If you've come up the ranks in B2B Marketing and/or Sales, you know the quarterly and perhaps even monthly drill. We look at opportunities via company name, whether they are Global 2,000 or Fortune 500, deal size potential, and other few factors that likely make up segmentation. Usually a component of this effort is the target role and title you've got neatly pegged into a sales automation or CRM application. This is often accompanied by the mandate that we need to sell to the C-Suite or the CIO or CFO and whatever C label we may find. This may have been just fine - that is - until buyers have become fairly self-directed in the buying process as well as enabled by the Internet and social technologies.
What is becoming more and more evident is that buying behaviors are getting harder and harder to discern because B2B marketers are not exactly privy to the changing behaviors. We may be from a quantitative viewpoint, which is limited to tracking and monitoring Internet and social technology data, but not from a qualitative perspective. Here is where buyer persona development can be of help. In a previous article, Buyer Personas Require Qualitative Research and Contextual Inquiry, I mentioned that buyer persona development is at its' core a research methodology grounded in the practices of qualitative research and contextual inquiry. At this point in time in the social age, although it has always been a process by which to understand buyer behaviors for nearly a decade, buyer persona development is a critical means for B2B companies to get a handle on how to understand and segment buying behaviors.
What buyer persona research can reveal are distinctive buying behaviors within industries, marketplaces, organizational types, and etc. One of the main misunderstandings about buyer personas I've seen both by providers and companies is that the starting place is with the title and role of the buyer. Setting them down the path of building what are more buyer "title and role" descriptions and profiles masked as buyer personas. The resulting profiles adding a little more knowledge about potential buyers but not yielding the deep insights needed to discern buyer behaviors.
Another key area buyer persona research can help with is the changing nature of multiple decision-makers and multiple complexities in the buying process. While we can readily acknowledge the profound changes in buyer-seller models of doing business, it is not so easy to see the profound changes occurring in how complex organizations conduct business and buying. New intra-social technologies and collaboration platforms are rewriting the rules of how divisions, departments, teams, and personnel work through complex purchasing and procurement. Creating new and distinctive buying behaviors that can exists among complex solutions and organizational goals.
B2B marketers themselves must figure out the adaptations they must go through in order to map to changing buying behaviors. But first, they must obtain a qualitative understanding of buyers and their new found buying behaviors. In the areas of content strategy and content marketing, I am seeing the same path towards "titles and roles" being taken although under a new name. Here's what I mean: although we are giving B2B marketers a new label of content marketing to work with, many B2B marketers are still writing and publishing to the title and role set forth by the organization and not to the buying behaviors that have changed. I believe actually minimizing the full power and impact that content strategy and content marketing can have.
Let me use an illustration. A B2B organization that I worked with recently was involved in high-tech solutions for data centers. The natural impulse was to target the title and role of the CIO (and you all know the chorus part of that familiar song - "sell to the C-suite"). This meant that their content messaging and approaches were all aimed at the CIO. What qualitative research for building buyer personas revealed was that all of this messaging was going right in the proverbial trash can. What was discovered was that for this particular high-tech solution, title and role meant very little. What mattered most was that certain markets and industries had distinctive research and approval processes as well as buying behaviors for this solution which were carried out by people with varying titles and roles from IT Network Managers to Vice President of Information Architecture. The organization began to build its content around the issues and goals that were being tackled within the buying process and not specifically to a title and role. They learned, via qualitative means, how to become relevant to buyers no matter the title or role. Buyer Personas were built and segmented by how they reflected more the nature of the behavior an archetype buyer will exhibit when addressing this particular problem and solution.
Without question, while B2B Marketing is focused on developing its new prominence in the early stages of the buying cycle via content strategy and content marketing, B2B Sales is caught flat-footed on how to adapt to changing buyer behaviors. Professionals in B2B Sales must feel like they under assault from the constant dire predictions of outright dissolution in organizations as well as the constant pressure to squeeze more revenue out of the pipeline. This may be especially true in B2B organizations where inbound competencies haven't been developed and measurements for productivity are based on outbound calls, appointments, and deals.
I do not subscribe to the notion that B2B Sales will face extinction much like when the Roman Empire fell and the city of Rome burned. What is true is that B2B Sales must go through a period of reinvention and cannot stand idly by as the world of B2B buyers continues to transform with each passing day. The good news is that B2B Sales can become a critical resource for buyers in a new found way if reinvention means becoming buyer enablers.
Here's the interesting twist in the changes that are occurring - as buyers become more self-directed - the more B2B organizations will view "buying" in a professional light as opposed to something they do. My thought here is very different than the conventional purchasing department. Self-directed buying that involves research and evaluation as well as stakeholder analysis will become an increasingly important role in B2B organizations. Just like in other professions in embryo stages, a few will begin to lead the pack and bring some sense to the chaos of buying. B2B organizations will begin to assign and delegate buying to "professional buyers" skilled in using Internet and social technologies and who are skilled in the process of executing a self-directed buying cycle.
Buyer Persona Development can be a process and means for B2B Sales to reinvent itself. Understanding the archetypes of buyers and their relevant goals can provide the powerful insights B2B Sales needs to engage with buyers in this new social age. How can B2B Sales begin to reinvent themselves starting today? Here are a few guiding steps:
Commit to Research: this step is like perhaps going to a 12-step program related to an addiction. A B2B organization must first admit and come to the realization that they may know very little about the new social buyer and that the reason they need to reinvent their sales organization is because they are out of touch with their buyers. The first step is to recognize the need to know your buyers in a new and deep way.
Do the Right Research: the right research is based on qualitative research and contextual inquiry. Meaning you must go where your buyers are and gain insight into behavior that no amount of quantitative arm twisting will reveal. And oftentimes this means investing in third party help for a very important reason: not only will buyers be more forthcoming outside of the seller-buyer relationship but qualitative research and contextual inquiry (with knowledge of ethnographic and anthropology practices) takes skillful effort.
Don't Fall in the Profiling Trap: a misunderstanding I mentioned above is thinking that buyer personas are a profiling of specific titles and/or roles in your target organization. Thinking only in this way will put you no further ahead than you already are in terms of mapping B2B Sales to buyer behaviors. Food for thought: if B2B organizations are assigning and delegating "professional" social buyers, how well do you know about them? Who are they? Are they the same as the titles and roles you've thought for the last twenty-five years? What do these new buying cycles look like?
Build Insight-Based Buyer Personas - Not Templates: in B2B Sales, insights about buyers are crucial to having a platform for engagement and conversational relevance. Templates of buyer personas are very limiting in keeping the focus where it should be - on key insights and narratives that matter to how buyers go about accomplishing goals.
Design for Sales Readiness: the design of buyer personas should focus on sales readiness in B2B Sales. Today's B2B Sales Teams must be ready to anticipate and meet buyers where they are in the buying cycle. Buyer Persona Development grounded in the right research can give an insightful window into how today's "assigned" social buyers are self-directing their buying cycles.
Design for Interaction: designing buyer personas should include a healthy focus on interaction that involves personal engagement - whether it is by a social technology medium, by phone, or in person. This can be done on two levels. One to design for conversation and two to design for customized content assembly.
Inform Sales Structure: buyer persona development can contribute immensely to informing how to organize sales team structurally and in ways that best map to how buyers are self-directing their engagement. The development effort informing on the right mix of inbound and outbound competencies that allow for an engaging as well as a redesigned buyer experience.
Inform Sales Roles and Hiring: the role of B2B Sales is transforming significantly and is at a critical juncture point. It must demonstrate role change to the buyer community in order to restore as well as regain relevancy. This means that B2B must junk their existing hiring criteria for sales they are wedded to. Buyer persona development can inform on the skills, knowledge, education, and attributes needed by sales teams to succeed.
These steps outlined above will contribute towards the reinvention of B2B Sales within B2B organizations. I also predict as B2B Sales adapts and evolves to changing buyer behaviors and reinvent anew, it will gain a prominent role in the eyes of the buyer. The changing buyer is already starting to experience "content overload" and overwhelming information sorting. B2B Sales, in a new role of expertise, can be the enabler and assembler of goal attaining opportunities that B2B buyers and social buyers alike will want as resources.