Tony Zambito

DECEMBER 12, 2020

Empty office buildings dot the map of the United States. CEOs and their teams across the country, as well as the globe, are focused on maintaining performance and productivity during the pandemic. Finding the means for their employees to sustain productivity while working from home is often discussed. Not just metrics.

Business 252

Business Thought Leadership Statistics Budget Programs 252

Tony Zambito

OCTOBER 12, 2020

This transformative upending in B2B commerce has led to both buyers and B2B organizations viewing customer experience as a more important factor than product and price. This also means building in mobile capabilities across platforms. Digital Commerce Experience Matters As Much As Customer Experience.

Buyer Personas 310

Buyer Personas B2B Amazon Fulfillment 310

Tony Zambito

APRIL 30, 2021

Marketing and Sales Leaders Must Build Core Competency of Understanding Buyer Persona Goals. Personas and Buyer Personas were invented to help organizations make informed decisions on product design or buyer strategies. Sometimes, culture and DNA are used interchangeably. 3 – Leveraging and Informing Buyer Strategies.

Buyer Personas 176

Buyer Personas B2B Sales Organic Leads Profiling 176

Tony Zambito

MAY 17, 2021

Jon Miller, chief marketing and product officer of Demandbase is advocating for ABX. Understanding the new buyer mindset and building organizational DNA to think like buyers become critical to ABM or ABX success. An indication the struggle is real is the new term ABX or account-based experience. And adopting a lifecycle viewpoint.

Account Based Marketing 224

Account Based Marketing ABM Buyer Personas Intent Signal 224

Tony Zambito

OCTOBER 23, 2018

Data : Buyers are increasingly reliant on and building predictive data operations to help with their decision-making. Whether they be market-based, production-based, or operations-based decisions. Look for an increasing number of Data Scientist building user-friendly decision-models for buyers to use.

Digital Transformation 184

Digital Transformation Buyer Personas Work Management Marketing Management 184

Tony Zambito

MARCH 2, 2022

This build-up to the moment we are now in calls for corporations to examine their stand on ESG. Additionally, we have seen major tech companies, like Apple, ban the sale of their products to and within Russia. For many European countries, their dependence on Russian oil grew to 40% of total oil consumption.

Order 147

Order Business Planning Demand 147

Tony Zambito

NOVEMBER 15, 2020

When the concept of a buyer persona was originated in 2001, they were derived from the experiences in creating goal-directed user personas for product design. Buyer Thinking : Much has been written about building empathy into sales and marketing messaging.

Buyer Personas 220

Buyer Personas Digital Transformation B2B Sales Interactive Marketing 220

Tony Zambito

MARCH 12, 2017

Multiple studies over the past three years from the likes of PwC, Deloitte, Forrester, and IBM indicate that 75% or more of CEO’s are identifying building out competencies in insights as one of their top goals. To survive also means rebooting, building, and maturing competencies in buyer insights.

Buyer Personas 251

Buyer Personas B2B Digital Transformation B2B Sales 251

Tony Zambito

SEPTEMBER 26, 2018

The urgency brought on by the continued elusiveness in shifting entities as a whole from product-centricity to customer-centricity. Making the necessary allocations to build in yearlong preparation towards attaining deep understanding, knowledge, and insights. It remains so today with increasing urgency.

Allocation 181

Allocation Digital Transformation Press Training 181

Tony Zambito

OCTOBER 27, 2018

This transformative upending in B2B commerce has led to both buyers and B2B organizations viewing customer experience as a more important factor than product and price. This also means building in mobile capabilities across platforms. Digital Commerce Experience Matters As Much As Customer Experience.

B2B 165

B2B Amazon Buyer Personas Fulfillment 165

Tony Zambito

FEBRUARY 28, 2016

And, not too surprisingly, continues to be viewed as product-centric. Build and catalog content assets around scenarios : Rather than build content assets only through a generalized, one size fits all, view of a buyer’s journey, B2B marketers should be building assets according to buyer’s need for information relevant to specific scenarios.

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas B2B Content B2B Sales 100

Tony Zambito

OCTOBER 18, 2015

At the same time, we also saw the prominence of product management and product marketing rise in 1980’s and 1990’s. The jobs of product marketers were to market to customers the product lines of the organization. User-centered design is based on the personification of interactions with digital products and software.

Ideal Customer Profiles 100

Ideal Customer Profiles Profiling Buyer Personas Marketing Management 100

Tony Zambito

NOVEMBER 10, 2011

.  Using the metaphor offered by Pine and Gilmore, leaders today will need to find producers of experience and find directors who are skilled at interweaving content, conversations, interactions, and roles into the production of buyer experience.    One of my favorite theater productions has been A Chorus Line. 

Trends 100

Trends Content Wikipedia Custom Publishing 100

Tony Zambito

MARCH 24, 2011

In the new buyer experience economy , it is less about the product or service and more about creating value through experience.    The quality and usage of a product or service will always matter.    Businesses producing inferior products or services will fall off the radar screen of buyers. 

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Fulfillment Design B2B Sales 100

Tony Zambito

JULY 6, 2011

About a dozen years ago, I became involved with personas through fate by meeting Alan Cooper , at the time he just finished his landmark book The Inmates Are Running The Asylum , and becoming enamored with personas as a process to build more user friendly products.    Cooper barely survived the bust - and I am glad it did. 

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Peer-to-peer Ideal Customer Profiles Psychographics 100

Tony Zambito

NOVEMBER 1, 2010

.  B2B buyers today desire the totality of end-to-end experience in addition to products and services that help them to meet goals and solve challenges. Collectively, these three essential aspects represent the building blocks of Buyer Experience Design. 

Design 100

Design Buyer Personas B2B Thought Leadership Lead Ranking 100

Tony Zambito

JANUARY 22, 2017

Fundamentally reshaping markets in five years’ time compared to the fifty to seventy years it may have taken to build up a market. How to design products and services that were user-friendly and enabled users to fulfill their goals. Which looked at the design of products or services in terms of human interaction with computers.

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Digital Transformation Enterprise Management Account Based Marketing 100

Tony Zambito

MAY 4, 2011

  Mainly, buyer personas are presented as a means of templated profile building.    Initially, research was conducted on users to help inform product and/or service design.    The focus was on understanding user goals and how to design products or services that helped users to achieve their goals. 

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Research Ideal Customer Profiles Demand Generation Agencies 100

Tony Zambito

AUGUST 3, 2011

If you are able to build an in-house practice, bring on people who have the requisite background in anthropology and ethnographic research.  What if you do not have the means or resources to build an in-house practice that conducts the research and creates interfacing personas for the research? 

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Organization Viral Marketing Ideal Customer Profiles 100

Tony Zambito

APRIL 6, 2012

Far too often, who the SMB buyer is and understanding how and why they make purchasing decisions gets lost in the shuffle of statistics on number of dials, connections, and product pitches. What the new breed of inside sales reps wants today is more engaging conversations with buyers and less focus on product pitches once they connect.

SMB 100

SMB Buyer Personas Lead Ranking B2B Sales 100

Tony Zambito

JULY 18, 2011

  No easy task for much of today’s management structure still is focus on pushing products and services out to customers.  Related to from push to pull , much of the intended efforts in building buyer personas – whether executed correctly or not – has been about how to message to buyers. 

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Lead Ranking Ideal Customer Profiles Opt-out 100

Tony Zambito

SEPTEMBER 27, 2011

  How well organizations; in relations to products, service, and brand; maps to Buyer Perceived Values will serve as the one of the primary influences that shapes buyer behaviors and purchase decisions. Risks :  let’s face it – changing products or services in a B2B market can turn into an agonizing experience for buyers. 

Peer-to-peer 100

Peer-to-peer Loyalty Correlation Pricing 100

Tony Zambito

JANUARY 3, 2016

Nearly 60% indicated they were frustrated their buyer personas were based on typical product management and sales intelligence factors and did not result in the expected deeper understanding – this is the same result from the previous year. As I close, the question to answer is: what is the state of buyer personas as we head into 2016?

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Correlation Effectiveness Ideal Customer Profiles 100

Tony Zambito

JANUARY 7, 2010

During the previous decade, we’ve seen a growing acceptance for the use of buyer personas to help guide effective product, sales, and marketing planning.   Crafting user personas for the design of products require a significant degree of observational and ethnographic based research.

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Lead Ranking User-Generated Content Barriers 100

Tony Zambito

NOVEMBER 8, 2015

Buyer interviews and on-site observations (ethnographic-based) can yield deeper insight into the why context and enable organizations to build empathy with buyers. Including add-on of newer products and services. Data analytics can yield insights into buying behaviors but lack in context and all-important empathy.

Buy 100

Buy Buyer Personas Acquisitions Correlation 100

Tony Zambito

APRIL 14, 2011

Buyers will make quick determinations about their relationships based upon the availability of real-time content – information on products, services, support documentation, expert knowledge sharing, and the likes.    This will cause organizations to have to build logic into how they present content and expertise. 

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Buyer's Journey Wikipedia Social Networks 100

Tony Zambito

JANUARY 5, 2010

.   The Buyer Persona blog written by Adele Revella of Pragmatic Marketing has also made the term much more visible and Adele has written very thought provoking postings on why buyer personas are important to product managers as well as sales and marketing professionals.   It resides with one man and one man only – Alan Cooper.

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Work Management Forrester Marketing Management 100

Tony Zambito

JANUARY 30, 2012

What matters in today’s B2B climate is having the ability to predict multiple scenarios and more importantly – multiple buying scenarios that will shape the organization’s marketing, sales, product, content, and social strategies. Multiple Scenarios – In today’s business climate, the number of possible buying scenarios continues to increase.

Lead Ranking 100

Lead Ranking B2B Peer-to-peer B2B Sales 100

Tony Zambito

NOVEMBER 1, 2015

Buyer personas are thought of as a tool specific only to new endeavors in content marketing, campaigns, and product launches. Do not box-in buyer persona development to specific campaigns : This is a common mistake I see often. As opposed to within the context of qualitative buyer research.

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Ideal Customer Profiles B2B Marketing Paid Search Agency 100

Tony Zambito

AUGUST 22, 2011

  The foundational purpose of personas – be they user, consumer, or buyer personas – is to inform strategy related to product innovation and marketing innovation.  Wired into the DNA of organizations for the past century has been the constant notion of pushing products outwards and conducting voluminous push messaging. 

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Viral Marketing Research Planning 100

Tony Zambito

OCTOBER 3, 2011

  As mentioned in the previous article on Buyer Perceived Value (BPV), value has been viewed conventionally around product and service.    The convergence of the Internet and the Social Age is resulting in new as well as evolving values that we may not fully understand at the moment. 

High Quality Lead 100

High Quality Lead Differentiation Social Networks Paid Search Agency 100

Tony Zambito

DECEMBER 12, 2010

  For the past thirty to forty years, sales have focused on relationship building, methodology, and processes.    The driver of sales experience was more than the combined percentage of the three other drivers defined in the study – company and brand, product and delivery, and value-to-price ratio. 

B2B Sales 100

B2B Sales Buyer Personas Multi-Channel B2B 100

Tony Zambito

MAY 5, 2011

Collaboration : buyers want to participate in several aspects related to research and development, product development, knowledge sharing, customized servicing, and an ongoing dialogue. Building : traditional transactions, simple to complex, involved a lot of presenting and receiving until the buyer basically says – I’ll take it. 

Buy 100

Buy Buyer Personas B2B Lock-In 100

Tony Zambito

OCTOBER 11, 2010

  A profound understanding that, as Dan Henson highlighted back then, can lead to innovation in services, products, and relationships.    Buyer Experience Journey Mapping is purposeful in building in the multiple experience scenarios and providing an integrated view of buyer experiences.

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Marketing Automation Services Lead Ranking Conference 100

Tony Zambito

SEPTEMBER 15, 2010

  Culturally as well as structurally organizations have been described as sales-driven, marketing-driven, or product-driven; just to name three examples here.    Buyer Experience Design improves an organizations competency to deliver on consistent experiences that builds loyalty that lasts.

Marketing Management 100

Marketing Management Buyer Personas Marketing Automation Services Loyalty 100

Tony Zambito

DECEMBER 5, 2010

  While relationship building will remain important, reliance on this alone will not be enough.   Branding that has solely a product-centric or a sales-centric orientation will prove to be insufficient to map to the demands of buyer.  Trend 2: Organizations will focus on reinventing the buyer experience.

Trends 100

Trends Buyer Personas AIDA Buyer's Journey 100

Tony Zambito

OCTOBER 18, 2010

  Most revealing was how many phases of production took place and how each phase was an experiential process in of itself.    Jeffrey Katzenberg that day told the story of how many times they went back a step or two in the production journey to get the right film they were looking to produce. 

Buyer Personas 100

Buyer Personas Buyer's Journey Allocation Trigger Marketing 100