Martech Interview with Jim Kraus, President, Buyer Persona Institute (BPI)

Hi Jim, welcome to the MarTech Interview Series. Can you begin by telling us about Buyer Persona Institute (BPI) and your role there?

BPI’s sole purpose is to help organizations create buyer personas that reveal deep insights about the buying decisions they are trying to influence. These buyer personas take all the guesswork out of marketing because they are based on interviews with real buyers. They reveal insights that will inform nearly every marketing and sales decision you make, including what you need to communicate to prospective buyers (messaging), who you should communicate it to (targeting), and how (buyer’s journey).

As President of BPI, I focus on client management, thought leadership, and business development. I enjoy collaborating with our clients and working with a talented team of buyer persona experts that are dedicated to their craft. Being a division of KS&R, a nationally recognized strategic consultancy and marketing research firm, allows us to leverage the vast research expertise and resources of our parent company, reinforcing our commitment to delivering exceptional results for our clients.

Creating buyer personas have become a common marketing exercise in most organizations. What common mistakes do you see marketers making?

Any activity that helps marketers and sellers better understand their prospective buyers is a worthwhile endeavor. The challenge with buyer personas is that many organizations have a limited view of what they can and should be. They’re not making “mistakes”, they’re just missing an opportunity to create buyer personas that actually improve their ability to influence prospective buyers. Let me explain, as some of this is definitional:

Over the years, the term buyer persona has become synonymous with profiling a particular individual or role involved in a buying decision. To us, that’s really a buyer profile and it has limited value because it tells you nothing about how these buyers actually make buying decisions. An actionable buyer persona reveals deep insight into the mindset and behaviors of buyers throughout their entire buying journey. These types of insights take all the guesswork out of marketing, enabling you to develop strategies, content, and messaging that connects with buyers, breaks through the clutter, and drives more sales.

What are the key differences between a buyer profile and a buyer persona? Could you provide some examples to highlight these differences from a real practical scenario?

A “buyer profile” describes the characteristics of someone involved in a buying decision that you’re trying to influence – their role, industry, company size, geography, priorities, psychographics, etc.  It’s a fictional archetype that provides background information about an individual. It provides little insight into a buying decision and what drives prospective customers to choose you, your competitor, or the status quo. From marketing and sales perspective, buyer profiles have limited value.

A “buyer persona” is built from the real words of real buyers and provides deep insight into a buying decision that you are trying to influence. Much more than a one-dimensional profile of an individual or role, actionable buyer personas reveal insights about your buyers’ decisions, including their needs, desired outcomes, concerns, decision criteria, and buying journey. Buyer personas are immensely valuable to marketers because they eliminate all the guesswork about what prospective buyers want and need as they evaluate their options.

To illustrate my point, consider the example of an ERP software provider. Say the ERP provider determines that three roles are typically involved in ERP buying decisions –

1) operations,

2) finance, and

3) technology professionals.

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If you’re responsible for developing marketing strategies to increase ERP leads and improve conversion rates, which would you rather have?

• A buyer profile for each of the three roles that describe characteristics of these types of individuals with little insight about how to really influence them when they are involved in an ERP buying decision, or
• A buyer persona, based on interviews with recent ERP buyers, that reveals what outcomes these decision makers expect from their ERP investment, concerns that they have, and questions they will ask as they figure out who to consider, winnow down their options, and make a final decision. They also reveal when, where, and how buyers seek out information to inform this ERP decision.

You’d choose the buyer persona because it provides everything you need to know to develop impactful campaigns, target the right media, create effective messaging, produce quality thought leadership content, and arm your sales teams with the tools they need to hit their numbers.

Can you elaborate on what rethinking the buyer persona means? What information should a buyer persona contain?

Buyer personas include five areas of buying insights as it relates to a buying decision that you’re trying to influence. We call these the 5 Rings of Buying Insight^TM, and they include:

1. Priority Initiatives – are the most compelling reasons that buyers begin to evaluate a solution like yours. It’s the trigger event or conditions that cause a buyer to look for a solution NOW while others are content with the status quo.
2. Success Factors – describes the results that buyers expect from buying a solution like yours. Success factors resemble benefits or outcomes from the buyer’s perspective – what THEY expect to achieve.
3. Perceived Barriers – reveals the fears and concerns that lead buyers to maintain the status quo or perceive a competitor’s solution as a better fit for their needs. This insight helps identify factors that eliminate certain providers as buyers narrow down their options.
4. Decision Criteria – reveals the specific company and solution capabilities that matter to buyers as they evaluate your ability to deliver success. These insights are the questions that buyers are asking throughout the buying journey.
5. Buyer’s Journey – includes the behind-the-scenes story about the work your buyers do to evaluate their options, winnow down contenders, and settle on their final choice. These insights include who takes part in the buying decision, the specific work your buyers must do at each step, plus the information sources they use and trust.

The final piece of your buyer persona is a profile of individuals that are involved in the buying decision. As mentioned earlier, we call this a buyer profile and it includes demographic characteristics, challenges, and overall priorities of these decision-makers. This will be the “cover sheet” to your buyer persona as it summarizes a few useful characteristics of these individuals.

How does your methodology for building personas differ from other processes?

There are three key elements of the approach that are important.

The first we just discussed – basing your buyer persona on insights into the buying decision rather than just individuals or roles involved in the decision. That’s a foundational piece.

The second is collecting these buying insights through in-depth interviews with recent buyers. These are buyers who have recently made the exact same buying decision that you’re trying to influence. These aren’t interviews with your existing customers who have certain biases (good or bad). They’re interviews with prospective buyers you would have wanted in your sales pipeline! If you want a fact-based view of how to influence your prospective buyers, you need to talk to them – there are no shortcuts.

I’d like to mention one thing here. We’ve seen over the years that some marketers get anxious about the idea of talking to buyers – don’t be. We consistently find that individuals who have recently been involved in a buying decision ENJOY talking about the process they went through. This was an important decision for them, and they will talk freely about their mindset and behaviors throughout their buying journey. What you’ll learn is a game-changer.

The third component is to include an abundance of buyer quotes in your buyer persona. Once you complete your buyer discussions you’ll look across all the interviews to find patterns in the data that reveal insights in each of the five areas I mentioned earlier (5 Rings of Buying Insight^TM). You should include buyer quotes to support each insight as they serve two important purposes. First, quotes add credibility to your buyer persona by linking what buyers actually said to each insight. Second, they enable you to have a deeper and more nuanced understanding of your buyer – how they think and talk about a particular buying decision. This understanding will be invaluable to your marketing and sales teams.

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How can an organization get the most value out of a buyer persona?

We see organizations use these buyer personas a number of ways:

1. Identify Which Types of Buyers You Need to Influence and How to Reach Them – buyer personas reveal all the roles that participate in the buying decision as well as when, where, and how these individuals seek out information to inform their evaluation.
2. Develop Competitive Positioning – interviews with recent buyers enables you to capture how prospective customers perceive your solution and capabilities versus your competitors so you can position yourself in a way that is clear and differentiating.
3. Create Effective Messaging – insight into a buyers’ expectations throughout the buying journey, plus verbatim quotes describing how they weigh their options and make a choice, enables you to find the messaging sweet spot between a buyer’s needs and your solution’s capabilities.
4. Develop High Quality Thought Leadership Content – buyer personas enable marketers to identify problems and desired outcomes that are particularly important to decision makers and reveals opportunities to develop content that allows buyers to see things in a new and more confident light.
5. Arm Your Sales Teams With Buying Insights and Tools They Need – an understanding of your buyers’ needs, concerns, and what is most important in their buying decision enables marketers to develop strategies, tools, and messaging that sales can use to hit their numbers.
6. Guide Product Development Decisions – buying insights reveal features and capabilities that matter most to buyers as well as any gaps in your solution.

Could you tell how buyer’s journeys have evolved with the latest digital technologies such as conversational AI, and personalization?

Conversational AI and personalization have added another dimension to how buyers explore, evaluate, and make buying decisions. These advancements have also revolutionized how marketers understand and engage with prospective buyers. Conversational AI enables more interactive interactions, while personalization tailors the buyer’s experience based on their preferences. While these newer technologies offer benefits such as data-driven decision-making, customized communications, and enhanced customer experiences, their true power is realized when combined with buyer personas. Buyer personas provide the essential foundation for leveraging conversational AI and personalization, enabling marketers to deliver personalized and engaging experiences that drive engagement, conversions, and buyer satisfaction.

What’s the advantage in going to a specialist to create buyer personas? Why not do it in-house?

You can definitely develop your buyer personas in-house! The trickiest parts are finding theright buyers to talk to, conducting interviews to get the insights you need, and compiling theresults. There are a number of free resources, including templates, online to help. If you find the process becoming overwhelming or if you see value in seeking assistance from an impartial third-party firm, there are options available. Many specialized firms, including those with extensive experience like ours, have developed buyer personas for numerous organizations over the years, providing them with valuable insights and expertise.

In 2010, Adele Revella founded Buyer Persona Institute to fulfill her vision that all marketers could be buyer experts — professionals who are a trusted source of competitive advantage because they have deep insights into how, when and why buyers choose the solutions they market.

Jim Kraus is President, Buyer Persona Institute (BPI).