Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor (follow me on Twitter at @fearlesscomp) of Find New Customers was trained in buyer personas by the Buyer Persona Institute and Buyer Personas is a service we offer our clients, so we want to share more information with you.
Why do Buyer Personas matter?
Buyer Personas help you create better marketing content, plain and simple, because the better you understand buyers, the better you select words which drive sales leads for you.
Congratulations to @hubspot who created a Buyer Persona Template in PowerPoint. Thanks for waving the flag, Hubspot.
No offense, Hubspot, but it’s nowhere near as good as the class I took with Adele Revella. The Buyer Persona Institute teaches one how to do detective-type interviews. Yours was too simple. Besides, Adele has the 5 Rings of Insights which is her copyright.
In yesterday’s post, we covered “Conducting the buyer interview” which is the hardest to do for most marketers, so check out that post and see why training and practice are so important and why it’s best left to trained professionals. (Thanks to Box.com we still have all the materials from that great class.)
Now we wan to answer a logical question. Who should you talk to? (Whom is the right word.)
Let me share the great insights from the e-book by Adele Revella (@buyerpersona) and Marianne Ross (@maribethross) titled “For Compelling Content, Let Your Buyers Be Your Guide.” Thank you, Adele and Marianne. Marianne now works for Aberdeen and not Netprospex anymore and I hope she’s doing well..
“Persona interviews are easiest to conduct with buyers who have recently invested a considerable amount of time in the buying process, or when the outcome of the decision has high stakes for the buyer. It is more difficult to lo engage buyers about decision that involved little research, or if the buyer would find it easy to replace the solution if they are dissatisfied.
For instance, buying a new business book on Amazon is a relatively low investment and interviewing the buyer about this decision would reveal little.
By contrast, the buyer who purchases a new enterprise software solution has spent months or years in the decision process and will be very happy to sell someone who is not in sales about the agonies of that experience.
The best place to collect insights is through interviews with recent evaluators because these are people who have just been buyers. The conversation you will have doesn’t require the buyer to guess about how a decision was made. You are simply asking them to tell you what happened and how they arrived at the final decision to select your solution, or not. This makes the resulting information FAR MORE RELIABLE than it would be if you were presenting a hypothetical situation and asking the buyer for a reaction.”
My good friend Adele Revella of the Buyer Persona Institute is working on a new book on Buyer Personas, so please keep your eyes open for it.
What do you think? Was this information on buyer personas helpful?
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Jw
