MarketSense

Buyer Profiles versus Buyer Personas

Buyer profiles, buyer personas, is there a difference?

The answer is both "no" and "yes".

Buyer personas are typically described as profiles of the buyer. Yet, they warrant new terminology because they go way beyond the simplistic buyer profiles of yesteryear.

Traditionally, marketers used buyer profiles to help them segment their target markets. These buyer profiles tended to be simplistic in nature. For business to business buyers, the profile might include industry, role (via title), business size,and business location. For consumers, the profile might include gender, age, location, and income.

These buyer profiles reflected what marketers could actually target with the marketing databases and advertising of the times. Why build better profiles when the technology didn't exist to really use it?

Well, the technology exists today. Marketers have a significantly enhanced toolbox complete with information about intent - keyword search and adwords as well as the ability to track all sorts of behaviors with marketing automation tools.

It is difficult to realize the full potential of these tools without a much richer buyer profile to drive them. This is where buyer personas come in.

Buyer personas are profiles for real people, not simply categories of people. They detail the characteristics that come into play when an individual seeks to buy a product. Buyer personas can include the traditional components:

• Demographics - age, gender, marital status, income, location, etc.
• Bizographics - industry, business size, seniority, function, role, risk, culture, etc.

Of greater value are the buyer personas' personal characteristics:

• Psychographics - personality, values, attitudes, interests, lifestyles, etc.
• Motivation - needs, goals, pains,ideals, challenges, etc.
• Relationships - peers, subordinates, superiors, etc.
• Modalities - behaviors, buying needs, buying process, risk tendencies, decision-making, etc.

Marketers who create buyer personas, aren't throwing darts into the great unknown anymore. They actually understand their buyer. They know not only where to find them (basically all we got from the old buyer profiles), but how to reach and engage them. They know how to persuade them to buy.

As you can see from the depth of the profile, buyer personas aren't trivial to create. You actually have to research your buyers. You have to talk with and listen to your buyers. You have to draw from the variety of individuals in your organization that have first hand experience with your buyers. Then, you have to analyze all of this information to make sense of it.

The result is pure gold for you and your organization. Every buyer persona insight is actionable. Use the insight to improve your product design, build a more effective marketing approach, create a stronger relationship, and expedite your sales process.

Once you know your buyer, all of your marketing and sales efforts can be designed to optimize the buying process.

Want to increase your conversion rate, use buyer concerns to attract your buyer.
Want to decrease your sales cycle, anticipate your buyer's needs.
Want to close the sale, craft the persuasive offer.

Buyer personas give you the insight you need to achieve each of these objectives.

Improve your personal effectiveness as a marketer. Dig in and use the institutional knowledge to start crafting buyer personas. Watch it reap rewards across the organization. Knowledge is power. Buyer personas change the marketing game.

Marketing Automation and Marketing Methodology

More and more leading edge marketers are adding marketing automation tools like Marketo, Eloqua, Manticore, or SilverPop to their marketing toolboxes. And for good reason. Amongst marketing automation's greatest strengths are its abilities to more easily integrate campaigns, analyze response, and improve the results of marketing activities.

More enticing is marketing automation's ultimate reward -- enabling marketing to play a critical role in revenue attainment.

But to realize this reward, you need something more than the marketing automation tool. You need a strategy built on a proven methodology.

Start implementing your campaigns and gathering metrics. It won't be long before you realize this truth for yourself. Marketing automation can help you execute your marketing activities faster. Bad tactics more quickly in. Poor results more quickly out.

If you had bad marketing habits before, marketing automation tool use tends to further expose those bad habits.

Let's be clear. I am not demoting marketing automation tools. To the contrary, marketing automation tools are the essential foundation to on-going, successful marketing contribution to revenues.

What I am saying and what marketing automation vendors are advocating is that this success cannot be achieved without an underlying strategic methodology.

And what are they recommending? Universally, marketing automation vendors are talking about buying process based methodology.

So, what is a buying process methodology? A buying process methodology is

A marketing approach that acknowledges and aligns with a buyer's needs throughout the buying process

What makes a buying process methodology successful?

Buyers buy when their needs are met. A buying process approach focuses on anticipating each need of a prospect as he/she works through the buying process.

Recently in this blog, I have concluded an introduction to the different stages of the deliberated buying process. This is part of the foundation for our buying process methodology.

To realize the benefits of the methodology, we recognize the symbiotic relationship this methodology has with marketing automation tools. Implementing a buying process methodology without a marketing automation tool is challenging.

Marketing automation helps you visualize, model, implement, track and adjust your buying process strategy.

Are you already intimate with your marketing automation tool? Are you just getting started with your marketing automation purchase? Or are you still evaluating the purchase of a marketing automation tool?

In all cases, it is time you looked at a buying process methodology so that you can achieve those ultimate marketing automation rewards.

Learn more about our buying process methodology with our eBook - Understanding the Buying Process

Post Purchase Buyer Decision Evaluation

If purchases are what every marketer strives for, then returns are the marketer's best kept secret. If you've spent 3 months of marketing and sales activity, the return of a purchased product turns out to be quite costly.

Buyers always reevaluate their purchase decision after the money has exchanged hands. They may do it immediately, or they may do it at some point in the future. Regardless of when they reevaluate, the outcome of their evaluation impacts your business.

The buyer's evaluation criteria is quite simple:

Did the reality of the product meet my expectations

If their product experience doesn't match their expectations, bad things happen.

1. Product return

If a product return stems from a product defect, you have a quality issue. Quickly replace the offending item with a working one and you can minimize the damage.

If the product return stems from discontentment with the way the product met expectations, you have either a communication problem or a relationship problem.

2. Shelf-ware

Shelf-ware is a hidden problem for marketers. Your product has been purchased, but it ends up not being used. Yes, the marketer gets the money, but nothing else is gained in the transaction. Not product loyalty. Not brand building.

Shelf-ware is the bottom waiting to fall out of your business. What appears to be healthy on the surface (sales) is masked by a slow death of disinterest.

3. No repurchase

Some products or services will need to be repurchased in the future. Clothes wear out. Machines break down. Subscriptions expire. An unsatisfying original product (or brand) experience, limits your ability to capture that repeat purchase. Say good-bye to high customer lifetime value.

Long lags between purchases can make uncovering the original purchase issues very difficult. Customer satisfaction studies are one way of staying on top of buyer satisfaction.

4. Product complaints

Now, more than ever, unhappy buyers have a multitude of forums to broadcast their complaints. Those complaints can influence greater numbers of prospects than ever before. This means that marketers have to take customer complaints seriously.

Marketers should always create mechanisms and encourage disgruntled customers to communicate their issues directly with the business. Marketers must monitor social media, rating web sites, etc. to intercept problems before they blossom into brand damaging rants. Be aggressive in fixing the problem both with the customer as well as with the issue's origination.

As you can see, a product return is the least of a marketer's problems.

Here are some ways to make a buyer's post-purchase evaluation work for you:

1. Encourage the buyer to communicate directly to you their post-sale perception of the product. Incent it if you have to.
2. Gather those positive buyer stories and use them.
3. Don't make the buyer the bad guy when he/she gives you negative feedback. Treat your buyer like you would want to be treated -- with honor and respect.
4. Don't hide the buyer's issues under the rug. Deal with them. Use them to make your product better.

Getting Your Prospect from Decision to Purchase

The road from a prospect's selection of your product to handing over the money is littered with potholes. And most of those potholes are of our own creation.

Now, if you are selling a product that only needs to be repurchased every 3-5 years, you may be able to live with the inefficiency. However, in our renewal-heavy, Software as a Service (SaaS) world, this inefficiency will absolutely kill your business.

If there is one truth to give us context for creating purchase efficiency, it is:

Buyers want to purchase where and how they want to purchase.

Your job is to make it easy for your buyer to purchase in his/her preferred channel, with his/her preferred payment method.

How we put the purchase at risk:

1. Preferred channel isn't enabled

The buyer has worked through their buying process without engaging a person. Company XYZ does not offer on-line purchase. The company forces the buyer to complete the purchase through a sales representative.

2. Preferred payment type isn't accepted

The buyer's purchasing department requires that all business purchases are to be made via a purchase order. Company XYZ doesn't accept purchase orders.

3. Required payment paperwork is not created

In order to obtain corporate reimbursement for a purchase made on a personal credit card, certain proof of payment must be submitted. Company XYZ has no way to create paperwork that meets the buyer's requirements.

4. Licensing model does not support the buyer's needs

Company XYZ only offers individual, non transferrable licenses for its product. The buyer needs a more flexible sharing or use-based option.

5. Price competition across channels

Significant price differences for the same product across channels can stall or redirect the buyer's purchase.

6. Last minute surprises

Return policies, end user licensing terms and restrictions, next steps, additional costs... any product detail which comes as a surprise to the buyer can deter the purchase. More importantly it can introduce trust issues that completely derail the purchase.

7. Trust issues

Company XYZ's on-line store isn't clear about communications, privacy, security, and credit card handling policies. What buyer will risk identity theft to purchase there?

8. Product is out-of-stock in channel

The buyer has an urgent need to purchase your product. However, the product is out-of-stock in their preferred channel. Will the buyer wait, go elsewhere or change their selection?

Timing is Everything

Your goal should be to move the buyer from product selection to purchase as quickly as possible.

• The greater the time lag between the decision and the payment, the greater the risk that the buyer will abandon the purchase with you.

Sharing Purchase Channels

Shared purchase channels create their own payment completion challenges. A dedicated purchase channel would be one that sells only your product(s). Dedicated channels don't introduce competition that could derail the buyer's payment. However, dedicated channels may not be the buyer's preferred channel.

Buyers often will enter a shared channel, firm in their product choice. Yet, a number of factors could change which product they ultimately purchase. Competitive promotions and discounts can alter a value-based decision. Unavailability and last minute surprises can trigger a new selection.

Design Your Payment Channels

You have invested significant assets to motivate your buyer to purchase your product. Make sure that you design the final payment step to simplify and expedite the buyer's payment.

Read more about the buying process our eBook Understanding the Buying Process or in this blog series.

Building Emotional Connection for Your Products

We cannot stress enough the importance of creating a positive emotional connection with your buyer. Without that "good feeling", achieving the final sale will be elusive.

Positive emotional connection isn't just about interpersonal interactions. The buyer's emotional response is based on all of the buyer's interactions with you, your product, and your brand -- not just your sales team.

Let's reiterate again the emotions you need to create throughout the buying process in order to stimulate a sale.

1. Likability
2. Trustworthiness
3. Desirability to work with
4. Without fears
5. Supportive
6. Excitement

Now, the hard part. How do you create these positive emotions in your buyer? You create strong emotional connections by driving emotional consistency across all of these areas:

• Look and feel of your web site, content, and communications

Do not underestimate the emotive power of your look and feel. Lightness and space create a sense of openness, of breathing room.

• Voice and tone of your content

Tone and voice create a sense of sincerity, honesty and approachability. Does the content tone depict you as personal, professional, and encouraging?

• The content itself

The content should be about the buyer, not about you. Does your content portray you as a distant entity or a personable, trustworthy associate.

• Integrity of personal relationships

Say what you mean, mean what you say, and stand by what you promised. Listen and affirm. Learn and grow. Really care. Be a servant not a ruler.

So, what happens if along the way the buyer starts forming a negative connection with you? Is the sale lost?

The longer you let negative emotions build, the more difficult it is to turn them around.

But to get the sales you must turn around any negative emotions. It isn't easy.

1. You must understand what the emotions are and how they were developed
2. You cannot dismiss these emotions - the buyer must feel heard and understood
3. You will need to take action

Changing the emotional tenor at this stage requires a personal touch. You must be open, not defensive, willing to do what it takes to make the situation right in the eyes of the buyer. This must be done with unfailing attention to consistency of your behaviors.

But negative emotions can be turned around. It will take an investment to do so. In cases where you succeed, the war stories can do more to build your reputation than anything else you could try to orchestrate.

How Buyers Select Your Product

We are in the final stretches of the prospect's buying process. Your prospect has understood their need, researched the alternatives, and evaluated their options.

You are waiting for the buyer to make their decision. They seem to be taking forever. What is holding them up?

1. Unanswered questions
2. Unaddressed concerns
3. Need isn't great enough
4. Alternatives aren't compelling enough
5. One alternative doesn't stand out
6. Something doesn't feel right

If the buyer's issue is with questions or concerns, the good news is that you can fix this by:

• Opening up feedback mechanisms that encourage the buyer to communicate their issues with you
• Understanding the issues of previous buyers and develop content to address these issues

Audience interviews are a great mechanism to help you understand prospect and buyer issues.

If the buyer's issue is with the need or a compelling, stand out alternative, you haven't lost the sale yet. These issues often point to a failure of the buying process to date to adequately develop the pain and the solution.

• Quantify the negative effects of not making a decision
• Enable the buyer to envision their success with your product

The biggest issue you face in product selection is buyer's emotion.

It is most important to recognize that the buying decision will not be based solely on the merit of your product.

How the buyer connects emotionally with your offering is critical to the purchase decision.

1. Do they like you?
2. Do they trust you?
3. Do they want to work with you?
4. Have you addressed and alleviated their fears?
5. Do they believe that you will stand by them if problems surface?
6. Are they excited about what you will do for them?

Did you notice that I repeatedly said "you" instead of "your product"? This isn't a mistake. Buyers will tend to humanize products. (That is one of the reasons why branding continues to play an important role in product selection.)

Creating that positive emotional connection that helps you sail through the selection stage is not easy. In fact, it is so important that I will focus on it in my next blog entry.

Ensuring Buyer Consideration when Narrowing the Alternatives

We've just passed the half way step in the prospect's buying process. We should still be under consideration if we have been found, our offering is included in their frame, their information needs have been met, and our offering fits key decision criteria.

The buyer has probably been informally making assessments of the alternatives to this point. However, he/she will eventually come to a point when he/she switches from information gathering mode to information assessment mode. This may happen because he/she has exhausted the information available. It could also occur because he/she is hitting a time threshold for his/her need.

A buyer will only hold onto a few alternatives going into the final purchase decision.

To simplify the final decision, the buyer will want to narrow down the alternatives he/she is seriously considering. He/sh is going to do this based on the criteria he/she has identified so far.

So, what is the buyer going to do with that criteria? He/she is going to prioritize it. Some criteria is more important than others. If your offering rates well for the highly ranked criteria, you will have an advantage. You can see why not only helping define that criteria list, but also ensuring the buyer understands how your offering rates for the criteria is important.

If you don't help prospects understand how and why your offering should be evaluated as you recommend, then the buyer will be left to do this him/herself. The outcome will not necessarily be accurate or in your favor.

There is no guarantee that the prospect won't evaluate your offering for each criterion on his/her own. However, if you are honest and open about how you rate for a criterion, this can minimize the difference in the results. It also earns you points in the emotional area of trust.

Buyers will also include criteria that aren't explicitly called out on the decision list.

There will always be decision criteria that isn't written down on the buyer's evaluation list. That criteria isn't facts or measurements. This unstated criteria is emotional in nature.

Emotional considerations are as important as technical ones in the buyer's evaluation.

Have you been helpful in the earliest stages of their search?
Do they believe what they have learned about you?
Do they trust you?
Do they like you?

You must also rate well in the emotional aspects to make it to final consideration. Buyers don't want to buy from a company they don't like or trust. It is for this reason that the best product doesn't always win.

Who does win?

The product with the best fit will win. Emotional considerations are a critical part of the "fit" equation.

So, to make it to final consideration, you must:

1. Understand that criteria that the buyer will consider
2. Recognize that individual buyers will prioritize criteria differently
3. Help the buyer rate you on criteria that interest them
4. Ensure that you rate well on the unspoken emotional criteria

Helping the Buyer Define the Decision Criteria

It continues to surprise me how many marketers leave the definition of decision criteria for their product to someone else.

Every product has some areas where it excels and other areas where it may weakly compete. Perhaps marketers are afraid that buyers won't purchase their product if they know beforehand the product's weaknesses. If this is truly the case, the marketer has bigger problems than verbalizing the product's weaknesses.

At the Buyer's Mercy or Not

The result is that buyers are often on their own when it comes to defining decision criteria for a purchase.

In certain cases, buyers can turn to analysts, reviewers,or consumer agencies to learn how to evaluate the product's usefulness for their situation.

They may also turn to the volume of information on the Internet to supplement their research. In this age of abundant communication, marketers can't hide their dirty laundry for long.

Opening the Kimono

It is time that marketers start thinking differently. After all, it is the marketer's job to find good matches for its product. The best way that marketers can find these matches is by being honest and clear about the situations where their product works best. This also involves helping buyers not select their product when it is not suitable.

I often find that marketers are deathly afraid of admitting their product's weaknesses. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, if they don't admit the weakness, it doesn't exist.

I tend to look at it another way. If you can find buyers who are delighted with your product despite its weaknesses, you have a business. If you can't, you need to fix the product so that it can enable a viable business.

Some of the worst sales I have seen happen when a product purchased is not a good fit for the buyer. The pain and anguish these sales cause the business and the customer can be extreme. Why try to make a square peg fit into a round hole?

Help Buyers Find Their Perfect Match

Do you want to expedite a sale? Do you want to create a good buyer match? Then help the buyer understand the decision criteria they should be using when evaluating solutions for their need.

Be free to not have your product rise to the top in every situation. After all, isn't that what differentiation is all about?

Simplify the pros and cons of the important criteria. Position your product accurately against the criteria. You will save the buyer time. You also will build an amazing amount of trust with the buyer. That trust is your most valuable asset in a successful sale and in an unsuccessful one. With it, buyers remember and return to you for their other needs.

Researching a Need - Educating Your Buyer

In working with clients, the area that consistently needs the most work is prospect education. It is not that marketers don't educate their buyers. The problem is that the focus of that education is largely around the product.

Product-centric education is self-serving. "You"-focused product education cannot establish buyer trust. And buyer trust is always an important element in the purchase decision.

So, what is a marketer to do? We've been taught that data sheets, technical white papers, product specs, features and functions should be our primary output.

It's Time to Relearn Our Craft

It is time to change our vocabulary and our content mechanisms. We must re-orient them both towards the buyer.

As we've seen in the awareness of a need and framing a need buying process stages, we should enter the buyer's world by helping them understand their need and its potential solutions. However, just because a buyer has framed their need doesn't mean that they no longer need to learn about their need.

The buyer is always learning about their need. If all you offer is product-oriented literature, the buyer must translate that into need-related concepts. Every aspect of your product content is evaluated based on the buyer's understanding of their need. You talk about features. The buyer tries to translate those features into use cases.

And if the buyer cannot figure out how your product details satisfy his/her need, he/she will exit the buying process. Unfortunately, ineffective translation happens all of the time.

Need Education, Need Satisfaction

The way to help the buyer is to write need-oriented content. Types of need-oriented content include:

• Need characteristics - like a discussion of symptoms
• Remedies - develop the pros and cons of different solutions, not just yours
• Use Cases - illustrate how needs are satisfied with product use
• Case Studies - big picture descriptions address successful approaches and define expected results

You will note that a need-oriented list doesn't include product feature descriptions, data sheets, or technical white papers. Yet some of the information found in those type of documents is represented in need-oriented content. The difference is the contextual entry point to that information -- the buyer perspective not the product perspective.

Answering Buyer Questions without FAQs

Finally, content that answers buyers' questions will always be more engaging. I am not talking about frequently asked questions lists. FAQs are a lazy marketer's tool.

Take the time to understand the buyer's question and its related follow-ons. (How many times does one question lead to another?) Then determine how your content will organize related questions.

The Result - Buyer Engagement

There are four benefits of switching from product-centric content to need-oriented content.

1. Improved buyer comprehension - no longer is the buyer trying to correlate your product-oriented messages to their need
2. Faster buyer comprehension - by removing the translation step needed for correlation, the buyer quickly reaches a positive conclusion
3. More buyer matches - you no longer lose buyers who have not been able to recognize how your product solves their need
4. Increased buyer trust - by presenting options for need satisfaction and offering pros and cons for your solution

Take the Plunge

One of the easiest ways to test the value of your content is to source it on your web site. Introduce it. Follow the visitor analytics. Compare it with other content. Play around with navigation devices to the content. Ask your visitors to rate the content.

Never get to enamoured with your content. Learn from your metrics and be ready to dump old content and write fresh content.

Framing A Need - Ensuring Buyer Consideration

So, your buyer has become aware of his/her need/want/problem. They've been talking with their friends, looking for expert advice, and generally socializing their need.

As they process all of that information, they hone in on the mechanism that will make or break your ability to get through to them. That device is the problem frame.

Narrowing Down the Possibilities

For many needs/wants/problems, there are a variety of ways that each can be satisfied.

Let's take the example of a United States buyer who needs to replace his/her car. To start, he/she has 10 U.S. brands to choose from. Each of these brands offers numerous product lines. Each product in the line has plenty of different configurations. And this is before you add the 9 international car manufacturers with their product lines and configurations.

To keep the selection process manageable, buyers frame their need. That frame is their way of narrowing down the world of solutions to a smaller set.

How buyers narrow down that set of possibilities - frame - is critically important to you.

Frames define the scope of the buyer's solution search.

So, You Want to be Included

In selecting their frame, your product will either be included or excluded for consideration by the buyer.

In our car example above, say the buyer frames his/her need as

I want to buy a new Toyota.

If you are GM, what is the chance that you are going to get the time of day from the prospect while in his/her buying process? Close to zero unless something unexpected happens to cause the buyer to revisit his/her frame.

Unexpected things do happen. Look at the runaway car issues Toyota recently has faced. But can you really count on a major gaff by a competitor to give you entrée into the buyer's process? To put it another way, if you are GM, you would have to wait another 40 years before that will happen again.

How Do You Ensure Visibility

So, if being included in the buyer's frame is so important, how can you ensure that your product is included in the buyer's frame?

Help the buyer frame their need.

This takes us back to the awareness stage in the buyer's process. In order to help the buyer frame their need, your product needs to be found in at least one of the places the buyer is going to use to socialize their need.

You want to be the leading source of information about the buyer's need. You want to become the trusted advisor. You want to subtly help the buyer choose a frame that will include your product.

Car manufacturers spend millions of dollars a year creating frames. They do it with branding. Think of Volvo. Safety comes to mind. Think of BMW. Ultimate driving experience comes to mind. Because of the myriad of car options available in the marketplace, car manufacturers invest in branding to align with framed needs.

Not all of us have thousands to invest in our brand. But in this Internet age, you don't necessarily need to.

What you do need to do is ensure that your products can be found. Once found, you need to be the best at helping the buyer understand the way to frame his/her need.