?

Speaker B: Specifically the rewrite. So Adele Revella, who founded Buyer Persona Institute about 15 years ago, wrote the first edition, and that's. I think it's about eight or nine years old at this point. So, um, we're updating that. Um, it'll be out in the middle of next year and there's, there's a lot of, A lot of the stuff is going to stay similar from the standpoint of the overall methodology, the framework that we've been talking a bit about. Um, but we are going to go into some new and different areas. Um, like AI for example. What's the role of AI? How can it help you subsidize your Personas and add to the insights you're getting from interviews? Uh, we're going to be talking a little bit more about how you can turn Persona insights into, um, actually improving performance and things you can do with marketing sales so how you can leverage them a little bit more. We're, uh, going to go a bit deeper into the buying decision because that's such a, you know, we spent a lot of time in the first. In the beginning of this conversation and the distinction between a role based, audience based Persona and a Persona based on the buying decision is, you know, it's fundamental. Right. So we're going to spend a little more time talking about that. M. Just to help people understand the difference. And what are the pros and cons?

Speaker A: Excellent, excellent. Um, so how did you get to this space? Like, how did you get into buyer Personas? What was kind of your life's journey that ends you focusing on buyer Personas so much that the intro said that word like 20 times. Um, like, where did you come from? What did you do before you were here? And then let's, uh, lead right into buyer Personas and, and kind of, uh, the types of services and what you guys do. Exactly there as well.

Speaker B: Yeah. So my, my career has been spent almost exclusively in the market research industry. So I spent decades leading research teams both on the client side and on the supplier side, uh, vendor side. And for me, I had known Adele for years. We, uh, had crossed paths with different clients and different things that we were working on. And she had retired at the end of last year. So we started working together a couple years ago. Um, and it was just one of the reasons that I love working with Buyer Persona Institute and the team that we have is because it takes. It's not just doing a research study. Right. It's much more than that. It's literally taking a research study and it has immediate impact on marketing, actually applying it.

Speaker A: I always felt I didn't know much about market research, but it was like, okay, this stuff's done, and then what?

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Yeah. So I've always Had a bent towards leaning into the then what type stuff. So it's a very natural flow for me. So this was just a logical thing for me to be interested. And anybody that knows me would say, of course Jim's interested in this type of buyer Persona. Right. So, um, that, that's kind of, that's long story short, that's what led me here.

Speaker A: Well, and even this, the market research didn't come up until you got partway into your process. And you guys like, it's not about the market research. That's just kind of the data you're, you're using to create something and do something useful. Um, do you recommend people, uh, do their own market research or hire an outside firm? I mean, let's say you have a company that could go either way. They're like, look, we can have somebody do this internally or we can pay a market research firm to do it. Is there a preference there for us?

Speaker B: No. Right. So I mean, you know, obviously, you know, if we're doing studies for companies, that helps us. Right. As far as bringing in business. So we, we are always happy to help companies with their buyer Personas. Uh, it really depends. Right. So you know, if you have the knowledge and skills in house to be able to do this on your own, you know, have at it. Right. We do offer on our website, we actually offer a master class that you can take. It's a self, it's an online self paced class that will take a lot of stuff we talked about and give you even more detail. Right. So you'll, it'll, you know, how do you do interviews, how do you recruit all those?

Speaker A: How to do everything?

Speaker B: Yeah, it gets you closer. But having said that, there is, you know, the two hardest things to do that we do, um, will be one, just finding the recent buyers, um, can be challenging sometimes. We'll, uh, have organizations work with us because it's all we do. Like we've gotten good at it. Right. That seems like the other thing is the interviews I told you about. There is, there is a skill involved. Yeah, there is a skill involved and you can learn it. It's not rocket science, but there is a skill involved in that to do them well. So it really depends. And so if you have the budget, have a little budget to outsource it, I think that's the best decision. And with no bias at all, if you don't, then you certainly can go do something that can provide a lot of benefit for the company. So I don't want to discourage anybody that would Want to do this on their own.

Speaker A: So is this a barrier to entry type product or not product, but, um, process where if you don't do it right, it's actually ineffective or damaging. Or if somebody was to do like, oh, I'm going to do kind of, ah, a half ass, or let's say a simple version of this. Sounds great. Let me do a simple version. Some things, if you do that, it's worse than doing nothing. And some things, it's perfectly fine. It's like, okay, you, you did a simple version of this, you did something. Where does this fall in that?

Speaker B: Um, it. Again, it depends. I will say this. If, if the only insights that you really have is kind of just secondary research and taking your best guess or sales anecdotes, then I would say even if you can do this half ass, it's better than doing nothing. As long as you're actually talking to recent buyers. As long as that's the case, I guess enough.

Speaker A: If you have asked by talking to one person, then maybe, uh, if it's

Speaker B: a recent buyer who's made that buying decision and it's not just your current customer, you know, then that's worth doing. Right? Because those insights are gold. So everything we talked about is how to do it well and, you know, get the most out of it.

Speaker A: I thought I just had. It seems as an ongoing, maybe a company who wants to do this type of thing, but it's a big jump to just start doing it and put it all together. Um, if you were to tap your sales team and every time they ran into somebody that just bought or went with someone else and just use that as a. Okay, here's a. Then you have an ongoing. Oh, let us just, let us just over time, ongoing, have people and add to the buyer Persona. It doesn't seem like it's something you have to do all in one shot. Um, you could do an interview a, uh, month or every couple months and add a new interview and let it build up. Is that a technique in particular? Is it something that would work? Is there any idea reason that would be a bad idea?

Speaker B: I would discourage it for two reasons. One is there's going to be biases there. Um, and two, the bigger reason is that salespeople just aren't trained to interview like this. Right? I mean, they're trained to understand their customer and everything, but to have an unbiased interview where you're taking a real objective step back from an approach is not how the salespeople are built at all.

Speaker A: The sales guy who just lost the deal to a competitor.

Speaker B: Well, they're, they're trying to, they're trying to educate and influence. Right. They're having conversations for a purpose. This is, is less.

Speaker A: This is.

Speaker B: I need to take a step back here and I'm just trying to learn with no, no agenda. Yeah, it's, it's risky. I definitely would not recommend salespeople. I would rather see somebody in your marketing area take a shot at this.

Speaker A: I guess I was thinking more of a. The identification stage.

Speaker B: Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, no, that's possible.

Speaker A: Kind of say, hey, check out this company. Here's a contact.

Speaker B: Yeah, uh, it's possible. Yep. The only downside of that is if you just find recent buyers and they're not your current customers and they're not people that are identified by your sales team if they're a customer or not. Now you've got a Persona that you can literally say this is a market based Persona. This is a. Going back to our example, this is the buying decision for CRM and all the insights. Got nothing to do with our customers. Right. Nothing to do with our sales folks. This is unbiased, objective. This is who we want to be selling in our sales pipeline.

Speaker A: That's pretty powerful out in the wild versus taking somebody out of your pipeline.

Speaker B: Correct.

Speaker A: May find you had the wrong pipeline to start with or something like that. So you're already doing this self selected crowd and uh, it won't fix anything above that point in the pipeline maybe.

Speaker B: Right? Yep.

Speaker A: Okay. Excellent. Yeah. Yeah. I guess if they got down to that point in the pipeline again, it also you're, you're narrowing down to something that may have been narrowed down to through your faulty sales and marketing because you didn't properly have this identified. So you're getting a uh, self selected crowd that may be improperly self selected already. Correct. Fantastic. Um, let's see. One last thing I think could be useful on this. Is there any particular software or any particular, anything that would assist people in uh, carrying this kind of a thing out?

Speaker B: No, not really. I mean from a software perspective. I mean just, I, um, know our time's getting close here. Um, I can point you to just a couple of resources for your listeners if you go to buyerpersona.com, that's our website. Um, there's some, there's different free resources you can tap into. There's buyer Persona templates there, there's sample buyer Personas there. Um, there's the masterclass if you wanted to take that. And um, we put a lot of Thought leadership out there. So for any of the topics we've been talking about, that's a great place to go for additional information if anybody's interested.

Speaker A: Fantastic. This will be a seamless uh, transition here then. Yeah, we'll, we'll put that in the show notes on if you market.com as well as uh, information LinkedIn, uh profile maybe to uh, connect with you and um, a uh, link to the uh, Buyer Personas book on Amazon, the first edition there. Anywhere else uh, where people can find you find the uh, the company buyer Persona.

Speaker B: Now LinkedIn is a great place to connect with me or Buyer Persona Institute as well. We're out there so that would be, you know, feel free.

Speaker A: Fantastic. Well I encourage everyone to check out the show notes@ifyourmarket.com we'll have all the information there and uh, more links to Jim uh Krause and um, share us on social media. Tell your friends, give us a good review, it all helps. And uh, on behalf of the if you Market team and Jim Krause of Buyer Persona, thank you for listening to the if youf Market podcast where we believe if you market the out of it with Buyer Personas they will come. Are you looking for new leads or always in need of quality contacts for your marketing campaigns? But list companies and online tools are the worst, right? Well then you've got to check out Top Data Search by Mountaintop Data. At Mountaintop Data, we're a team of weird people that actually like getting our hands dirty with sales and marketing data. And we specialize in business contact information. We compile and maintain a database of tens of millions of targeted high quality business decision makers with emails, phone numbers, mailing address and all the information you need. Go to topdatasearch.com and request a free account with the promo code IYM1000. Like if you market the podcast here and get a free account with unlimited searches, no seat fees and 1000 free record download credits. That's top data. Search.commhm. This podcast is a part of the C Suite Radio Network.

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