Written by Dan Renyi of Klear B2B, originally published on infinityn.com
What is the best way to accurately map out your buyers’ decision making process? Having a deep understanding of the buyer persona is fundamental to any good marketing strategy. For today’s GTM in competitive Saas and tech markets, drawing the clear image of the buyer takes a more refined approach. In this article, you will learn how leading tech enterprises do buyer persona creation.
A cornerstone in any account-based strategy is adequate market-research and customer profiling. The very first step in the ABM process - the creation of a target list - presupposes that you have created an ICP - an ideal customer profile, which goes hand-in-hand with a deep understanding of both the market and the innate needs-wants-desires and decision making processes of the individual buyers. And we have arrived at buyer personas.
Unfortunately for account-based marketers, the majority of buyer persona-creating instructions are slim. They are designed for profiling personas for simpler, small-consideration buying decisions. Most of our B2B sales cycles, on the other hand, involve buying teams of 5-13 individuals and can last up to 14 months.
As an account-based professional looking to market complex tech solutions, you have to be aware of not just the personal and psychographic traits and stereotypes, but the typical internal evaluation processes and politics at play in your buyers’ organisations. Let’s face it, most profiling tools and advice just don’t live up to this complex task.
A common shortcut that can sometimes be tempting for marketing is to get insight from sales, and to a lesser extent, customer support. While these are worthwhile conversations, they are inadequate in themselves to draw up a solid storyboard about how our accounts (and people in those accounts) go from the pre-awareness phase to signing the contract.
Sales has a different perspective than what we need for creating buyer personas. Salespeople are usually good at recognizing buyer intent and mapping out potential obstacles. But the biggest piece of the puzzle that they miss is all the interaction that happens before sales gets involved. As a marketer, you obviously need to be acutely aware of what’s going on in the earliest stages of discovery.
Fortunately, there is a great method out there; rooted in decades of buyer-focused tech marketing experience.
The credit for inventing the framework goes to Adele Revella, who explains the process in her book Buyer Personas - how to gain insight into your customers’ expectations. It is a qualitative approach that builds on conducting one-on-one interviews with buyers.
In the remainder of this article, we’d like to help you get the essence of the method to help you gain further insight into how your buyers make decisions.
The foundations of the framework go back to storytelling. Yes, storytelling… which surprises many people, but the “art of stories” is actually in very close relationship to this type of qualitative research.
One may have the impression that market research is largely a statistical affair, where the right questions should be asked, the answers gathered and math be used to interpret the data.
It is often assumed that qualitative research works much the same way - with the exception that fewer and open-ended questions are being asked. This allows room for the respondents to elaborate on a topic, giving deeper insight into individual and organizational motivations.
Revella’s approach, and subsequently our Account-based Intelligence process involves asking our interviewees just a few scripted questions. What we are aiming for instead, is to get the stories that go from how the challenge or need for our solution had surfaced, all the way to considering different options and dealing with politics and finally choosing a vendor.
There are very good reasons why we want stories instead of asking specific questions. Stories have the ability to transfer the tangential and often unspoken, subconscious aspects of events. Surfacing these details makes a huge difference.