Creating Magic by Adding Context to Content

I had an excellent conversation with my friend Greg Alexander, CEO of Sales Benchmark Index, about how marketing and sales can work together more effectively. We discussed the new buying process and what this means for salespeople, marketers, and their management teams.

In my simplistic first stab at this, I offered that marketing must create the content that salespeople need to be successful in the selling process. It could be found in a repository somewhere, or it could certainly be available freely on the web, but the important thing would be that the salesperson knows where it's located and how to access it. This means that what the marketing team creates is important throughout the entire sales process, not just for initiating the process at the top of the funnel, as was true just a few years ago.

It is, I said, the salesperson's job to understand each individual buyer or existing customer so well that the salesperson knows precisely which bit of content is pertinent to the customer's situation and sees that it is delivered to that customer.

“What the salesperson has to do is implement context,” Alexander added. “This is where contextual content marketing actually happens. The marketing department is doing everything you just said, which is of huge importance, because salespeople don't have the time to go do all that. And sometimes they don't have the skills.”

In Alexander's view, the salesperson, as the expert on the customer, takes what the marketing department creates and then personalizes it for each buyer or existing customer and passes it on in whatever method is best: LinkedIn, Twitter, email, or even the good old telephone. It is a reason to make contact.

“Sales reps take the information and say to themselves, ‘How does this idea, this theme, this concept apply to my account and the decision makers inside my account?’” Alexander says. “‘How do I make this real to them? How do I provide context for it?’ That's where the magic happens.”

With that magic in mind, in this chapter I will focus on the concept of buyer personas. While the ideas here are essential for the smooth running of all aspects of an organization—including sales and marketing and customer service—many ideas will also likely fall into the purview of your organization's marketing department. If you run a smaller company, it's your job to make sure this integration happens. If you're part of a larger organization, you need to make sure the marketing executives are in sync with your new sales and service plan. You might suggest to the marketers in your organization that they check out my book The New Rules of Marketing & PR. In it, I provide the same concepts you'll read here but with much more detail specifically written for those in the marketing and public relations departments.

I include this chapter because for sales and service to be successful, it is essential that marketing be aligned and work smoothly in conjunction with sales and service activities. The days of the great divide are over.

The Power of Content That Provides Exactly What You Need

Think about the websites you've visited recently. Have you noticed that sometimes you can glance at a site (or product page) for the first time and instantly know that it will not be helpful? I experience that feeling nearly every day. I might be shopping for something—say, a bike helmet. So I go to Google or to Amazon and just search for “bike helmet.” At this point, I'm looking for a site that will educate and inform me, not one that is chock-full of jargon and hype. I'm expecting that the people behind the site have anticipated my need for a little education. Yes, I am interested in buying a helmet at some point, but not until I know exactly what I want. What should I look for in a helmet? What's the trade-off between less weight and more strength? What's the price range?

Usually I sample a few sites or product pages that are just terrible. When that happens, I'm gone in a split second, clicking away, never to return. You know what I'm talking about, right? You make a decision immediately. It's a gut feeling you make in real time, isn't it? In contrast, many sites have valuable and useful information. In fact, sometimes I feel that a site has been developed especially for me! It's as if someone read my mind and built a site based on my needs alone. And the site was right there when I needed it.

You know something? It's not a coincidence when a site feels like it was created especially for you, because that means a marketer somewhere did his or her job well! When I end up somewhere that educates me about bike helmets through a video, a few blog posts, or maybe a Q&A with some instructive photos, I'm ready to make a buying decision in just a few minutes. And guess where I am inclined to buy? Yes, the place that educated me.

If you've read my previous books, you know I talk a lot about what I call “buyer personas.” Buyer personas are the representative groups of people who buy your products and services. In fact, the concept of buyer personas is so essential to good marketing and sales that I'm compelled to reintroduce the idea here. It's essential to realize that only when your marketing and salespeople work together and are united does an organization truly thrive in today's always-on world of the web, a place where people do their own research.

The Nobis Hotel Sells to David Meerman Scott

In Chapter 3, we explored the idea of story in two broad contexts. We looked at how consumers tell a story to themselves based on their worldview. These stories frequently involve products and services and inform individuals about the sorts of things they want to buy. And we also looked at how companies tell stories, with the best being a founders' story or one crafted by the top people, which everyone in the organization uses to define their mission. It is when those stories mesh that a company is perfectly aligned within its marketplace. A hotel I visited in Stockholm illustrates this example brilliantly. As you're reading, consider how you can do the same thing for your products and services.

Have you noticed that nearly all hotel websites are exactly the same?

There's the photo of the property on the front, the “reserve a room” widget usually in the top left, and a bunch of boring, superlative language. Basically the sites are interchangeable. I recently booked a hotel in California, and the three hotels I considered had websites that looked like they had all been designed by the same agency.

But it doesn't have to be that way! When my wife Yukari and I decided to spend a few days in Stockholm, I did my research and ended up booking a room at the Nobis Hotel. I made the choice myself based on—you guessed it—the content on the hotel's site. This hotel website immediately seemed different. It felt like it was speaking personally to me.

That difference continued as Yukari and I checked in and explored the property. It seemed perfect for us. We had to find out why, so we met with Oliver Geldner, an executive at the Nobis.

Geldner told us that the buyer persona of the people attracted to the Nobis are frequent travelers who are sick of sterile chain hotels and want something different. They are people who make their own decisions about where to stay using the web and social media. Their buyers want upscale luxury but in a modern style, not the old-world traditional style.

As Geldner was going through this with us, I stole a glance at my wife. “That's us!” I almost shouted. How cool that we were actually attracted to the hotel based on the buyer persona created by Geldner and his colleagues! Our worldview intersected with the hotel's story.

The most fascinating detail that Geldner shared about the Nobis Hotel was the internal description of the Nobis that is used when communicating about the hotel on social networks like Facebook:

The Nobis Hotel is a grand old lady who lives in a vast apartment in Stockholm. She's a dame of means. She has a cocktail party starting every day at 11:00 am and is slightly tipsy by 5:00 pm and that is when she is communicating to you via social networks as a friend.

The Nobis is a Swedish hotel, but she insists on communicating in English even though the majority of guests are Swedish.

She has a sense of humor and has interesting things to say. She wants to be relevant, have a sense of humor and not take herself too seriously.

Wow! How cool is this description? (Well, at least it's cool for me, which is why I was attracted to the Nobis via its site.)

Here are a few short stories I pulled from the Nobis Hotel Facebook page. I can picture the slightly tipsy grand old dame writing them:

Animal question of the week: “I am traveling with a duck, and would need a room with a tub.” I can't wait to see the cleaning lady's face when she comes in to make up the room! Well, at least today we got nice weather, for ducks.…

And this:

Note to all parents of three-year-old boys: there is a subtle but very distinct difference between peeing in the steam room and peeing into the steam room. The first can be the sign of an emergency; the latter is a signal you might have a hooligan on your hands.…

Isn't this fantastic? Can you imagine a big chain hotel communicating like this on social networks? Not a chance!

Geldner told me that he does a semantic analysis of the Nobis Hotel listings on travel review sites such as TripAdvisor to find out what words and phrases visitors use in their reviews. These are then used in the Nobis marketing.

So rather than make up their search engine terms like most marketers, they actually use the terms like “beautiful modern hotel in Stockholm” that people use in social networks as their search engine optimization (SEO) phrases.

All of this communication to buyer personas drives people into the Nobis Hotel's sales and marketing process, making the actual point of sale—the moment when someone enters their credit card number to make a reservation—happen more often.

Before we dig deeper into the concept of buyer personas, let's look at how most people communicate about products and services, essentially focused on their own egos rather than on their buyers.

Making Stuff Up

I see it again and again. The way most entrepreneurs, salespeople, marketers, and product managers operate is by making stuff up. I spend a lot of my time talking to organizations about their sales and marketing plans and strategies, and it is amazing to me that so many of them spend their time like this: holed up in comfortable company conference rooms, sitting on nice cozy Aeron chairs, eating free sandwiches brought in from a catering company, and trading ideas about how to sell and market their products. You know, just off the top of their heads. The worst part? In these making-stuff-up sessions, everyone in the room works for the company, and therefore there is no representation of the voices of people who will actually buy the products and services. People go back and forth, saying, “Oh, I think we should do this” or “I think we should do that.”

I call this “MSU behavior.” The polite way to describe MSU is “making stuff up,” but feel free to substitute a less polite word beginning with S. Many people I work with, organizations large and small, prefer the other S word because it emphasizes the behavior's dramatic ineffectiveness. What people who make stuff up are not doing is getting out of their comfortable offices and talking to people who represent their buyer personas. People practicing MSU behavior are simply guessing at what buyers need.

Annoying Three out of Four Customers

I have exercised in more than 100 hotel gyms. Some are great, fully outfitted with the latest gear. Some are tired and broken down. Recently, as I was doing my morning workout in a hotel gym, I was thinking about how these rooms get put together. Does any hotel developer actually interview potential guests before planning and constructing the gym? It certainly doesn't appear so.

Some have interesting views, like the gym at the Stella Di Mare Hotel in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt—where I happened to be staying when I wrote this portion of the book. But most gyms are relegated to the hotel basement.

How do they decide what equipment to buy and in what quantities? They appear to just study existing gyms and copy what every other hotel does.

The accepted ratio seems to be two treadmills for every elliptical. Why?

The stationary bikes are nearly always empty of riders. Who decided to waste money on those things? (My theory is they were popular in the 1970s, but nobody has bothered to tell the hotel gym people that preferences have changed in the decades since.)

And for something really weird, consider that no matter how large or how small the hotel gym is, there is precisely one set of dumbbells! In the tiny Courtyard Marriott gym in Bangor, Maine, there was just one treadmill, one bike, and one elliptical. Yet it had a beautiful set of dumbbells. But at the Intercontinental in Cairo, which boasts a huge gym with some three dozen pieces of equipment that were mostly unused while I was there, I witnessed four people sharing one set of dumbbells.

Don't even get me started on the music. Nearly all hotel gyms play music. Loud music. But at the same time, my informal analysis reveals that about 75 percent of people in the gyms wear headsets (usually in Apple white).

So while the majority of customers listen to their personal music selection or perhaps enjoy an audiobook, or they plug into the exercise equipment's integrated television screen sound, the gym still pumps in the loud music. What results is an annoying musical clash. So unsurprisingly, people play their music at a higher volume to overpower the gym music in the background. Do hotel operators realize they are contributing to their customers' hearing loss?

As we all know, one's taste in music is about as personal as one can get. Nevertheless, many establishments believe that imposing their playlists on their customers is good for business. Why would someone decide to annoy 75 percent of customers with a practice that can be fixed in one second?

Understanding your buyers.

Why not observe and learn from what people actually do in the gym, and turn the damned music off? Why not get a second set of dumbbells?

Most people tend to be polite and avoid conflict, so rather than tell hotel staff that the music is annoying (or your product doesn't seem to be addressing needs), they simply turn away and go elsewhere.

Of course, this isn't a story about hotel gyms. It is all about understanding your buyers.

Egocentric Nonsense

The problem with making stuff up is that, unless you get incredibly lucky, you're not likely to stumble upon exactly the problems your buyers face. Even more importantly, you'll miss the specific ways they describe these problems.

According to the Princeton University WordNet database, ego is defined as “an inflated feeling of pride in your superiority to others.” When companies make stuff up, they tend to create sales and marketing materials with egotistical language, usually featuring obscure jargon from their industry. I call this nonsense “gobbledygook.”

You know what I mean: the technology company that hypes a “world-class, mission-critical, cutting-edge solution to improve business processes.” Huh?

Or how about the automobile manufacturer that prattles on and on about the obscure technology behind its award-winning antilock braking system? This is just egotistical nonsense. I couldn't care less about the subtle nuances of the technology behind any antilock braking system. However, I do want to know if my car will stop properly.

Buyer Personas

Buyer personas, the distinct demographic groupings of your potential customers, are critically important for successful marketing that leads to sales success. Creating marketing and sales initiatives that target specific buyer personas is a strategy that easily outperforms the results you get from sitting on your butt in your comfortable office making stuff up about your products.

For those of you who don't work for a company that sells products or services, my use of the word buyer applies to any organization's target demographic. A politician's buyer personas include voters, supporters, and contributors; universities' buyer personas include prospective students who might apply, their parents who will foot the bill, and alumni who might donate; a golf club's buyer personas are potential members; and a nonprofit's buyer personas include corporate and individual donors. So go ahead and substitute the way you refer to your potential customers in place of the phrase buyer persona if you wish. But do keep your focus on this fundamental and powerful concept.

By working to understand the market problems that your products and services solve for members of your buyer personas, you'll gain the insight you need to quickly develop a product or service that will resonate with buyers. And once the product is ready to ship, an understanding of buyer personas transforms your marketing from mere product-specific, egocentric gobbledygook (that only you and the other employees in your organization understand) into the sort of valuable information people are thrilled to consume and eager to share. When people are educated and informed by your organization, they frequently make the choice to do business with you in return. Let's take a look at an example of how real-time buyer persona research yielded a surprising insight for a company that took the time to learn.

Consider the rental car industry. Now, I'm no industry expert, but I do rent cars from time to time. It would seem to me that rental car companies serve quite a few distinct buyer personas. Here are a few that come to mind:

• Independent business travelers who make rental decisions themselves
• Corporate travel department employees who make an approved vendor deal on behalf of hundreds or even thousands of company travelers
• City dwellers who don't own a car but who need wheels for the weekend
• Somebody choosing a car for a family vacation
• A commuter whose own car is in the repair shop for a few days but who still needs to get to work

The incredible value of creating multiple buyer personas and learning about each is that the needs they express and the problems your organization solves may be very different. In the rental car buyer persona example, a corporate travel manager who cuts a deal for 5,000 employees has very different needs (for example, to save the company money) than somebody whose car is in the shop for a week and needs a temporary vehicle because, above all, she cannot miss work. Smart organizations build sales strategies that will appeal to each of these buyers, with a focus on their unique problems. It is precisely those organizations that build sites based on buyer personas that cause you and me to go, “Wow! They really understand me!”

And then, because the marketing is so well targeted, the potential customer is nearly sold by the time she gets to the point where the sale happens, either in an e-commerce transaction or by contacting a salesperson.

No Red Alfa Romeo?

One way to research buyer personas in real time is to monitor the blogs, forums, chat rooms, and social networking sites that buyers frequent. A huge benefit of this form of research is that people are communicating right now, and you can see what's being discussed—for free! How cool is that? It's exactly what Avis Europe did, in order to learn what cruise passengers need from a rental car company. The company has been actively using the web to reach buyer personas since launching the rental car industry's first blog in 2006.

Okay, quick: What comes to mind when you imagine a large cruise ship berthing at a resort island? What do you think passengers would want in a rental car for touring the island for a few hours? Well, people at Avis Europe assumed that cruise passengers would primarily be couples and would prefer a sporty two-seater to tool around in. They were exhibiting classic MSU behavior. Once they began the research, however, they realized they were very, very wrong.

“By monitoring Twitter, blogs, and forums to listen in on conversations, and by following trends, we were able to gain insight into what was important to cruise passengers, like our location's proximity to the port, and the kinds of cars that they actually wanted to rent,” says Paul Burani, a partner at Web Liquid Group, a digital marketing agency working with Avis Europe.

A startling insight emerged from the research. Not only had Avis Europe underestimated the size of the cruise market, but it had chosen a default car that was completely wrong for many travelers. It turned out that people tend to make fast friends on cruises, and many choose to tour islands with another couple or in groups. So Avis Europe quickly gained the insight that larger cars and vans were needed immediately at cruise ports. With this buyer persona insight, Avis Europe could adjust the makeup of the rental fleet in real time. This product reconfiguration resulted in more sales right away. This kind of valuable information cannot be made up in a conference room. The only way to learn it is to hear it directly from representatives of your buyer persona groups.

“That was an example of consumers articulating needs which were different from our expectation, and it surprised us,” Burani says. “It just goes to show sometimes common sense does not work.”

Because Avis Europe marketers understood how customers make rental car decisions at cruise destinations, and they adjusted the car selection and communicated appropriately, the salespeople at Avis Europe were prepared to make more sales.

Multiple Personality Order

Most organizations, like Avis Europe, serve more than one buyer persona. Your job is to identify the different buyer personas and then research each one. Of course, many people are a little stumped when confronted with a blank whiteboard and asked to identify the different buyer personas their organization sells to. What you should be asking yourself is this: What problems do we solve for our buyers? When a problem you solve is fundamentally different from one group of customers to another, then you have more than one buyer persona. The rental car market is a perfect example. For the cruise passengers, a rental car on a resort island solves the problem of how to spend a few hours with a group of new friends from the ship. For the person whose car is in the shop and who needs to get to work, the rental car solves a very different problem.

I like to talk about universities as another example of a type of organization with multiple buyer personas. An effective university marketing and PR effort would include research on the buyer persona for the high school student who is considering college. But since the parents of the prospective student have very different information needs (How much does it cost? Will my daughter be safe?), buyer persona research should also be conducted with the goal of understanding parents. A college also has to keep its existing customers (current students) happy. Of course, alumni are an important audience as well, because many graduates donate money to their alma mater on a regular basis. And maybe the university also targets funding agencies, so the people who run the foundations that dole out money to worthy causes are another buyer persona for a university's marketing efforts. By truly understanding the needs and the mind-sets of the different buyer personas, the university will be able to create appropriate marketing and PR initiatives to reach each of them.

This understanding means that instead of making up jargon-filled, hype-based, product-centric advertising, you can create the kind of information that your buyers find compelling. Taking the time to segment buyers and then listen to them discuss their problems can transform the effectiveness of your efforts. The other thing that happens is that your marketing materials will use the words and phrases of your buyers, not your own.

This concept of buyer personas can seem a bit daunting for some, especially those who have previously relied on their personal intuition or have called on assistance from an agency. Some people are wary of the concept because they don't immediately see the value of buyer personas for their specific market. I find that observing actual examples from a variety of markets helps. We will next look at the importance of interviewing your potential buyers, and how the process of segmenting potential customers into buyer personas has helped drive business.

The Buyer Persona Interview

The best way to learn about buyers and develop buyer persona profiles is to interview people one-on-one and in their own environment. The goal of the interview is to define the problems people are facing and to learn precisely how they describe those problems—the actual words and phrases that they use. For example, if your company creates products that are used by people who play golf, then get yourself out to a public golf course or country club and speak to people there! You'll need to segment the buyers you speak to, in order to develop individual profiles for each. Perhaps you might segment golfers into buyer personas like this:

• People who play golf for fun
• People who play golf for exercise
• People who play golf mainly for the social or business aspects
• People who play golf to drink beer and bond with their buddies
• High school and college students who play on their school's team
• Professional golfers

Start with open-ended questions of a general nature. A question like “Why do you play golf?” will often yield surprising answers. Ask about how golf fits into their life and work. You can then begin to ask more specific questions, but don't drive the discussion toward the products and services that you currently sell—buyer persona research is not a sales pitch! In fact, when you approach people to speak with them, emphasize that you're not trying to sell anything but, rather, you are trying to learn about how to create better products and market them effectively.

Another line of questioning should center on problems your company's services are designed to address. You should inquire about how your buyers gather information when they need to solve such a problem. Again, using the golf example, you might ask, “Do you read golf magazines? How about visiting golf websites, blogs, and social networking sites? Do you ask the club professional for advice?” You should also ask, “If you were to go to Google or another search engine to research equipment to improve your golf game, what words might you enter as search terms?” This information becomes valuable as you create and market products to golfers. And it is essential to make sure that your marketing aligns with your sales process.

I would also encourage you to ask questions related to speed. You never know how a line of questioning focusing on the real-time aspects of a business can spark ideas. If you learn that your buyer personas are frustrated with the cumbersome system for reserving tee times, perhaps your company can perfect a real-time, web-based self-registration system that works on mobile devices.

In order to gather enough information, you will probably need to interview 10 to 20 representatives of each buyer persona. I know some organizations that have interviewed many more. By triangulating the information you gather from a dozen or more interviews, you can then easily build a descriptive buyer persona profile.

Here are a few ways to personally connect with your buyers.

Uncover New and Valuable Information with Buyer Persona Research

GoPro Keeps Its Buyer Personas in Focus and Sells Millions of Cameras

Back in 2007, I enthusiastically gushed on my blog about the GoPro digital camera, which I had purchased to take photos and videos while surfing. I was a very early adopter (the digital version had been out only a month or so).

In my post, I said: “GoPro should focus on user-contributed photos and videos, but the product was only introduced a few weeks ago, so I'm sure that with a product like this, more will come very soon.”

Wow, have they ever tapped the crowd! The GoPro Facebook page has more than seven million “likes,” and many people post photos and videos to the page.

GoPro excels because it is focused on coming up with solutions that address the specific problems faced by its customers. And its customers are willing to spend money on a product that will solve these problems. (In my own case, as mentioned, I wanted to shoot photos and videos while surfing.)

Not long after my original post, I interviewed Nicholas Woodman, founder and CEO of GoPro, for a story in the book Tuned In that I co-authored.

“The larger camera companies are building product on such a massive scale that it is not interesting to sell to a small niche market,” Woodman told me then. “GoPro's cameras are more specialized and complement your regular camera. You still take your Canon to a wedding, but out in the surf or on the mountain you need something else.”

What's so fascinating about this example is how different buyer personas articulate problems. Photographers asked, “How can I protect my camera in the water?” But surfers asked, “How can I take photos while surfing?”

Buyer persona research yields surprising information, and when you are tuned in to a problem that people will spend money to solve and you build a product that solves it, you are on the road to success.

Since my original post, GoPro has expanded way beyond surfing. Soon, Woodman concentrated on buyer personas representing other extreme sports.

“Because surfing is so demanding from a usability and environmental standpoint, our product also worked very well for other adventure sports,” he told me. For other sports, the core camera remains the same, but the associated accessories and mount are different. For example, GoPro has adaptable mounts for bicycle handlebars or to attach onto helmets and other body parts for sports like rock climbing and kayaking.

When adapting the camera to a new sport, Woodman says he has several prototypes built and then goes into the field to ask people to use the product, beat it up, and give feedback. “One of the great things about the markets we sell to is that they are passionate people,” he said. “Our solutions could never evolve from a boardroom discussion; our ideas come to us when we are out playing. We go straight to the source. We don't ask our grandmother what she thinks about our motorsport mounts apparatus; we ask race car drivers.”

So how is GoPro doing now, nine years after I first wrote about the company? According to Forbes, GoPro sales have more than doubled every year since the first camera's debut in 2004 through 2012, and in that year GoPro sold 2.3 million cameras. The company went public in 2014, and in 2015 grossed $1.6 billion—from zero a bit more than a decade ago. GoPro was responsible for 21.5 percent of digital camcorder shipments in the United States in the first half of 2012, according to IDC data. Among so-called pocket camcorders, that figure swells to one-third of shipments. Holy cow. And in a 60 Minutes piece, it was reported that Woodman is now a billionaire. All based on buyer personas!

By breaking down buyers into distinct groups—such as surfers, race car drivers, skydivers, and others in the case of GoPro—and understanding what problems each group has and how they are solved, you make it far easier to create breakthrough products like the GoPro camera and its associated mounts.

Buyer personas also make it much easier to market your products. Rather than web content that is simply an egotistical reiteration of gobbledygook-laden corporate drivel, you create content that people actually want to consume and are eager to share.

This approach is utterly different from what most organizations do. Either they fail to segment the market, and instead create nonspecific marketing for everyone, or they create approaches to segments based on their own product-centric view of the world.

It is so exciting to see GoPro's extreme success.

Close the Gap between Sales and Marketing

In my days as vice president of marketing at several technology companies, I distinctly remember how difficult it was for my team of marketing professionals to command the respect of the salespeople in the company. We were finally successful in doing so, but only by becoming the company experts on the buyers. The salespeople didn't care about the brochures we produced or the websites we built. They rarely commented on the email newsletter or the trade shows we spoke at. But by effectively understanding and defining our buyer personas, we shortened the sales cycle for the reps who followed our strategies. Only then did the salespeople offer respect and kudos.

But most sales teams and marketing teams continue to operate out of alignment. The marketers and salespeople question the others' skills and their commitment to the job. They fight over the quality of the leads. I remember hearing of a sales team that snidely referred to the marketing department as the “T-shirt department” because they said all the marketers had accomplished was the production of T-shirts imprinted with the company logo. Others call the marketing department the “branding police.” Marketers, in turn, complain about how the materials they produce fail to be used by the salespeople. They bitch and moan because the sales leads they generate are left untouched, claiming that sales staffers are too lazy to pick up the telephone.

Think about your own organization's last launch event. Were the salespeople hanging on every word as the marketers described the features of the latest product, service, or product marketing plans? If you're like most people I speak with (if they are honest), the salespeople were bored, probably poking at their smartphones instead of paying attention.

I ran these issues by my friend Adele Revella, founder and CEO of Buyer Persona Institute. My own understanding of buyer personas has been greatly influenced by her work over the past decade. I wanted to learn from her how sales and marketing can be more closely aligned.

“It's my experience that the best way to align sales and marketing is around real insights about how, when, and why buyers make the choices the company wants to influence,” Revella says. “That's because the one mission that both sales and marketing have in common is to persuade buyers to choose the company's solution rather than a competitor's or the status quo, and it's incredibly difficult to persuade people you don't understand. When you look at the content of internal meetings, the conversation is all about us—our new products, story, and goals. It's easy to miss the fact that buyers can have very different interpretations of the story, or even conflicting attitudes and motivations. When sales and marketing have a way to fully understand their buyer's decision model, it's a lot easier to get past the finger-pointing and focus on what they can do to win the buyer's business.”

Revella cites five specific buying insights that align the teams around the buyers and positively impact those buyers' decisions. Marketers should be able to tell the salespeople:

1. Which buyers want to meet with the company's reps and who will be annoyed by the request, as well as the circumstances that trigger these buyers' interest in meeting with a rep
2. Which parts of the solution or company story will have the most favorable impact on buyers, which parts are irrelevant to them, and which objections the salesperson will need to overcome
3. What the buyers are saying about the pros and cons of doing business with each of the competitors, and how the competition is persuading buyers that theirs is the best approach
4. How and when different roles within the buyer's organization will become involved in the decision, and what to watch out for with each of the respective influencers
5. How the marketing team is providing backup for all of the aforementioned, plus which sales tools they've built to help the reps succeed with these buyers

“One of the most important things we learn from interviewing buyers is that the company's marketing messages and campaigns need to address the perceptions that prevent buyers from choosing them,” Revella says. “We need to interview real people to understand the attitudes and beliefs that cause them to walk away from the product, service, or solution we hope to market to them. You can't accept an answer like ‘It's too expensive’ or ‘It's too hard to use’ or ‘It's missing X capability.’ These are the answers that salespeople are likely to pass along about why they lose deals, but personas need to go much deeper into, for example, why the buyer wasn't willing to spend more to purchase the company's premium solution. Did we fail to communicate the value of that additional cost? Or are we actually charging more than buyers are willing to pay?”

Becoming the Buyer Expert in Your Company

So how, exactly, do we interview buyers to develop buyer persona profiles? These interviews are best conducted by marketing because they learn much by having conversations with real buyers. Whatever you do, don't give this responsibility to the salespeople or have them listen in. You want candid feedback about what worked and what didn't when the buyers evaluated their options. Buyers won't open up when the salesperson is present.

If possible, either record the interview or have a colleague take notes. You want your undivided attention focused on the conversation, and you want to capture verbatim quotes to use in the final buyer persona document, as that's the best way to communicate exactly how buyers talk about a particular point.

“I suggest only the first interview question is scripted, and after that it's completely unscripted,” Revella says. Here's an example of an open-ended first question that Buyer Persona Institute uses to get the conversation going because it focuses the buyer on the first step in the decision process: “Take me back to the day when you first decided to evaluate [category of solution], and tell me what happened.”

Buyers will usually give you an obvious answer here about the pain point they wanted to solve. To get to real insight, you need to ask good follow-up questions such as: “You probably always wanted to achieve [benefit] or eliminate [problem]. What actually happened to make you decide that this was the right time to invest in a solution?”

After that, the rest of the interview is what Revella calls “structured but unscripted.” The structure is based on walking the buyer through every step in the buying decision, from the first day all the way to the point when the buyer made a decision. And, as mentioned, it's critical to keep asking good follow-up questions, because that's when buyers get invested in the interview and reveal real insights.

If you want to interview buyers about a brand-new idea that isn't yet available, you need to get them talking about the problem you plan to solve. You might start with a very general question like “How's business?” Then, once they get talking, you can segue to “We're hearing that buyers are struggling to [insert problem here]. What are your thoughts?” Spend about 10 minutes or so with open-ended questions about what they tell you. After that, you can tell them about your proposed solution and ask them for feedback. But the most valuable insights come before you've biased the conversation with your own ideas.

In a consumer setting such as when people at GoPro interviewed surfers, an opening question might be: “What do you like most about [activity]?” Open-ended questions lead down surprising pathways and sometimes reveal insights that create a billion-dollar company like GoPro from scratch.

Closing the gap between marketing and sales means the marketing staff needs to be the buyer expert, not just the product expert. Marketers need to focus on buyer personas. It's not about posters or pretty slides. It's about having deep and factual clarity about how markets full of buyers think about doing business with the company. That's when marketing is ready to deliver tremendous value to the sales process.

Which brings us back to those dysfunctional discussions between sales and marketing, the name-calling and finger-pointing that go on in so many companies. “Marketers complain that salespeople don't follow up on their leads, even those that are highly qualified. This is especially difficult when salespeople have several different products to sell. Reps will generally avoid following up on leads for new or unfamiliar products,” Revella says. “But who can blame salespeople for preferring to sell products where they can anticipate how the buyers are going to react? Every rep wants to feel ready to answer the buyer's questions and overcome objections. Marketing needs to step up its game, understand what the salespeople are going to encounter, and give the reps confidence that they've got a winning hand.”

If you have responsibility for both sales and marketing, you need to make certain that marketing is focused on buyer personas. If the marketers work in a different part of the organization, you need to be an agent of change. Figure out how to get them the opportunity and skills they need to interview buyers and become buyer experts. Talk to the head of sales or the CEO if need be. Marketing can deliver incredible value, but only if marketers have a full understanding of their buyers' needs and perceptions.

The Buyer Persona Profile

Once you've completed some 15 to 20 buyer persona interviews and done some additional research by reading what your buyer personas read, it's time to create a buyer persona profile. This one-page document will be your guide to creating real-time marketing and public relations programs to engage that particular buyer. Your marketing and PR will be transformed from egocentric, product-based stuff that doesn't connect with buyers to information that people notice. You will connect with your buyers at a gut level.

And, importantly, your sales, marketing, and customer support efforts will be aligned.

I strongly suggest that you go so far as to name your buyer personas, as a way to make them come alive for you and the others in your organization. I also recommend that you cut out a representative photo from a magazine to represent your buyer persona and to help you visualize him or her. Via names and images, rather than nameless, faceless prospects, your buyer personas will come to life for you and the others in your company.

A great example of a buyer persona profile is the one describing “Internet Ian,” one of three buyer personas that HubSpot markets to. HubSpot is an inbound marketing software platform that helps companies attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers. Marketers from HubSpot developed the Internet Ian profile based on interviews with more than 100 web marketing managers.

What you'll see with Internet Ian is a composite profile of a web marketing manager, sometimes called an Internet marketing manager. Many of the details are consistent across nearly all of the representatives HubSpot interviewed. For example, web marketers generally understand HTML and web analytics very well. However, some of the details are more specific, representing composite or average characteristics. For example, Internet Ian is 26 years old and holds a bachelor's degree from Carnegie Mellon University. Of course, not all web marketing managers are 26, male, and Carnegie Mellon alums. The point is that including a combination of both general traits common to all web marketing managers and specific details that are still in some way representative helps marketers at HubSpot to personalize Internet Ian, and make him a little more real. The point here is that knowing a great deal about Internet Ian means it's much easier to reach him.

For each buyer persona profile, your job is to know as much as possible about this group of people so you can answer questions like these: What are the problems facing this buyer persona? What media do they rely on for answers to their problems? How can we reach them? What words and phrases do the buyers use?

The information found in the Internet Ian buyer persona profile helps that buyer persona come alive for the marketers at HubSpot. Instead of sitting around the office making stuff up, they are constantly referring to Internet Ian. “What would Ian say?” and “What would Ian want?” are frequent questions asked in HubSpot conference rooms.

Organizations that take the time to learn about their buyer personas get out of the common egotistical sales mode and instead work to educate potential buyers. When you educate and inform rather than hyping, your marketing comes alive. Your buyer personas are then eager to do business with you and excited to share your ideas with others. The sale is made more quickly, and more business results.

Focusing on buyer personas will transform your business. That's why this concept is so critically important for effective sales, marketing, and service alignment—it's also why I write about it a lot.

How Buyer Personas and Journey Mapping Integrate Marketing and Sales

Most marketers make stuff up. They sit in nice comfortable offices and imagine what interests buyers, and then create “copy” and “campaigns,” typically with the help of equally clueless agencies.

But as I've said many times in these pages, the more you know about buyers, the better aligned your marketing and sales become. The strategy of buyer persona research combined with journey mapping is an incredibly powerful way to rise above the competition.

At a recent presentation I met with Paul Mlodzik, Vice President, Marketing and Communications at The Co-operators Group Limited, and learned how he has implemented buyer personas and journey mapping. Indeed, The Co-operators is among the very best examples of marketing strategy based on understanding buyers I've ever seen.

The Co-operators Group Limited is a Canadian-owned financial services and insurance cooperative with more than $40 billion in assets under administration. Through its group of companies it offers home, auto, life, group, travel, commercial, and farm insurance, as well as investment products. The company sells to people of all ages and backgrounds and is both a business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) marketer.

The Co-operators Group's first step was identifying discrete buyer personas and then interviewing representatives of each group.

“It took five or six months to get through all of this because you really do need to sit down with a lot of people,” Mlodzik told me. “We would interview them on the phone to figure out what are the common characteristics of the things that they're saying. We generated a very large database of actual verbatim quotes to see how people are thinking and the type of words that they're using.”

This kind of one-on-one telephone or in-person research is time-consuming but when done well yields incredibly valuable information. To help with the process, Mlodzik and his team worked with Forrester Research.

“When we came out with the group of personas, we had a whole vocabulary around each persona about the types of things that they would say,” Mlodzik says. “We learned about technology use, how they live, where they live, who they ask for advice, and how they go about interacting with different types of products and services, not just in our market but in general, and then specifically in our market.”

To ensure that Mlodzik and his team are completely dialed into each persona, they named each and then built very detailed profiles used by the team to create their marketing strategies. So that others in the company are aware of personas, they created posters out of them, which are located around the company offices. They even created an interactive persona exhibit, which will be touring offices across the company.

“By actually doing the work and doing it properly from a research-based perspective, you get a tremendous sense of confidence about things,” Mlodzik says. “I really like the fact that I was surprised by some of the things we learned. As a marketing veteran, you think you know about buyers. But I like being surprised because it gives me something else to work with. It gives me a hole to plug. It gives me a new need to go after.”

The confidence that Mlodzik and the team developed through research means that he can focus on only the most important strategies and tactics. It gets them away from the “list marketing” that so many people do when they are unclear about the best way to reach buyers.

“We're doing fewer things but each more intensely,” Mlodzik says of how he does marketing now versus before the research. “We have found we're doing less activity and getting more results.”

The process also helps to align marketing staff with the right roles. “As a result of doing this work, you end up freeing up head count,” Mlodzik says. “Instead of replacing people in roles that become vacant, we created different roles with different areas to focus on based on what we discovered during the persona process. It has changed the way that we do business.”

Understanding buyers is essential to great marketing. When you are properly aligned, you have confidence in your marketing strategies and your tactics are more effective.

A customer journey map, which can be used as a follow-on to buyer persona research, details a representative customer's experience and includes company interactions from initial contact through the process of engagement and into a long-term relationship. It can include virtual as well as human interactions.

Once Mlodzik had identified buyer personas and had published those profiles inside the company, the team brought groups of about a dozen people from each persona together for the journey mapping research. “These people hadn't met before,” Mlodzik says. “We told them that they would be grouped with people that we felt were in the same market or had some of the same preferences. But it was very funny to watch them interact with one another because it was almost like they were separated groups of friends. As soon as they got together, they just started yakking immediately. It was hard to get their attention at times because they just wanted to interact with each other so much.”

The way that Mlodzik implemented journey mapping at the Co-operators yielded surprising results that highlighted the differences between what staffers thought people do and what the customers actually do.

“The process has two parts,” Mlodzik told me, using the example of a Generation Y person filing an auto insurance claim. “The first thing you do is take the subject matter experts from inside the company, people from our claims department and underwriting and marketing and whoever knows about this particular journey in depth, and you put them in a room and ask: ‘How does this go? Step one: They hit a car. What happens? Step two: What do they do next?’ And you go through all the different steps and all the choices and how they get their car repaired and how you think they're feeling at any given time. Then you bring in about ten customers that are actually that persona, and you do exactly the same thing. The disconnects are sometimes jarring.”

It was clear that parts of the expected customer journey through the claim process did not match with what the young people said they would do. “You come into it with preconceptions,” Mlodzik says. “I was interested in what was not going to match up. For example, all of the young people except for one said the first thing they would do is call their parents—not call the claims number, not call their agent, but call their parents! We assumed people would call the 1-800 claims number. But that didn't happen. We learned how unprepared they were for the claim experience and how for them it is one of the biggest things that's ever happened to them. Those kinds of disconnects were the most important revelations.”

Mlodzik estimates that 25 percent of what Co-operators employees thought would happen were wrong. “That 25 percent is enough to make the whole way we communicate with them go bad,” he says. “A lot of the disconnects were around communication preference—tone, language, the softer things. In a highly commoditized business, financial services and insurance, one policy does look pretty much like the next one. It's not highly differentiated like smartphones or something like that. It's all about the approach. And if you get the approach wrong, you're sunk.”

Mlodzik and the team used the results of the journey mapping research to storyboard each process and make them more effective. “It's interesting because you think you're going to be fixing a product problem or a claims process or something like that,” he says. “Instead, a lot of what needs to be fixed is communication. You find out that what they really need is a simple email at the right time. It's a well-timed communication that helps them through this entire process. It's inexpensive but not simple to deal with.”

As an example, Mlodzik cites the journey of the “David” buyer persona, someone in his mid-40s running his own business. “This is a very entrepreneurial and independent kind of person and a perfect candidate for all kinds of different lines of insurance,” he says. “They can be some of our best customers. And they also tend to be do-it-yourselfers. When it comes to wealth and life insurance planning, they think they know what they're doing, but they don't. We learned that the way to approach these people is super important. When we put our subject matter experts through their journey, they came up with a 37-step process for doing a needs analysis and getting somebody into a basic set of investments. But when we brought in an actual group of ‘Davids,’ they knocked it down to about ten steps, which were very quick. And the process was over in less than three weeks because they showed exactly how it should be presented to them, when the choices should be presented, how everything should work. As a result, we are completely revamping our process based on that because we had totally overcomplicated it.”

Because the research into buyer personas and journey mapping yielded such surprising results and the resulting changes had such an impact on how business is done at The Co-operators, Mlodzik is even more of a believer in research-based approaches. “This has been both enlightening and rewarding because you get right in front of people and talk to them. When you get in front of people, you're always amazed by the things that they tell you.”

When everybody else is just making stuff up in their comfortable offices, a research-based approach to buyer personas and journey mapping delivers a decisive competitive advantage.

Midnight Oil

Want an example of buyer persona research leading to a surprising new product?

Several years ago, Bunker Hill Community College (BHCC) in Boston became the only college in the country to hold classes beginning at midnight. Yes, midnight. The “midnight oil” class period is from 12:00 a.m. to 2:45 a.m., and courses offered during this period in the spring 2014 semester included Principles of Psychology, College Writing II, Statistics I, and Human Growth/Development. This all may sound a bit crazy until you consider that many people who want to take college courses in the Boston area work an evening shift (for example, restaurant employees).

When people at BHCC took the time to interview representatives of a unique buyer persona—individuals who want to take college classes but who work second shift—they learned that the preferred time for class was immediately after work, which for them meant midnight. Any college in the United States could have developed midnight classes. But BHCC led with this innovation because it stopped making stuff up and actually found out what people needed.

And the college was eager to offer courses in real time—in this case, the time that is convenient for students, not the one that works best for the college. In a fun twist, students attending the midnight oil classes enjoy unlimited free coffee! The free coffee is even part of the clever sales strategy on the BHCC site. The response from students has been wildly enthusiastic. You just can't make this stuff up.

Imagine how much easier it is for admissions officers to sell the school to prospective students who work the night shift. Again, as I've said several times in this chapter, aligning your company's marketing around buyer personas makes the sales process faster!

Sales and Marketing Working Together

With all this talk about buyer personas and how web content drives sales and marketing success, it is essential that we take just a little time to look at how the two functions differ. By making certain we understand the difference, we can close the gap between marketing and sales and grow business faster.

It is the job of marketers to understand buyer personas—essentially groups of buyers—and communicate to these groups in a one-to-many approach. Marketers are experts at communicating to many people, and typically the potential customers they reach are not yet ready to have a sales discussion.

The marketing team captures the attention of a group of buyers and drives those people into and through most of the sales process. The content generated by the marketers—blogs, YouTube videos, infographics, e-books, webinars, and the like—can influence large numbers of people. Done well, with a deep understanding of buyer personas based on research, this content generates sales leads that culminate in the buying process.

The role of salespeople is completely different because they influence one buyer at a time when the buyers are much closer to making the buying decision. While marketers need to be experts in persuading an audience of many, salespeople excel in persuading the individual buyers. They add context to the company's expertise, products, and services. Through them, the marketers' content fulfills its potential at the precise moment the buyer needs it.

People Reaching People

Recall how I opened this chapter. Do you remember the two types of websites that we all visit? The ones we click away from usually hype their products and talk mostly about the organization. But the sites that we relate to, the ones that resonate, are created with us in mind. We're human, and we crave interaction with people who know us. When you deliver information to your buyer personas, you build a relationship with people before you've ever met them.