Leveraging Buyer Personas for Strategic Growth - Jim Kraus - Fractional C-Suite Retreat - Episode #63

Growing a business is hard, but it does not have to be.

Once a week, we take a break from the hustle and bustle in business to talk about innovations and what's new in the C-suite. This is the Fractional C-Suite Retreat, and I'm Joseph Frost. Pull up a seat at the fire, grab a drink, smoke a cigar, and just join me as we relax, learn, and get inspired. This retreat is sponsored by Your CMO, helping organizations grow with better marketing strategy.

Welcome. I'm excited for today's guest. Prior to his current role, he worked as the Vice President and Principal at a KSNR, a nationally recognized strategic consultancy and marketing research firm. He won awards for the excellent leadership he provided for important market research projects that enabled IBM Global Services as their market research leader. He has a BA in economics and an MBA, both from Rutgers University.

Welcome.

Jim Krause. Jim, how are you?

Hey, I'm doing great, Joe. So glad to be here.

So I didn't want to put you under the shadow of your current role, but tell me, what is your role and title and the quick background of Buyer Persona Institute?

Yeah, so I'm president of Buyer Persona Institute. I've had that role for a couple of years. My entire career has really been spent in the marketing and market research industry. Led market insight teams on the client side, on the consultant side. So Buyer Persona Institute is kind of a natural next step for me, if you will, because I've always been kind of a very hands-on market researcher that cares almost too much about what do you do with market and buying insights, not just creating them, but how do you actually develop them and actually do something really useful for them. So Buyer Persona Institute has, has been really a great fit And I'm sure we'll talk about, you know, buyer personas and methodologies and approaches and how you can use them. But that— in a long story short, that's how I kind of got into this right now.

Yeah, I'm so excited because I've been a big fan for a long time and I'm glad we're on the call today. So, well, let's start with my first question, which is what's something on— what's something going on in the C-suite today that you think other C-suite leaders should know about?

I think really it's Just conversations about, you know, there's a lot of conversations about, you know, especially in today's, you know, economic turbulent times a little bit that we're still trying to come out of is trying to figure out where do you spend from a marketing and sales perspective. I'll go, I'll look at it from that lens. Where are you gonna really use somewhat finite resources, right? I mean, a lot of the C-suite is really trying to make some hard decisions in the marketing and sales arena, but also on the other, other disciplines within the organizations. And I think one of the really hard things is trying to figure out where do we invest in things that are more foundational that are really going to create knowledge and capabilities that's gonna carry us through the next, you know, boom, if you will, economic cycle. And what are some places that we wanna really kind of focus on to really drive, drive leads and drive conversions and win more business now. So one of the interesting things I'm seeing is I would say 6 months ago, it was more of, hey, we just need to kind of pull up the shutters and, and maybe just kind of weather the storm. Now it's interesting. We're seeing more and more as the C-suite is really trying to figure out where do we make investments to really carry us forward now, looking, looking forward more. So a lot of the conversations are kind of the, the, you know, the pros and cons of different approaches that they may, may use to do that. So that's good news, I think. But that's the main thing I'm seeing is just that that discussion happening, that thinking happening.

Yeah, I, I see it too. And a lot of times it's, there's a big umbrella over marketing and sales spend and where to focus to get the, you know, short and long-term returns. I think the smallest part of that umbrella is probably market research, but gosh, when done right, it could be, make the biggest difference in the rest of that, that trajectory. So can you speak to that a little bit? Because I think most people underestimate the value of investing in research.

Yeah. So really the key thing is, and one of the reasons that, as I mentioned earlier, why I'm enjoying, you know, leading Buyer Persona Institute is, you know, I'm a big proponent of being, you know, really looking at market research and really scrutinizing the investment, but in a positive way. Like it shouldn't be viewed as, Oh, it's a, you know, it's something that doesn't provide a lot of value or it's a necessary evil. You really wanna look at it in a positive way and, and kind of reverse process where you wanna say, what are the insights that I really need about the market or my own customers or prospective buyers that is really gonna give me the insights to move forward very confidently in what I'm doing?

Right?

If you look at it through that lens, what's gonna end up happening is you're gonna A, value research, and B is you're gonna be looking at it from a much better and discerning eye as far as where you spend research. Right? So You know, one of the things about buyer personas and our focus, which is really understanding the buying decision that people make more so than just profiling individuals and roles, but really understanding what does it take to influence buyers to look at your products and services? What does it take buyers to actually trust you as they're working their way through their buyer's journey? And, you know, they're trying to get educated about a particular purchase they're, they're making. They're getting confused. They're looking at multiple providers. They've got some angst about the purchase. So what is it can you learn about your buyers and then think about how you can use those insights to really, you know, stick the landing when it comes to marketing and sales. So, so when you're communicating to your prospective buyers, however you're communicating to them in any forum, you just feel really confident that, you know, you're saying something that they're going to care an awful lot about, number one. And number two, if you do it correctly, you'll also be talking about something that really differentiates you and makes it very clear why they should want to go with you. What is the thing that you provide that they should not only have confidence but also say, hey, you know, these folks have something special here that we really want to look at?

Yeah, well, I know for, for a fact that it works because we do the buyer persona interviews with all of our customers and we've always seen valuable insights come from it. We also almost always have the same conversation. I'm curious how you message this. Around, oh, I don't need a buyer persona. I understand my buyers and who they are versus what you just said is what are the insights you need to make better decisions or what is that buyer decision-making process like? And it's not clearly articulated the difference between those two things. Can you help me do that?

Yeah. And this is really important. You know, in fact, when I have the opportunity to speak at events, you know, a lot of times I'll spend the first half of what I talk about literally on just defining a framework for buyer personas and how you define them and how you think about them. And then the rest is kind of how do you go about and execute and actually develop them. But what you're talking about is such an important piece though, because when you say buyer personas, that terminology, it's got a lot of baggage, good and bad, right? But when you say buyer personas, what most people think of, particularly marketers and sellers, is they think, okay, a buyer persona is a, it's a fictional avatar, if you will, that profiles a particular individual or role involved in the buying process, right? So if you sell software or service or some type of technology, for example, you may have a CIO buyer persona. Right? And, and what you're thinking about is, okay, that's gonna be a lot of insights about the CIO. Right? Like, what's their average age and education and what are their top priorities and what are their challenges and what information sources do they read and all that stuff is useful to a point.

Right?

But a buyer persona, the way we define it and the way we do them is much more impactful because it's not about just understanding the individual and the role. What you really want to understand is what are some— what can we understand about the actual buying decision that they're making? Because a CIO, I'll stick with the CIO example, they may be involved in 20 buying decisions a year or more in all different types of products and services they use for their organization. I can guarantee you, having done enough of these, that the things that they really care about and the things that are gonna really influence their mindset and their behavior varies quite a bit by buying decision or by different product or service that you're selling. So that's what you're trying to do. Like, if you can try to think about a buyer persona as, you know, I sell X, what are, what are some things I can understand about the mindset, attitudes, and behaviors about buying committees that are buying X? That's really the way you wanna think about buyer personas. That's a, that's a real game changer.

So it's the, it's the, context around how they buy your product or service that matters in, in understanding that buyer persona, not the general target of who's that buyer that we're targeting, the demographics and geographics and even psychographics.

Absolutely.

That general background is important, but the context of how they go about making the decision to buy your product or your services is the key.

Yeah. And, and maybe we can go even go one step further to try to bring this to life a little bit more. So really there's 5 to build a buyer persona. You really— there's 5 really key areas of insights that you want to know about a particular buying decision. And, you know, for anybody listening to the podcast, what I would say is think about a particular product or service that you sell, right? Because it doesn't matter what it is, especially if it's something that's a kind of a high consideration decision where buyers are going to be looking at multiple alternatives. There's probably going to be a buying committee. It may be an infrequent purchase. They don't make it all the time, or they, you know, maybe it's the first time they've even made it. Right. But it's not a transactional thing they're buying all the time. Think about, you know, in your mind's eye, think about that product you're selling. So if you built a buyer persona based on that product, there's 5 things you'd want to know. We call them the 5 Rings of Buying Insight. It's just a name. You can call them whatever you want. The first thing you want to know as part of your buyer persona for product X, whatever that is, is what we call priority initiatives. And think of priority initiatives as triggers. These are the things that literally are causing your buyers to say at a particular moment in time, we need to do something. We need to start looking for alternatives to what we're doing now. Because what we're doing now or not doing now just isn't working anymore. So you want to know what those are, right? Because you want to be able to meet your buyers where they are. So you want to understand what is the thing, whether it's a challenge, whether it's something going on in their organization, something to do with the environment or the economy? What is the thing that's getting them to say, hey, you know what, I got to start Google searching solutions or I got to talk to my network and figure out what's out there, right? The second thing that you want to know as part of your buyer persona is success factors. And these are simply— the easiest way to think about them is outcomes or benefits, right? These are the most important things that you want to get out of this investment, right? What are the 3, 4, 5, 6 things that are, you know, absolutely critical that you spent the money and you can look back on it and say, hey, we achieved these things. You wanna know what those are because think about case studies you're building, your messaging, and trying to really resonate with buyers about what they wanna achieve. You wanna know what those are. The 3rd thing is called perceived barriers, and this is a really important one. It's my favorite. I don't know why. Maybe it's because, maybe it's because I'm a cynic at heart, but it sounds negative, but it's actually a positive thing. And here's why. So perceived barriers are the concerns and trepidations that buyers have about making this investment with anybody or things they may be concerned about buying from certain providers that have certain types of characteristics. So that sounds awfully negative, right? I'm talking about, like, all the things they're concerned about and fear about. The reason it's so powerful, though, is because if you know what those are, and that's a key insight in your buyer persona, now you can proactively address them. And even more importantly, By definition, these are things that are getting providers eliminated from contention.

Right?

So if you are able to address that, you're going to, you're going to end up, you know, as you say, help you get through the winnowing out processes they're evaluating. So that's the third one. The fourth one is decision criteria. And the way I like to think about decision criteria is now you're really getting kind of in the weeds right now. Your buyers are, you know, they've probably done a little research. They're starting to understand their alternatives. They're talking, you know, features and support and all kinds of things with different alternatives they have. And they're just starting to get a bit more educated. So these are like the really more detailed questions they may have about your product, your features, your support, anything that has to do. And, and it's when they're really starting to winnow down their options, right? And going from 8, maybe 8 alternatives to 4, what have you, right? And then the last part of this is the buyer's journey. This is the 5th ring, if you will. And buyer's journey really includes 3 things. It includes, you know, who are the key influencers that are involved in this decision? You know, and what are their roles in that decision? Number 2 is what are the key steps in this process? So what are the key things that are going on in this, in this buyer's journey in terms of how they figure out who they're going to consider and how they evaluate their options? And then the 3rd part of buyer's journey is just the information sources that your prospective buyers actually use to get informed about the different alternatives that they're looking at. So if you think about those 5 things I mentioned, those 5 things about your— now gives you everything you need to know from a marketing and sales perspective to develop strategies and messaging that are not only relevant to your buyers, but also really gonna help you differentiate yourself with buyers. So they're— I often call them the foundation of the marketing house. Right? They're really gonna inform everything. Yeah.

You did such a nice job of articulating those, 5 rings. I think the most surprising part to the most people that are just new to this concept is how much work does it take to create those insights? Are we talking hundreds of interviews and hours of research and dozens of surveys to thousands of people?

Yeah. So the answer, it depends, right? So I will never add, I will never tell anybody not to do more buyer interviews because The more you can talk to the, your buyers, the better off you are, right? From a marketing and selling perspective and product perspective for that matter. But generally speaking, the rule of thumb that we have is, is do at least 10 interviews with, with what I'm calling recent buyers. And we should probably talk about that definition too in this conversation. But you wanna talk to 10 recent buyers that have literally been through this same buying decision in the last 3 to 6 months. And these aren't just your current customers. These are people that may have not looked at you at all. Maybe they looked at you and picked somebody else. Maybe they looked at you and they did pick you. But these are representative of the market of the product or service that you sell. If you do any less than 10, what tends to happen is it gets to be a little bit more anecdotal than is ideal, because when you do the interviews, you wanna actually look for patterns in the data across these, these buyer interviews you're doing. Anything less than 10 gets a little sketchy.

Right?

What we found is when you do more than 10, you can, you'll certainly learn new things. You'll get more depth of insight, but you won't necessarily learn any new things. So if you can just do 10, and there's reasons to do more than that, but just to keep things simple for now, if you can just do 10 recent buyer interviews of somebody that's made the exact same buying decision you're trying to influence, you'll be amazed how much, how much insights that you can get that are going to inform your key decisions.

And I think the hard part is then how do you find those 10 recent buyers if they're not just your current customers?

Yeah. So there's, there's a couple of things that you want to do. You know, if you're, if you're doing a study like this and you want to talk to recent buyers, there's two main things you want to do for just defining what that will look like, what the study, quote unquote, will look like. One is you want to define the buying decision that you're trying to influence, which, which So it sounds very easy and sometimes it is, sometimes it's, it's not so easy, right? So think about, you know, if it's a, you know, let's say it's CRM software just to use an example, right? You could say, all right, well, we want to find recent buyers of CRM software. Maybe it's as simple as that and it's a simple definition of CRM. It could be that you're an organization where you really kind of focus on the sales and marketing aspects of CRM and that's really kind of your sweet spot and where you really focus. Maybe you want to define the buying decision as CRM, but you want to talk to buyers where sales and marketing components of that were really the priorities, right? So you can define that any way you want. So you define that. The second thing you want to define is what your target market is, right? So again, we'll just stick with the CRM example. It may be that, you know, you're really— your ICP, your ideal customer profile might be large or small companies, right? Maybe it's both. Maybe it's one or the other. Maybe it's midsize. Maybe there's certain industries you focus on, certain geos. Companies that have certain characteristics, whatever it is, you wanna define what those are. So now you've got 2 things. You've got your buying decision on the one hand. You've got your target market on the other hand. And what you wanna do is develop, we call it a screening questionnaire for those that may be more familiar with, with research. You've probably heard of that before. And it's just a way to, to qualify people for the interviews. Right? And there's different sources that you can use. There's different recruiting firms that can help you do this. There's expert networks out there that can help you tap into these folks. And what you want to do is find organizations that have made that buying decision in the last 3 to 6 months, and you want to find individuals in the company who were significantly involved in that buying decision because, you know, you're basically taking them through an interview where they're gonna tell you everything that happened. Right? So it's an— obviously, it's important they were involved in a very significant way so they can give you all those juicy details, which is really It's the gold, right? Is the thing that's gonna really give you all the insights that you need.

How, how do you find those people? I find, I mean, I know some of these answers I'm asking you, but I'm curious. And it's hard to go out and find someone who's not a customer that's going to complete one of these interviews with you, right?

So you can do a couple of different things. So if you go to any qualitative focus group facility, a research facility, they usually have sample that they can provide. There's expert networks that are out there, like, you know, the GLGs and Zintros of the world that many folks have probably heard of. Those are another sample sources. You know, there are in the, in the research industry, there's a variety of firms and that have capabilities and databases that have these type of firms. And then you can either work with them to help, you know, you work with, you give them your screening questionnaire that you've developed as far as who you want to target based on those two big things I told you about. And they will help you find those folks. Right? Or you may have your own recruiting resources. The other way to do it is if you have win-loss records, that's another way to do it. You know, with the only challenge with win-loss records is you will find people that, you know, obviously current customers if they're wins, ones that are losses, you know, they were obviously looking at you. The one piece that you're missing there is you won't have a view of prospects that didn't look at you, which isn't— which is not ideal because those are folks you want to look at as well.

So your organization does this for clients. You provide this service and a deliverable. What's the deliverable look like then for somebody that hires you to do their buyer interviews and provide them these insights? What's that look like?

Yeah. So there's 3 key pieces to a buyer persona the way I usually describe it.

Right.

So number 1 is the buying insights and those 5 rings of buying insights that I told you. Right? So, you know, so let's, we'll just, let's just pick SuccessFactors. That was one of the things I mentioned, right? One of the 5. And those are the outcomes that your, your prospective buyers want to achieve. We will look across, across the interviews. We, you know, we record them, we transcribe them, we mine them for insights, and we will develop, we will find patterns in the data across them so we can identify where is there really a pattern here? Where are we really seeing something that's happening across a number of companies and not just one company, right? Type thing. So the first thing is we'll just list out the different success factors. So maybe there's 6, right? And here's the 6 key outcomes that a company is looking for when they buy your particular product and service. So that's the first component. The second component of your buyer persona are buyer quotes. And these are absolutely critical. And what buyer quotes are is they substantiate your insights. So as an example, let's say one of the success factors, let's, you know, we'll talk about the CRM example. Let's say you find out a success factor for CRM is lowering your marketing costs, right? Buyer quotes will be actual quotes from your interviews that buyers actually said that where they actually talk about that and they talk about the, that outcome that they want and why that outcome is important. So what we'll do in our personas is we'll deliver the insight and then all the buyer quotes that we had, that we got to substantiate it. And those buyer quotes do 2 things that are really powerful. The first thing they do is they provide an incredible authenticity to your persona and credibility. You know, our favorite meetings is readout meetings because when we go through the buyer quotes, very quickly the buyer becomes the star of the show, right? We're not the star of the show. You're not the star of the show. The buyer is, right? And hearing their words, actually how they talk about this stuff and think about this, it just brings the whole organization together. So it's great when we do readouts and we have marketing, sales, and product people on the phone. We're doing a Zoom meeting. And it's amazing how they all kind of come together because these are clearly the people they're trying to influence. Right? That becomes very clear. So that's number 1 for buy-in. The second part, probably even more importantly, is, you know, as a marketer or seller, you're always trying to figure out how do I get in my buyer's head? How do I really give them what they want? Right? Like, you want them to be satisfied. You want to, you want it to be the, you know, the win-win situation. This allows you to walk in their brain very clearly and in their steps and in their mindset and how they talk about the solution category, how they talk about your competition, how they talk about you. So that's incredibly valuable when you're developing, you know, marketing and sales assets, messaging, conversation starters, thought leadership pieces, all those kinds of things. The buyer quotes are very valuable. So those are, those are 2 of the 3. The 3rd and final component of your persona. We call it our buyer profile, and it's a cover page. The way to think about it is it's almost a cover page to your persona. Why the persona provides insights about the buying decision, the buyer profile page just gives you descriptive characteristics of the folks that are involved in that buying decision. You're gonna get these from the interviews. So you'll get things like, you know, it's these, you know, the, these are the titles that you talk to in your interviews. Here's their top priorities overall. Here are the information sources they use. Here's their typical education. And for many, they think of that as a buyer persona. It's not. It's a, it's a profile of your buyer, the individuals and roles. And that's a nice cover sheet. It's a way to just get people like, okay, this is who you talk to. This is kind of what's on their mind. Then you get into the buying decision. You get into the real, you know, nuts and bolts of the whole thing.

So do you offer like a sit-down consultative, uh, you know, presentation of this material, or is there an interactive workshop then that happens afterwards that we start going into like tactics that might be, uh, appropriate for this audience? Or how far do you take it after the, uh, the first 3 items are done?

I mean, we focus on 2 things for, for our clients. One is just developing the buyer personas is core to what we do, right? We do this we do hundreds of these studies, right? So we've, we've gotten pretty good at it in terms of how to execute them and how to do the interviews, how to find the people, et cetera, et cetera. The other thing that we do, and we can either help organizations do this or you can do it on your own, is a, we call it a persona activation workshop. And what's really important is what, what the goal of that workshop is. So let me just speak about that for a minute. So if you think the easiest way to think about it is if you think about a Venn diagram where you've got two interlocking circles, let's just focus on one circle, right? One circle will be all your buyers' wants and needs. And this is literally all the insights that you just learned in your buyer persona, right? So let's say you did a buyer persona study. You've got 30 or 40 buying insights, right? You now feel really good that you know what it's gonna take for, to influence your buyers. So that's great. If you had to do nothing else, you're ahead of the game with that, right? Because it's probably a little bit more than you have right now, at least, You know it factually. That's, that's the case. The other side of the Venn diagram, the other circle is what your capabilities are.

Right?

Because you wanna map, you wanna marry those two things together and find that intersection and that sweet spot. So what the thing to do in the activation workshop, or if you do it on your own, however you do it, is go one by one, literally every buyer want and need that you got from your persona and ask yourself, what are your capabilities against that buyer want need? Because I can tell you there'll be certain things that You're like, oh, this is perfect for us. You know, we've got great capabilities here. We're the only ones that can do it. So not only is it valuable to the buyer, but it's also differentiating. Awesome, right? Maybe you go to the next one and you say, oh, we're okay here. We've got capabilities. We probably can do what the rest of the market can. But yeah, we can check that box. You may go to another one and say, wow, we're just woefully inadequate here. Maybe we're working on this, but it really isn't on our radar, right? So the key point is you're going one by one By doing that and then mapping those two things together, what you're gonna find is you're probably gonna find about 5 or 6 key value prop themes where you're gonna feel great because you're gonna know two things. One, you're gonna know that buyers want it because you did the, you did the research, you did your homework. The second thing is you're gonna identify where you have strong capabilities and where you can differentiate yourself in that exercise. Now you can develop messaging and value prop themes around those 5 or 6 key areas. And those are incredibly powerful because now you've got things like, you know, sales folks are always trying to figure out what do I go talk to my prospects about? Here you go. Here's 5 things we can guarantee you they're gonna care about them. And oh, by the way, we did all the work and you've got all your proof points. Right? Messaging. Right? We're gonna develop messages around all these things. We're gonna develop thought leadership, thought leadership content around all these things. We're gonna do, when we do events, we're gonna be really focused on these 5 things. Right? Or pick a couple of the key ones. Right? It's just the center of your universe because you've done that exercise. So that's a great thing to do. You don't have to do it to get value out of the buyer persona, but, you know, boy, you'll be ahead of the game if you do it.

Yeah, I guess that's to me, why do the persona work if you're not gonna do the activation work? But I'm sure it gets utilized in other areas of the business as well. But, you know, at some point you've got to activate on that work. The, you know, the question that one of the questions I've had for a while is that the buyer persona is that this, this process has been around for how many years have you guys been doing this? 2000 to 2010?

Yeah, it's been— yeah, it's been about 15 years.

Yeah. How much has the buyer changed in the last 15 years?

I know the answer I should probably say is a lot. But, but it hasn't changed all that much. And all I mean by that is that, you know, it's interesting to me how, you know, again, it's all, it's all buying decision specific. So it depends on what your product or service is. But the thing that hasn't changed is the framework and the things that are really important that you wanna know about your buyers. At the end of the day, those are still, I wouldn't say they're the same things. So again, it's apples and oranges depending what you're looking at, but it's still buyers that are you know, they're struggling, right? I mean, you know, if I look 10 years ago, buyers were also, you know, when they're going— when you're thinking about these high consideration buying decisions, they're going in this and it's— it may be something that they just— they haven't bought that frequently or maybe they've never bought at all. So they're just trying to get themselves really educated about it as quickly as they can. It's fascinating to me how even with some of the most sophisticated solutions that we have the chance to work on at times, like technology solutions that could be really niche and specific, We'll hear time and again that they started their search by Googling.

Right?

Which is, you know, it's just really, it's not the only thing they do, but it's, it's still pretty common. So buyers are still talking to their peer networks inside the company. They're talking to their peers outside the company. They're doing internet research. They're talking to vendors. They're looking at case studies and customer references. They're still doing all the same things they did 10 years ago. What's really important is just to really understand the specific decision that they're making that, that you're trying to sell a product or service around. That's, that's the key.

Yeah.

How often should an organization consider updating their buyer persona work?

Yeah, that's a good question. We get that a lot. It depends, and, and it depends on a couple of things, but the main thing is how much is your market changing? So if you— then there's a couple of ways your market could be changing. If you have a, a product or service and it's basically more or less the same competitors or type of competitors there's a lot of not advancements or innovation in what you offer. You probably don't need to update them all that much. Maybe every couple of years would be fine. If it's something where either you've got new competitors coming into the market or there's a lot of innovation where if you look at your product or service in, in a 2-year period, a lot can change as far as some of the key features and capabilities. Or even more drastic, people are fundamentally addressing the— they may have the same need, but it's being fundamentally addressed by something different than it was a few years ago. That's another reason to do it. But generally speaking, you don't have to update them as frequently as you might think. It really just depends on how dynamic your market is and how much, how much it's changing and evolving.

Yeah. So what— how, how are you using AI to enhance the work that you do for your customers? And then how are you also seeing AI being misused maybe by others trying to do the same thing?

Yeah. So, you know, we're, we're pretty pragmatic about using AI right now. And of course, obviously, this is all gonna evolve, right? I mean, that's the kind of standard thing with AI. It's early. We'll see how it evolves. And, and that's all exciting, and we're excited about it too. And, I would say the most important way we're using AI right now is to help us analyze some of the interviews that we do. And, and that's for us, it's only occasionally. It really kinda depends if we're doing a bulk, like a large number of interviews, right? Because AI can help you analyze. So when you do the interviews, for example, that we do with recent buyers, you're recording them, you're transcribing them, you have all this unstructured data. You can feed those into different AI engines, whether proprietary or non-proprietary, and they can help identify key themes and things of that nature. That can be really helpful. I don't push that too much though, because if you're an organization that's doing your own buyer persona, I think, I quite honestly think if you're doing like one buyer persona for a key solution, for example, I think you're doing yourself a disservice if you just rely on AI to develop those insights. You know, take the time to read those transcripts and really think through and get in the mind of your buyers. Because I can almost guarantee you're gonna, you're gonna identify insights that AI probably won't pick up on or they won't have the richness that you would. But it's definitely a tool that you can use to help you with that. You can also use it to help you enhance, like, your buyer profile. So it's not a bad thing to do if you're trying to, you know, come up with, you know, let's say as part of your buyer personas, you're interviewing CIO, you know, like IT executives and marketing professionals. You know, let's say you sell CRM as, you know, sticking with that examples. AI can be useful to get some background information that helps you kind of fill out your buyer profiles and descriptive characteristics. So they're helpful in that regard. The only caution I always tell people is when it comes to the persona itself and the buying insights, AI does not have access to this behind the room, you know, because when you're doing these interviews, you're literally almost, you're almost covert, right? You're almost, you picture yourself following these folks around, you know, as far as all the key decisions they're making and their behaviors and their mindset, AI has no way of pulling that information out. Right? It's not, that's not publicly available information. And even if it was, you have no way of verifying it. Yeah. So, you know, again, I think AI is a great tool. I think it helps you with analysis. I think it can help with your buyer profile, but I would caution to be careful of using it for your buying insights, particularly for something this important because the persona is gonna inform all, almost everything you do in marketing and sales. So you wanna get it as right as you can. So that would be my only, my only caution.

Yeah, I think that's great. The first point you made about using AI to maybe help kind of aggregate some of the data, it can trans— take the transcriptions and cut them down and do certain things. And we've always used a marketing coordinator to do that work for our team. But we've We know the value of those interviews and those kind of almost subconscious insights you get that are so great that we require on all the buyer persona projects that our CMOs actually do the interview portion of it, right? It is recorded, transcribed, then the coordinators come in, they help put it together, but the CMOs were there, they had the conversations, and then now they've just kind of become much more familiar with that buyer. Generically. And then the insights come out and really help them message the key points back to the client. I think AI would have a really hard time ever doing that level of kind of work, I think.

Yeah. We do. So our researchers, the ones that do the interviews, our typical process is, you know, they'll, they'll do the first cut of the analysis with the, you know, with the insights and, you know, making sure we identify the right buyer quotes. But then it's an iterative process. So in, in our case, well, you know, I'll work with the researcher and literally go through the results with them and talk to them because what'll end up happening is I can't think of a, a session we've ever had where we didn't add some insights or massage some insights or something that really came out of it. The other value in it is just by talking about it, things just come up. Right? You find, you know, it's not just the insights. What you'll— what'll typically end up happening is there'll be, like, 2 or 3 overarching things that we think are really important to understand about the buyer, and that may not even fall in one of the 5 rings very easily. And if you rely on AI or you don't do a little bit of that iteration, you miss it. It's not the end of the world, but you made this investment, this commitment of time and resource, you know, you want to get as much out of it as you can.

Do you go back and do anything to maybe fill in some of those gaps if you recognize them after the fact or augment some of the data or validate it with surveys or any other tools when you do a project, or is it just really strict keeping, keeping it to the interviews only?

So one of the things that you could do is, and we have another, we have another version, buyer personas. We have an updated and expanded version of the book that's coming out this summer. We added a whole chapter on survey research to it. And the reason for that is because there's all different types of things you can get from survey research as a follow-on to the in-depth interviews. So, you know, the interviews that the first interview you do are discussion. They're 30, 40 minutes. It's a conversation, right? You're, you're acting as a journalist really more than an interviewer, right? You're trying to get the buyer's story in their own words. What you can do with surveys afterwards is, so, you know, let's say, I'll just use this as an example. Let's stick with SuccessFactors, right? Those are the outcomes that you're trying to get from a particular, from a particular purchase that you're making. You know, through the interviews, you may identify, let's say, 8 SuccessFactors What you don't know from those interviews is, is there any hierarchy at all?

Right?

Are any of those more important than any other ones? You just haven't done enough interviews to do that. With surveys, there's different methodologies you can use to really get very fine-tuned about how important these are. So you may find that one success factor is— they're all important, but you may find one is 3 times more important than the other 7, as an example.

Right?

Just to be, you know, blatant about it., or more subtlety. So that's one of the things that survey research can do. The other thing survey research can do is, and survey research is basically just interviewing a larger sample of, buyers essentially. And it's usually closed-ended questions like ratings and rankings of that nature. The other big thing you can do with survey research is it helps you segment results. So you maybe find out that we've got this buyer persona, but with more data, we can actually see that, hey, maybe there's a couple of segments. And, you know, all these insights are relevant, but maybe for one segment, maybe there's a, maybe there's a key theme or area or areas that are really important. And the other segment, maybe it's some others. Right? And together, they're still correct, but the segments give you even more fine tuning in your marketing and sales strategy. So that's another great thing to do with surveys. Yeah.

That's good. Well, let's talk about the book a little bit. So the first book was probably around 2010. And, you know, 15 years ago, things have changed enough so that now it's time to revisit portions of the original book and approach. What are some of the highlights of the new book that's coming out?

Yeah. So I think the main things that we focused on the book is we spent a little more time in the beginning of the book talking about a lot of what you and I talked about early, Joe, about, you know, the difference between a buyer persona that's just, you know, a profiling a particular role or individual. And what is a, what is a buyer persona that really enables you to understand a particular buying decision? And we've learned that that's one, it's, it's a pretty simple concept, but sometimes it's, it's, it's trickier to kind of really grasp it completely. So we spent more time in the book talking about the distinct differences between the two and why understanding the buying decision is so critical. And we actually have a whole chapter giving an example of, of a high consideration buying decision so that, you know, as the reader, you get to the end of it and it's just kind of a, the light bulbs will start to go off. We say, ah, that makes total sense why we'd wanna do our buyer personas this way. So we spent more time in the upfront part of the book explaining that. And then the, the second, the, the back two-thirds is similar. I would say there's a couple of things we added. We added how do you design a buyer persona study? So we didn't really get into that in the first book. So we talked a little bit about this earlier, but a little bit more specificity about if you're gonna do this type of buyer persona study, how do you actually design it? Right? You know, then there's a lot of stuff about executing these, these studies, which is similar or the same. We added a new chapter, which I mentioned on surveys, which is how do you extend and enhance the insights even more? So that's another brand new chapter. And then we added more towards the end of the book about how do you, where are all the different ways that you can use buyer personas in marketing and sales. So there is some good stuff in the first book on that. We just added some more specificity so that, you know, people that are doing this can kind of say, oh, here's, you know, SuccessFactors, here's 4 or 5 different ways I can use SuccessFactors to really, you know, help our marketing and sales performance. So we added a little bit in all the key sections of the book. So we're excited about the enhancements that we made.

What's that process been like? When did you start thinking about rewriting the book, updating the book, or maybe writing a new book?

Like, tell me about the process. Yeah. So, you know, Adele wrote the— Adele Rivella wrote the first book, as a lot of folks know who are probably listening to this podcast, and her and I co-authored the second book. And so we started talking about it a couple of years ago, and we kind of knew that an update was really needed just because, you know, the more you talk to clients and marketing and sales professionals, you start to see things like things that, that are in our brains that we know would be helpful if we could get it out of our brains and out there.. So we picked up on some of those things, and then we started getting excited about some of these new areas like the study design piece and the survey piece, and AI's in there a bit as well. So I would say the writing really started in earnest the fall of this past, this past year. So really October, November, December timeframe. And we got the manuscript in to the publisher in January, and I've been, you know, going back and forth with them over the last several weeks, actually just doing some copy edits here and there. And we're really gearing up for an end of July launch. So, so it's probably about 3 months of writing, you know, in tandem with, you know, you know, running the business right in parallel.

Yeah, it's such a process. Did you ever think about a whole new book or was it always we just want to revise the one we wrote before?

Always revise. I mean, big believer in this framework. I mean, it's just, it's so pragmatic. It's so straightforward. It's like once you get it, you get it. And you just can't argue the results, quite honestly. So I was a big fan long before I even got involved with Buyer Persona Institute. So it was never a, never a new book. There are other things we could write about, but as far as buyer personas are concerned, this was more of a how do we enhance it even more and how do we address some of the things that we look back on and say, like, you know, oh, God, I wish I'd put that in the first edition kind of moments. Right? Those, those things become more obvious the more you're working with, with, uh, with different companies and different people. Yeah.

I'm curious, what kind of leadership lessons have you learned over the last couple years coming in and taking over the Buyer Persona Institute from Adele, who's been such, you know, she's a founder, big name, big shadow, and now you come in and you're doing, you know, you're doing your thing in your way and it's going to be different at times and similar. What have you learned?

As a leader? Yeah. You know, it's, it's, you know, glad you asked me that. It's been, it's been a fascinating 2 years for me. So I'm a market researcher by trade and KSNR, the research firm that you mentioned, we acquired BPI a couple of years ago. I had run our tech practice for over a decade, and I did a lot of research on the client side at technology firms. So used to doing all kinds of custom research studies, right? That's kind of my bread and butter. If it's been research, I've probably probably done it in spades. So this was interesting because now I'm coming in with a framework that's been developed before and that I was a believer in, and there was a reason I was a believer in it because I've always been kind of very focused on the business aspect of research as we talked earlier. So the biggest thing I think for me has been, how do I, you know, how do I make sure that the things that are really good about this methodology and this, and this business and how we do it, how do we make sure that we don't lose that? Right? That's the last thing I wanted to do was lose all the great assets and thinking and resources that we had. At the same time, pushing forward and saying, like, where can we really make some enhancements that are real enhancements so that people don't think like, oh, they're a totally different company now. Rather, they think like, oh, wow. We didn't know you guys did that too. That's pretty cool. Tell me more about that. And there's a linkage between the two. And, and that I'm, I'm pretty proud of. I think we've done a really good job of doing that. And I think the book is a great example. Like, anybody that gets the second edition of the book, and I hope they will, I think you'll read it and you'll, I think you'll say that. You'll be like, oh, this is great. This is some new stuff that we can start using, but it's not like, you know, here's a brand new buyer persona framework, right? We're still big believers in it. So I think that's been the, from a leadership standpoint, I think that's been the biggest, I don't wanna say challenge because I've actually really enjoyed it, but the biggest thing that I've been really mindful of is making sure that we're keeping our strengths and our core and also making some improvements in how we do business. Yeah.

I'm curious, how well do you know your own buyer?

I never think well enough. Right. And that's just, you know, and part of that's because of what we do. And maybe it's because I'm a, you know, I'm a buying customer insight junkie at heart. So I love getting on, you know, client calls of any variety, whether it's a, you know, first time I'm meeting somebody or doing a readout or we're just brainstorming about how do we design this study. I love talking to people that we work with because that's when I really get to understand everything that's going on with them, right, from the, you know, here's the economic realities they're dealing with and the pressures that they're getting on a daily basis. You know, as an example, I, I've, in 2 years, I've yet to talk to anybody that didn't see value in doing this work. A lot of times it comes down to, you know, do we wanna make, might wanna make the resources available, time, money, etcetera to do it. But it helps me really understand their world. Right? And it's, you know, it's, it's, you know, making trade-offs all the time on, on things that you wanna prioritize. So that's great to also get a pulse on that. The other thing that's really valuable, and I'm always questioning people that I'm talking to, is it always starts with why do you wanna do a buyer persona? Like, I always start there. Tell me a little bit about what is a buyer persona to you? You know, if you had one, what would you do with it? And the reason that's so powerful for us is because very quickly, I get a sense for where are they, right? Are they, is it really, they're just kind of flailing a little bit and everybody's asking them for everything every day. Sales is on them and it's a new presentation deck, a new messaging, a new event they're doing, and they're under a lot of water like that. Or is it that, you know, they're really thinking through how do we make a more of a long-term commitment investment to understand our buyers? And we, really realize that this is foundational and we're just trying to start thinking through how we can use these insights. So I think it's a long, long-winded way of answering your question, but I never think we understand them well enough, but we're always talking to them and, and really trying to understand where they are.

Yeah. Do you work mostly direct or do you work through channel partners like other agencies or, or firms?

I would say 95% of the time we work directly with other companies and we're always happy to work with agencies, other types of partners, consultants, we're always happy to do that and be part of the, part of the solution in any capacity. But generally speaking, it ends up being directly with the marketing, marketing department generally could be sales, could be research. We love working with research folks too. But generally corporations, the marketing department is the primary, our key clients at the end of the day.

I love talking to you because I could go on hours and hours about this stuff. It's fascinating to me. I'm such a big fan. The one thing that just popped in my head, you don't have to spend a lot of time on it, but what do you do when a product is relatively new to the market? I get that once in a while, like, well, we don't really have any buyers because it's a brand new product and it's really nothing out there like this. How do you answer that concerned?

Yeah. So the good news for us is, as again, my background is market research. So I've done a lot of new product development research more than I, I care to admit, testing new products and services. And there's all kinds of research methodologies, you know, quote unquote, that you can use to do it. But I generally refer to them as kind of concept testing or new concept testing because it's a new something new, right? So obviously, if something's just out there in the marketplace and there's no competitors that are offering it or it's just really brand new, how do you go talk to a recent buyer, right? Because there aren't any yet. So What you can do is we have one study we're doing now just like this is you can introduce a new product or service to a potential buyer in more of a concept, quote unquote, concept way. And just simple way to describe this would be if we're working with somebody and they've got a, you know, a widget that they're, they're gonna sell and they know, they, they know who they pretty much know who their market is. Right? They know who they wanna sell to, whether it's certain company sizes or industries. And they can describe the product or service. You know, they can describe their widget and they can say, here's what it is and here's the benefits we think it's gonna, it's gonna, are gonna be important. And here are some of the key features we think are worth mentioning. Well, let's put that on paper. Let's actually write that out, right, as a, as an offering. Like, it's, it's this, it's gonna give you these benefits. Here are the key features. And then we introduce that to, we find prospective buyers that meet your target customer who you're gonna go, who you're going to be going after too. And we show them that concept. We may, We may show it to them on screen if it's virtually, we may read it to them, we may send it ahead to them. And we have discussions about it and we talk to them about all the 5 rings of insight I just mentioned to you. Right. And talk about like, okay, this thing's out in the marketplace. We'll get some general feedback on it, but then we'll get, you know, specific and say, okay, what are some of the things that may cause you to, to ever start looking for a solution like this? Right. To try to understand what the triggers are. What are some of the key outcomes and benefits that you would want from this? Or what are you seeing here that kind of gets you excited and say, hey, this would be cool type of thing? So it's not, you know, we've called, we call them greenfield personas. Sometimes you'd call it concept testing. You can still use the same buyer persona 5 rings framework, but it's more of a conceptual type thing is the key difference.

Yeah. I love that approach. That makes a lot of sense. It's the framework that has been tested over the years and beat up and maybe tweaked a tiny bit along the way, but it's tested, has lasted that test of time for sure. And I'm excited for the new version of the book to come out and the enhancements that are coming from that. What else are you excited about for the future, Jim?

Anything on your radar? You know, I'm— I would say from our business perspective, I think one of the things that I'm really excited about is, you know, the survey research part is a new thing that we're starting to do. And part of that's just because that's my background. It's something that I can really bring to the table and it'll, and it's, there's tangible value. So we're really excited about that. The other thing that I'm really excited about is just bringing this, this approach to other, to other industries. I mean, we've done a lot of work in the B2B space, particularly in the tech space where this is a perfect framework because there are high consideration buying decisions and it's just a really, it just fits like a glove type of thing. But there's a lot of other industries, whether consumer or business, where their target prospects are involved in these high consideration buying decisions that they're trying to influence. So I'm pretty excited about trying to penetrate and just increasing awareness of this methodology. So it's an option for companies in these different industries to consider.

So I'm really excited about, about that.

What's the next big industry on your radar? Yeah, I think in terms of our business anyway, I think we're, you know, we're excited about the book and getting that out there. We're excited about, you know, we're, we've got this new survey research offering that complements the, you know, the in-depth interviews we do for buyer personas really enhances the value of personas in a lot of ways. So we're looking forward to getting that out there a little bit more in some of these methodologies that folks may not be as familiar with, but add real tangible value and enhancements to personas. And then I'd say the other thing that we're looking forward to is just expanding into some, some new markets. We do a lot of B2B work, a lot of tech work because it's a good fit for this framework. But we're also looking to get into industries like healthcare and medical device and and buying decisions that are very high consideration, important decisions, and trying to make folks in those industries a little bit more aware that this type of methodology is actually out there and that they may not be as aware of right now.

Well, I imagine there are listeners that are in those industries you just talked about within the current B2B space you're in and really anywhere that, that needs to understand their buyers better. What would be the best way for them to reach out to you if they want to learn more or contact you about what you guys do?

Yeah, I would say the two places to go is to go to our website, buyerpersona.com. Pretty easy to remember that one. We've got all kinds of resources there. We've, you know, we have a blog and we have some persona templates there. We do a self-paced masterclass that I know, Joe, you're aware of. You can take if, you know, for those that want to really get into this and do it themselves, even So that's a great resource. And then the other place is LinkedIn. Feel free to link, link into me. We try to put out, you know, we try to put out a decent amount of thought leadership around not just personas, but also just buying insights in general and how to really get in-depth buying insights that can really drive your marketing and sales strategy. So that's another great place to connect with me.

Great. Well, we'll have those details in the show notes, but I just got to say, I'm really grateful that you came on the show today. I am a big fan, as I mentioned multiple times, and just nice to hear more in-depth of what you're doing and what's coming next. I can't wait to read the book, but thank you for being on the show today, Jim.

I really appreciate it. Yeah, thanks, Joe, so much.

I really enjoyed it. And listeners, thank you for being here. I hope you learned something more about your buyers. And if you want to reach out to Jim, please do., and don't forget to subscribe. My producer reminds me to ask our audience to subscribe to the podcast. It helps our numbers, and look forward to seeing you on the next, um, the next episode.

Thanks for being here. And that's a wrap. There's another successful episode of the Fractional C-Suite Retreat. See our show notes and more episodes at fractionalcsuitretreat.com. This podcast is sponsored by Your CMO, helping organizations grow, save time and money with better marketing strategy and fractional execution. Visit them at yourcmo.com. Your CMO dot com.

Spelled wrong on purpose.