Chapter 13
Inbound Strategies Are Persona Based
Personas are at the core of inbound strategies. An ideal buyer persona is a representation of the person your organization helps the most. Personas are semifictional representations of your ideal customer based on real data and some select educated speculation about customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. Personas include demographic information but put more emphasis on a psychographic profile. Psychographic factors are characteristics relating to someone's activities, interests, and opinions and include common behavior patterns, shared pain points (professional, personal), goals, wishes, dreams, attitudes, and values.
Personas are the basis for inbound strategies because of their emphasis on emotional connection. Most companies sell to at least three or four buyer personas. Personas evolve as habits change. Companies need to focus on their primary personas. Inbound organizations consistently evaluate their personas based on company direction, revenue and gross profit contribution, and impact on enterprise value.
After decades of watching great companies fail, we've concluded that the focus on correlation—and on knowing more and more about customers—is taking firms in the wrong direction. What they need to home in on is the progress that the customer is trying to make in each circumstance—what the customer hopes to accomplish. This is what we've come to call the job to be done.1
A persona embodies a person, not a large, amorphous, demographic-driven market segment. Initial persona assumptions are supported by user data that confirms behavior and creates a complete view of the customer.
Marcus Sheridan, the Sales Lion and author of the book They Ask, You Answer, says this about personas:
Helping is the essence of the “they ask, you answer” idea. We don't base our decisions on competitors. We don't base our decisions on bad fits that aren't ideal customers or clients anyway. We base our decisions on prospects that are a good fit for our business. If that is whom we're focused on, then it gives us the ability to communicate however we want and be totally honest and be totally real. We don't have to fluff it; we don't have to do any of that stuff. We can be straightforward with the information and give it to people directly. That wins us trust, and ultimately trust is what drives revenue.2
An inbound organization helps everyone in the precontact stage. Understanding your ideal buyer persona helps you define your targets, craft your messages, identify product/market fit, and define an effective buyer journey. It helps if you can determine the persona's goals, challenges, influences, emotions, and values.
Focusing on a persona helps you avoid the mistake of selling to the wrong buyer. Tracking personas helps you understand the most profitable buyers. An inbound organization obsesses over personas because it allows them to understand their buyer at an emotional level.
Jeff Bezos says, “Listen to the customer and invent for the customer.” In a well-known story, Bezos leaves an empty chair in every meeting that represents the customer or, as he says, “the most important person in the room.”3
While you may not leave a real chair open at the conference table, your cultural mindset should be focused on the ideal buyer persona and on how to treat them during the buyer journey.
Buying Insight
Adele Revella, CEO of the Buyer Persona Institute and author of Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight into Your Customer's Expectations, Align Your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business, describes buyer personas this way:
A persona, if built correctly, goes beyond what I call a persona profile and the buyer's journey and includes buying insight. It includes the buyer's voice speaking directly to how, when, and why they make the investment that the company wants buyers to make. The persona tells the company what triggers an investment, what outcomes the buyer expects from that investment, and what their objections are to choosing a company as their investment partner.
If the persona description includes all the questions the buyers ask about the solution and the company as they go through their journey, then it's really the foundation of the company aligning everything it does with what the market wants. The persona grounds the company in the market's reality, and this is entirely missing from most companies right now.4
There are many ways to build a persona, but they should all contain the key information outlined by the 5 Rings of Buying Insight described by Revella:
- Priority Initiative is the most compelling reason buyers invest in a similar solution to yours.
- Success Factors are the results your persona expects from a purchase like yours.
- Perceived Barriers describe the things that prevent a buyer from moving ahead with a solution like yours.
- Buyer's Journey is the story of the steps buyers take as they evaluate and choose the product, service, or company and who is involved in the decision.
- Decision Criteria are the attributes of your offering that are evaluated as buyers compare alternatives.
How do you start the persona discovery process? The path to developing personas is to interview customers and prospects and develop qualitative insights into the buyer's thinking. The key is: “Go to the source. Get the story in their own words.”2 This direct approach helps you avoid the classic mistake of making assumptions and letting your biases lead you astray. Let the buyers tell you what they want, how they buy, and other key buyer journey information.
How do you conduct these types of persona investigation calls? This type of call is not scripted. If you write down questions in advance, you may miss the most important part of the story. Start by taking the buyer back to the beginning of their journey with an open-ended question like “Let's go back to when you decided to start looking for [the type of solution here]: what triggered the decision to start looking?” Then ask buyers to talk about what they did next to research their options. Keep asking follow-up questions to get buyers to “say more about that” and go deeper to get to their buying motivations and decision-making preferences. If you accept the first answer, you may miss critical insights.
Around 10 to 15 interviews will uncover the insights you need. Leaders should participate in these calls so they hear the answers with the authentic tone, texture, and emphasis of the buyer. Do not let your sales team do these calls because they have a tendency to turn them into sales calls. It is even better to use an outside consultant to do the interviews to bring an unbiased perspective and identify blind spots that you've missed. Leaders should at least read the full interview transcripts and see for themselves the insights in the customer's own words.
The key to persona interviews is to listen closely and discern the nuances of the how, when, and why of buyer decision making. You will hear details of the customer's mindset that you have never heard or considered before. These become the core insights as you develop your inbound strategies.
Other persona development steps include:
Analyzing your existing customers' revenue, gross profit, cost of customer acquisition, and lifetime value- Determining which type of customers stay with you the longest, purchase repeatedly, and why
- Learning which customers are highly profitable, break even, or unprofitable and why
- Interviewing sales and asking them which leads are the best fit and what the essential characteristics are that they look for when qualifying
- Review trends with marketing to see how people engage with your website, email, and social media
- Talk to customers that have left for a competitor and prospects that haven't bought yet—because they will highlight the gaps in your customer experience and what your competition does better
The result of the persona discovery process is a personalized representation of your ideal customer based on your research and data analysis. A persona is not just a description of job duties of the person you want to sell to. This persona becomes your guiding focus as you design the customer experience and begin to engage prospects through the stages of the buyer journey (see Figure 13.1).
Figure 13.1 An Example of a HubSpot Persona Representation.
Source: Courtesy of Hubspot.
Developing an ideal persona is a core attribute of an inbound strategy. The persona discovery process gives your team a strong guideline to develop plays and action plans for your MSPOT to implement the strategy.
As Adele Revella told us:
The goal for buyer personas is to understand how we can be more effective in persuading buyers to do business with us with buying experience being a key differentiator for our company. In other words, so many of our clients are in mature markets where frankly there's at least a half a dozen other companies that can solve the problem pretty well from the buyer's perspective. Let's have the buyer's ability to trust us and get their questions answered be the differentiator in terms of our ability to win that business.
If that's the purpose of buyer personas, and I say it is, then let's, by all means, drop this idea that we need to segment buyers based on their job titles, their industry, their company size, or any other completely obvious demographic criteria and let's instead find out what's different about what buyers want, what matters to buyers as they go through that assessment. Let's get clear, very, very clear on what buyers care about and what would be helpful to the buyer and let's only build a second buyer persona when something different would be helpful to them.5
Personas should be updated constantly. Make sure the work of persona development is visible and relevant to ongoing daily work. Document persona insights and educate everyone in your organization about who the persona is and how each employee has a role in helping that persona achieve their goals.
People make decisions for their businesses in many ways—some are go-it-alone types, others develop consensus, and some are a mix of both. Building personas is about finding the critical areas that affect the decision to buy, how the people making buying decisions use information, and how to manage the internal change process.
A persona is the embodiment of the buyer you exist to serve.
How Target Markets Are Different than Demographics
Traditional marketing defines market segments by SIC or NAICS codes and includes distinguishing business characteristics like the number of employees or location, target business roles like purchasing or engineering, and demographics like age, location, and educational attainment.
Modern buyers do not fit into tidy categories. Look around your neighborhood. Traditional market segmentation would say that the entire neighborhood is one market demographic based on location, income, house size, school district, the number of cars in your garage, etc. But are you and your neighbors that similar? In most cases you don't have the same needs, wants, buying habits, likes, motivations, and dislikes. You don't work the same hours, root for the same teams, play the same music, watch the same shows, or care about the same things. There are some commonalities, but the differences are what matter. The differences include the problems that you are concerned about, the goals you want to achieve, and the outcomes that you desire.
The same ideas hold true in your business, whether B2B, B2C, B2A (business to appliance) or B2W (business to whatever).
The more effectively you target your ideal buyer persona and their problems and goals, the more successful you are likely to be. The more specific your niche, the easier it will be to talk directly to the people who make up that niche. You can target tool and die companies in the Southwest. Or you can narrow it down to tool and die companies in greater Phoenix with at least 10 employees, $3 million-plus in annual revenue, who are looking to grow their business at least 30% in the next 18 months.
Entrepreneurs are tempted to say: we should sell to a large market. But this is an impulse based on fear, of missing a sale or being too narrow. The fear is that focusing your efforts means slower growth and less market share and being broadly based means a bigger, more lucrative market. The reality is the exact opposite. Trying to get a little bit of a big pie usually means getting none of it. About segmentation, Adele Revella says:
What we care about as marketers is, as buyers consider and evaluate products and services like ours, what resonates with them? What would be helpful to them? What is useful? That's how you want to segment your business strategies. Segmentation comes after we get buying insights, not before.6
Do modern buyers want a generalist or do they want the absolute world's best at solving the specific problem they have in front of them, by an industry expert, who focuses on their exact niche? Think of it this way: If you have 500 prospects, do you consider them all the same or do you narrow them down to the best 10% that you help the most, increasing your chances of a sale? When you go to an event or trade show (yes, these still exist and are great opportunities for many companies) do you try to help everyone? Yes. Do you also place more time, effort, attention, and focus on the best-fit prospects that you meet and give them extra attention? Of course.
Employing an inbound strategy means sharing information that potentially will help everyone, but most of the efforts are focused on helping a very niche market and the ideal buyer personas who raise their hands and say, “I want more help.”
You can't convert everyone, but you can try to help everyone in your ecosystem.
Todd's accountant focuses on small family-owned, privately held, individual businesses in Florida. Todd describes his view of the accountant's ideal buyer persona:
He focuses on my personal needs, concerns, questions, and goals. He knows the laws and rules as they pertain to our business. He knows accounting, knows how to legally maximize deductions for our type of business. He knows how to keep us out of an audit and at the same time keeps us current on taxes and investments. He knows my business. He is not an accountant for a bank or a large company. He is an expert that empathetically helps me understand the options and issues regarding finance and accounting for a business like mine, and makes sure I take the actions necessary to be financially safe and secure while achieving my goals.
Dan tells a related story about a HubSpot partner:
A business owner in Helsinki told me, “I work with companies that have turnover of at least 10 million euros, at least a six-month sales process, have five people in their sales organization, a partner channel, and are digitally immature.” When he gets on the phone with the owner of a business that fits this description, it is game over; he wins the business 90% of the time.
Todd tells this story:
I was working to help turn around a small manufacturing company, and we brought the principal owners in to see the latest piece of capital equipment the team built. We were proud of it and wanted to show the new ownership team what we could do.
One of the owners looked at it and said, “Nice machine, are there a hundred people that can use it? If not, it is a piece of art.” He was right. We focused on one specific customer challenge and did not consider if this was a custom product or if even one other person could use it. Had we focused on the persona we would have seen this right away. Lacking the clarity of who we were building equipment for led us in the wrong direction.
In this age of specialization, niche beats broad every time. Persona development is about staying focused. It makes it easier for you and easier for your prospects, so no one is wasting time in bad fit relationships or with misaligned solutions.
The ideal buyer persona is the focus of all marketing and sales plans. By using a developed persona, your marketing and sales efforts stay targeted, and your plans stay focused. Starting from the customer and working backward is more effective than starting with an internal goal and working outward.
An ideal persona is a fundamental tool for inbound organizations. Personas apply to your buyers, employees, and partners. The process we described for buyers applies equally to employees you want to attract and to partners you want to engage. Developing specific personas gives you the insight you need to personalize your organization's interactions, which is exactly what everyone connected to your organization wants.