One of the most pressing issues that have surfaced in the last few years with the evolution of personas and with buyer personas in particular is how to address the complexity often found in B2B markets. In fact, I believe it is the underlying issue that has prevented buyer personas from being more widely adapted. We've seen this issue raised in several of the organizations we've worked with to create user and buyer personas (Goal Centric) and accompanied by anxious questions related to how to actually use the personas. In one Fortune 100 company we worked with, we saw "personas" that were created but had little value for they did not address the issue of B2B complexity. Thus, the significant investment made was all for naught. My partner, Angela Quail, and I helped to address the situation however it did leave us shaking our heads at how some persona efforts done without the rigors necessary can do more harm than good. As I mentioned in my previous blog entry, this misunderstanding and common pitfall of attempting to create a "single" user or buyer persona can be costly and result in little value. And unfortunately give personas and buyer personas a bad name.
Before I became involved with Alan Copper's efforts with personas in 1999, I spent the majority of my career in sales and marketing. One thing that I am sure any person in the B2B markets will tell you is that there is never just one "buyer" in these markets. Back in the day as they say, some of the most successful sales managers and sales reps I hired were able to not only grasped this notion but also were able to devise plans to speak to the many buyers that would exist in an enterprise account.
Reading Saeed Khan's On Product Management recent entry on the value of personas for developing enterprise administration software joggled memories of what perplexed me when involved with the likes of SAP in the early days of personas. Although more than one user persona of an enterprise application was being developed, my instincts were telling me that they were not addressing the multiple buyers and stakeholders in the process. Thus, the seed was planted on thoughts about customer personas, as they were first called, before the term buyer personas became more common.
An individual buyer persona in a complex B2B market can prove to be of only marginal value if it stands alone. Of course, I advocate even one individual buyer persona over doing nothing at all to improve a company's understanding of their customers. To fully realize the potential of buyer personas today, they need to be part of an overall effort to integrate them with buying process scenarios and a view of the "ecosystem" that is relevant to a specific B2B market. These views are essential to understanding the many roles that participate in the buying cycle and how as well as why buying decisions are made.
Consider briefly the product development and buying cycle of an enterprise software application. The likelihood that there will not only be many types of users but there will also be many types of buyers and stakeholders affecting the purchase and adoption on an enterprise level is quite high. Thus, the degree of complexity is significantly greater than that of creating a user persona for a B2C product or that of a buyer persona for a small business.
David Meerman Scott, who has a really neat blog called Web Ink Now, talks extensively through his new book The New Rules of Marketing & PR and speaking engagements about the new rules for B2B marketers. A couple of rules do apply here. One, that your audiences are no longer prospects but buyer personas. Second, is that the old rule of sales cycles must give way to buying cycles. Understanding not only who your buyer personas are but also how they engage in the buying cycle (and how the buying process is defined) is a "new rule" for the creation of buyer personas. This deeper level of understanding will ultimately help an organization to address the B2B complexity they are confronted with and to realize the full value of buyer personas.
