George B. Thomas explains why knowing who you can and cannot do business with matters more than collecting contact details. He argues for asking deeper questions to build trust and create meaningful buyer personas instead of relying on surface-level information.
Contacts equal buyer Personas. How many of you know what a buyer Persona is? A buyer Persona is a human being, but it's a human being that you actually want to do and can do business with. It's a fictional representation, if you will, of that human being. But the thing about buyer Personas is we need to know who we actually can do business with. Which, by the way, you can't do business with everybody. So you also need to know who we can't do business with. We need to know who we can do business with and who we can't do business with. A positive Persona or a set of positive Personas and a negative Persona. I'll get into that. But they're human beings. How many of you have a form on your website, meaning they come and fill it out? Let me guess. First name. Yes. Last name? Yes. Email? Yep. Phone number? Maybe a message like, how can we help you? How many of you are asking the question, how would you best describe yourself? Interesting. So if we don't take time to get to know somebody and who they are, how are we building trust? If we're not starting the conversation of how would you best describe yourself? If we're not asking the question, what problem are you facing if we're not digging in a little bit deeper, versus first name, last name, email, phone number. How are we building trust? If you don't do anything else, which I know you will do more than that. After this event, I would beg you to come up with the buyer Personas for your company.
