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Interview with Adele Revella, author of The Buyer Persona Manifesto

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Adele Revella

Today I speak with Adele Revella, founder of the BuyerPersona Institute and author of The Buyer Persona Manifesto. Adele has spent the last 25 years focused on a single goal: Developing marketers who are the trusted source of competitive strategies and rapid revenue growth.

Babs: Why are buyer personas so important?
Adele Revella (AR): Marketers need a concrete, real experience of how and why the buyer chooses a particular approach to solving their problem, or their only input, and this is obviously risky, is based on what the company wants the buyer to believe. It doesn’t matter whether the marketer is B2B or B2C, or marketing services, products, or solutions. All marketers need a tangible, authoritative source of insight into exactly who they’re trying to persuade and how different groups of buyers will respond to the various messaging and other strategies the marketer is considering. Marketers need to have real confidence in their personas, deep insights into what will work and what won’t with a particular buyer. Otherwise, they run the risk of making decisions entirely focused on internal goals. This has always been a bad idea. 

Now that buyers are able to navigate so much of their decision without the help of a sales person, companies can’t afford to ignore the buyer’s perspective. And the buyer persona is simply the most effective way to capture and communicate the buyer’s perspective.

Babs: How do buyer personas differ from market segmentation?
AR: Historically, companies segmented their markets based on demographics. In B2B marketing, this is generally by industry or company size. In B2C, this segmentation is based upon personal characteristics such as gender, income, marital status, or hobbies. From a marketing perspective, the critical factor for any segmentation approach is that the differences between any two segments are significant enough to inform different routes to market. Particularly in B2B, many marketers have been busy developing different messages, marketing content, and web navigation based on  segmentation criteria that doesn’t help them impress buyers. 

What’s worse is that many marketers have tried to implement buyer personas on top of their current demographic segments. For example, if the company marketed to three different industries, and there were four different job titles involved in buying decisions, the marketer thought they needed 12 buyer personas. This doesn’t work. 

If we start with the assumption that the only reason for a new segment is because we need a different strategy to be effective, buyer personas would not be related to demographics but rather based upon what’s unique about how different groups of buyers make decisions.   

Babs: How can an organization get started in creating them, especially an organization strapped economically?
AR: There’s good news here. I don’t recommend that marketers spend lots of money to hire research companies to build buyer personas for them. That’s because the end goal isn’t buyer personas. They are a tool to help you  build a marketing team with deep insight into how buyers think. And the people who really know the buyer will be the people who build the personas, not the people who pay for a slide deck full of pictures and stories. 

I am working with a few agencies that are building buyer personas for their clients, but these agencies are also building and/or executing their client’s marketing strategies. So, if the company has outsourced most of its marketing effort, then it makes sense that their agency should also build the buyer personas.  

I suggest that the company start with an upcoming campaign, launch or initiative that they know won’t be easy. It needs to be something where stakeholders realize that it’s important to succeed. It’s important to focus only on the buyers and decisions that you want to influence for this one program.

Babs: What information sources are most helpful in creating the personas?
AR: I’ve always said that the only source that’s really helpful is direct interviews with recent buyers. I’m currently working with one very large B2B company that appeared to have enough resources and data so that we could build their personas without taking that step. We’ve spent six weeks evaluating every kind of social media, web analytics, and other resource you can imagine, and we’re way short of what we need. So I am more convinced than ever that the most critical insights for buyer personas need to be uncovered through direct interviews with real buyers. The worst thing you can do is ask people inside the company to just make up the buyer personas.  

Marketers don’t need to be research professionals to interview recent buyers about what worked and what didn’t as they went through a particular buying decision. The interviews need to be unscripted, and marketers need to probe. That’s because the buyers’ first answer to any question is usually not deep enough to provide the insights that marketers really need. This is a specialized kind of interview skill that marketers can acquire with just a few hours of interactive training and coaching.

Babs: How often should an organization validate them? How should an organization know that they should be validated?
AR: This is another reason not to use a research company to build your buyer personas, because the discovery of buyer insights is never complete. I tell marketers that they need at least six-to-eight interviews with recent buyers before they develop a persona. Then, they need to conduct at least one additional buyer interview every month forever and ever. 

The fact is that the probing part of the interview is critical. As different decisions become critical, the marketer will need to probe into different areas of the buyers’ persona. Thus, interviewing buyers and being the buyer expert in the company should become a critical part of the marketer’s role rather than a project or task.  

Babs: You’ve taken up the mantle of major advocate for buyer personas. Why?
AR: I prefer to think that I’m a major advocate for the strategic contribution that marketers can make as the company’s trusted expert about their buyers.  Buyer personas are a way that expertise is delivered, but my real goal is to build marketers whose perceived core competence is deep insight into the company’s buyers.  
If you think about it, the success or failure of just about every decision the company considers will be decided by the buyers. Yet, in many companies, there is no one who can bring the buyers’ perspective to strategic decisions. This is causing a lot of costly mistakes that could be avoided and undermining the potential for marketing to be the respected force it deserves to be.

Babs: How did you come to write the Buyer Persona Manifesto? What’s been the reaction?
AR: When I started Buyer Persona Institute almost three years ago, I was just completing almost 10 years as the author and instructor of a two-day seminar called Effective Product Marketing. I’d traveled the world for all those years, telling marketers about the importance of buyer personas. Many students had asked me to write down my thoughts. 

With The Buyer Persona Manifesto, I wanted to present my vision to as many marketers and marketing stakeholders as possible. I published it under a Creative Commons license so that anyone could download it without registration or cost, and email it or share it with everyone. That seems to have worked, because the feedback is really good and so many people are interested in buyer personas now.

Babs: What’s next for you?
AR: I’ve recently released a new eBook, For Compelling Content, Let Your Buyers Be Your Guide, I co-authored with Maribeth Ross, VP of marketing at NetProspex. The eBook is a resource for marketers who want to understand how to build and use buyer personas as the foundation for all of their content. 

I’m also working on a new print book that I hope will be the definitive guide for marketers who want to become buyer experts. And of course I’m continuing to train and coach marketers so they can really know their buyers — and make the transition from tactical to strategic marketing. My ultimate goal is to help reshape the role of marketing, so I expect that will keep me busy for the foreseeable future.



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