Adele Revella on Growing Your Startup with Buyer Personas

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Today, I’m talking with Adele Revella, the CEO and Founder of Buyer Persona Institute, and author of Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight into your Customer’s Expectations, Align your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business.

Prior to reading Adele’s book, I always saw buyer personas as dated marketing gimmicks that were little more than a stock photo, some demographics, and a name like Mid-Market Mary or Small Business Steve. I just didn’t see how they could be acted on.

Adele changed all of that for me and made me see just how valuable buyer personas can be to any business, when they’re done right and today she tells us how to do that. Adele shares everything you need to know to learn who your buyers really are, what they care about, and how to use those insights to win more business.

If you’re relying on your assumptions, no matter how good you think they are, of why buyers choose your software over the competitors or what reservations they have before making the switch, then this is an interview you need to hear.

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Topics covered:

  • (00:18) – Background Leading up to Today
    • (00:29) – Adele explains what the Buyer Persona Institute is, and how she got started with it.
  • (02:15) – Buyer Persona Fundamentals
    • (02:24) – Defining ‘buyer persona’.
    • (03:29) – Mistakes companies often make when they are using buyer personas.
      • (03:44) – Constructing too many different example personas.
      • (04:03) – Using only the most obvious or irrelevant information.
    • (05:15) – Adele discusses the insights we are actually looking for to help guide marketing decisions.
      • (05:32) – Getting into the mind of the consumer as they go through their buying journey.
        • (05:51) – Their questions and their thoughts.
    • (06:44) – The Five Rings of Buying Insight.
      • (07:22) – ‘The Priority Initiative Insight’.
        • The trigger moment that compels them to go solve their problem.
      • (07:45) – ‘Success Factors’.
        • Which benefits factor into the buyer’s decision and which do not.
      • (08:16) – ‘Perceived Barriers’ aka ‘The Bad News Insight’.
        • Buyer objections.
      • (08:55) – ‘Decision Criteria’.
        • All the attributes of the product, service, solution or company the buyer is investigating.
      • (09:25) – ‘The Buyer’s Journey’.
        • All the places buyers go, the resources they trust, and who’s involved as they evaluate their options and choose one.
    • (10:51) – Conducting Probing Interviews.
      • (10:58) – Ensuring you get the information you need from your interviews.
        • (11:38) – Conduct interviews with people who have actually just been through a buying decision.
        • (12:02) – The first question to ask.
        • (12:41) – Determining what caused urgency in the buyer.
        • (15:49) – The art of asking probing questions.
          • (20:03) – How to allow the buyer to tell you what they need to say and avoiding confirmation bias.
      • (22:09) – Adele’s opinion on the use of surveys.
      • (24:16) – Why Adele recommends that only ten interviews are needed to gain the insights you need.
        • (25:00) – Exceptions to this ‘rule’.
          • (25:07) – Attempting to learn about different areas of a market.
          • (25:31) – Different geographies.
          • (25:41) – Differences between industries.
          • (25:56) – Company size.
    • (28:30) – Turning insights into action.
      • (29:15) – Crafting your response to the things that matter to your buyer.

Rapid-fire Questions:

  • (35:50) – What do you find yourself spending too much time doing?
  • (36:30) – Who do you learn from?
  • (37:23) – What is the next challenge that you’re going to be tackling in your business?

Resources mentioned:

Where to learn more:

If you want to learn more about The Buyer Persona Institute or work with Adele personally, head over to their website at BuyerPersona.com.  You can also find them on Facebook and Twitter.

Transcript:

Andy:  0:00:00.0  Adele, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Adele:  0:00:03.9  Well thanks for having me Andy, I’m a just absolutely delighted to be here.

Andy:  0:00:09.6  Yeah, I was telling you before the show, and before we even really set this all up, that I’d been diving into Bio Personas a lot this year, so I’m super excited to chat with you.

0:00:18.9  But to back things up a little bit for listeners who aren’t familiar with you or your work, let’s just start with the basics?  What is the Buyer Persona Institute, and how did you get started with that?

Adele:  0:00:29.6  Yeah, well it’s, you know, the company is a market research company essentially, although we do a lot of work with our clients post research to make sure that personas, the insights we get them about their personas are useful.  0:00:45.9  But it’s probably the easiest if you just think of us as a market research company.

0:00:49.8  And how I got started with this was a little weird, because I had been leading a workshop, I’d actually built a workshop – a two-day product marketing workshop for a company called Pragmatic Marketing.

0:01:02.0  And I’d been teaching that for thousands and thousands of companies all over the world.  And I had kept – I’d talk for about an hour of this two-day workshop about buyer personas, and at the end of the workshop when I got the feedback forms, people always said to me, “Gosh Adele, the buyer persona topic is the most compelling part of this whole workshop and we wish there was more.”

0:01:27.1  And so when I sold that business to Pragmatic Marketing, just over almost eight years ago now, I decided to start this company to make sure that buyer’s personas were really solid in people’s minds.

0:01:42.8  Because people have a general concept that they need to understand their audience and their buyer’s journey, and who their buyer is, but there’s so much more involved.  And it’s sort of like anything else, it’s – a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing, right Andy?

Andy:  0:01:58.4  Yeah.  Exactly.  Exactly.  And so I want to dig a little bit more into that, because I think with – if anyone, especially in the startup world is paying attention to any of the blogs, any of the books, anything that’s out there, they’re surely to have heard of buyer’s personas.

0:02:15.6  But, I’m sure if you were to ask each of them to define that they would give you wildly different answers.  So I’m curious how you yourself would define what a buyer persona actually is.

Adele:  0:02:24.8  Yeah.  And so, yeah – the part that everybody knows is that it’s kind of an example buyer.  Right.  It’s someone that represents your audience.

But the part that is the missing knowledge, is it’s the example buyer’s story in the context of the buying decision that you want to influence.

0:02:47.3  And so, it’s not just who is this buyer and what are their overall goals and what’s a day in the life – matter of fact, some of that can be either dangerous, or certainly – or even a waste of time.

0:02:59.2  But, because we’re trying to use this persona to make better decisions about how to market to and sell to this buyer, we really need to understand what the buyer’s experience and mindset and attitude is as they’re going through that buying decision.  And that’s the most important part of the buyer persona.  0:03:17.2  And the part that people often misunderstand or don’t understand at all.

Andy:  0:03:24.1  Yeah, and it’s something you touched on a little bit, but I want to ask you to expand a little bit more there.

0:03:29.4  What is – when you see businesses apply this incorrectly, what does that usually look like?  Like how are many businesses using buyer personas in what you would call the wrong way, or just not fully exploiting the power that they have?

Adele:  0:03:44.6  Sure.  And so what people will do, is they will go out and they’ll say, “Well, what are all the different examples of people in our target market who might influence or make this buying decision?”

And then they’ll go try to build an example for each and every one of those.  0:04:03.0  And in some instances, this can just get crazy.  With people building way too many personas, and also, having only the most obvious or irrelevant information about those personas.

0:04:18.5  And so the combination of those two factors – too many, and not really getting into their buying decision is causing a lot of, you know, power points to be developed and then sit on a shelf.

0:04:33.0  You know, people are sitting around and scratching their head and saying, “Well how was that?  It seemed like that should work, but it didn’t.  What did I do wrong?”

Andy:  0:04:40.1  And that’s honestly, kind of how I approach a lot of this – is I would see these personas of say, like a Marketing Mary, or whatever the clever nicknames were, and then when I would read them I would say, “Ok, I sort of get this person, but I don’t really understand what I’m supposed to do with this or how this is really going to help the marketing in general.”

0:05:04.5  And that’s where I saw a huge disconnect.  And so your book really kind of helped fill a lot of that in.  And I think this sets it up pretty well when we start to walk through what the actual process to develop these personas looks like.

0:05:15.6  And the first thing I just want to ask with that is, we kind of know the generalities that we want to ignore, or at least not focus on, but what are the insights that we’re really looking for to just help us guide those marketing decisions that we want the personas to assist with?

Adele:  0:05:32.4  Yeah, so we – very good question Andy, and what we want to do, is really get inside.  We have pretty much everybody understands you, now there’s a journey our buyers are going on, right?

And they’re going through a process to figure out that they’ve got a problem, or that they want to achieve a goal and then go look for a solution to that problem and buy one.

0:05:51.5   And what we want to understand it, throughout that journey, what’s going on in their mind?  What are the questions they’re asking?  What are they thinking about?  And what are they, sort of, beginning to develop as a case for what they think they need and who all is involved in that and where are they going to get to build that case.

0:06:15.0  Because as they do that, those are the places where we as marketers need to influence.  And what we can do through a series of interviews with real buyers, is that we can begin to get insights into all of those parts of their decision and their journey that will actually be – it’s almost like cheating.

0:06:37.1  Once we have those insights, we know exactly what we need to say and do to persuade them to choose us.

Andy:  0:06:44.7  And in the book you talk about what you call, ‘The Five Rings of Buying Insight’.  Is that something we can talk about a little bit more today just to get listeners up to speed on what those are?

Adele:  0:06:57.4  Sure, right.  So once we interview buyers and we have a very special recommended approach to doing these interviews that we should talk about, Andy, in a minute.  But we can look for patterns across the interviews in five areas.

0:07:12.6  And so the first one that I as a marketer or sales person – most of us are a little bit of both, especially in small businesses.  0:07:22.1  So I want to know what’s the trigger moment.  And we call this ‘The Priority Initiative Insight’.

But this is essentially  — something happens in that buyer’s mind or actually in their world that causes them to say, “I can’t live with the status quo anymore, I’ve got to go solve this problem.”  0:07:41.7  And so that insight, we call it The Priority Initiative Insight.

0:07:45.8  The second one we look for patterns around is what we call ‘Success Factors’.  And this – once we get – cull this from the interviews, it looks a lot like benefits, but what’s beautiful about this insight, is it tells us which benefits actually, in the buyer’s words, factor into their decision.

0:08:05.9  And it also, by omission, shows us which things we’ve been talking about that buyer’s really don’t care about, or it’s a minor aspect of their decision.

0:08:16.8  The third insight we call ‘Perceived Barriers’.  And I sometimes refer to this as ‘The Bad News Insight’.  Because this is the place where we capture patterns across the interviews around all the objections the buyers have.

All the reasons that buyers choose to live with the status quo, not make a buying decision and all, and/or what we learn about why they wouldn’t choose us.  Why would they choose a competitor instead.

0:08:45.0  And frankly, this can be the most important insight, because it’s one of the things that we most need to address in both ourselves and marketing.

0:08:55.4  The fourth insight, I call ‘Decision Criteria’.  These are all the attributes of the product or service or solution or company that the buyer is investigating as their doing their research and weighing their options and making a choice.

0:09:12.2  And so, for example, price might be a part of their decision criteria but we know from thousands of buyer interview that it’s not as big a factor as people think.  So we get all the other attributes that matter to them.

0:09:25.7  And then finally, the fifth insight is ‘The Buyer’s Journey’, which, you know, most of your audience is probably heard about.  Which is all the places your buyers go, all the resources they trust, and who’s involved as buyers go out and evaluate their options and choose one.

Andy:  0:09:45.7  Yeah, and it is something where you touched on a lot there.  And it think when people hear those different rings of buying insight, they’ll agree with them.  They’re sort of obvious once you hear them, like, “Yeah these things do matter a lot”.

0:09:59.8  But where a lot of people go wrong is they just kind of get their marketing team together, maybe they’ll ask some sales people a few questions or some support agents and try to come up with these on their own.  0:10:10.3  But that almost misses the point entirely.

You really do need to reach out and talk to buyers to figure out in their words what actually matters and what doesn’t.

0:10:21.6  And so we touched on it a little bit, but now I really want to dive into how to actually conduct these interviews to get the information that you need.

And I know you’ve done a ton of these yourself, your team has done even more.  And for anyone who’s done customer interviews, they know that while it might seem easy up front – just get on the phone and talk to some customers about what’s going on, or potential customers.

But to actually get this valuable information out of them, you need to have a bit more of a regimented approach.

0:10:51.3  So what do business owners – whoever’s conducting these calls, need to do to make sure that these interviews get the information that they need?

Adele:  0:10:58.5  Yeah, so the most important thing is – I mean, it’s always a good idea to talk to customers and buyers.  And we’re always going to learn from those experiences, but to your point, Andy, if we’re going to learn something that’s a game-changer, that’s actually going to give us some new insight – and I call them The Five Rings of Insight, and we kind of used that word casually.

But insights like an ‘aha moment’, it’s something that really shifts our thinking.  0:11:25.4  And if we only take the input of people internally, we’re unlikely – all we’re doing is recycling our internal knowledge.  And that’s not that useful.  I mean, maybe it’s ok to do, but it’s not going to get us that aha moment.

0:11:38.1  So doing these interviews, first of all, we’ve got to do them with people who have actually just been through a buying decision.  We’ll go back as much as a year, but no more than that.

0:11:49.9  And so, people, when they do interviews, they’re usually with customers and they’re usually about the customer experience.  We want to make sure that we’re walking that buyer through their actually buying decision.

0:12:02.0  And the first question in the interview is the only one that’s scripted.  And it goes like this:  Customer or buyer – John, Andy, whomever, “Take me back to the day when you first decided that you might need this kind of a solution?”

Whatever this is, and say what kind it is.  “Take me back to the day when you first decided you needed a new solution for recording Skype interviews and tell me what happened.”

0:12:30.6  And the buyer’s first answer is probably going to be something pretty obvious.  “Well we, you know, we’re doing a lot of podcasts and we needed a lot – we needed to make sure we had a backup solution,” and so on and so forth.

0:12:41.2  And I’ll say, “Ok, well of course you needed that, but you probably needed that three months before or six months before, or a year before you actually finally when out and bought something.  Talk to me about what changed.

What really occurred in your organization or in your mind or in your experience that caused it to be urgent in that moment?”

0:13:06.0  And I use that illustration, Andy, because here’s what I want people to take away from these interviews – it’s so critical, is that when you’re doing these interviews, the buyer’s first answer to any question you pose to them, is not going to be insightful.

It’s always about, sort of coming back, taking what they said and saying, “Yeah but”, or “You just mentioned you needed it to be easy to use.  You know everybody wants it to be easy to use, everybody says their software is easy to use or recording software is easy to use – talk to me about ‘easy to use’ and what was it about easy to use that you were evaluating, and how did you compare the ease of use of the various options?  And who was involved in that?  And when it really came down to those – that decision about who to consider, what was it you noticed about the ease of use of the one that you preferred?”

0:14:09.1  So, and I know I’m giving you a long answer here, but this is why I wrote the book, because this is a really – it’s a skill.

And it’s a skill that people have to practice and besides that very first question that I just gave your listeners, there isn’t a single other previously defined question in the entire interview.

0:14:33.5 It’s all about walking that buyer slowly through their real decision and asking lots of probing followup questions.

Andy:  0:14:41.5  And I think you hit on a lot there.  And the value of that question and probing beyond just that first superficial answer is really what makes this – the insights, the true insights live up to that – what you said, we might have been using it causally before, it’s what makes those insights so valuable.

Because the first answer is going to be the obvious thing that you probably could figure out by just having a superficial conversation, even with email, with a few different customers.

But to really stand out and make a difference, you really need to get at the root of that and figure out what it is exactly that they mean.  What are the pains?  What was that catalyst that caused them to change?

Because, I know in my own work doing these interviews, when you ask what happened – for the company I’m working with now, we do help desk software, and it’s for smaller businesses that usually have – just on support of their inbox.

0:15:34.6  And so they always say, “Oh, we were just getting too many emails, so it got too much to handle.”  But without following up, you don’t get more than that, and so that was a really great point about the value and the importance of digging deeper.

0:15:49.0  And so, I want to talk to you about what comes after this.  And you said it’s all about working with the buyer to guide them through the journey and probing to get more out of them.  What does that look like after they’ve set the stage in response to that first question?

Adele:  0:16:02.6  Yeah, so after that, we’re going to say, “Ok, so we can see that the email situation was intolerable because”, of whatever they said.

“What did you do first to research and your options?”

So as marketers this is gold, whatever this answer is.  You know, did they go to their peers?  Did they go online?  Did they do, you know, a search?  Did they think they knew the companies?  We want to know all that.

0:16:28.6  And – but again, that’s going to be pretty obvious, so now we’re going to say to them, once they tell us that, “Great, so when you were out on the websites,” and I’m just giving you examples, and there’s millions of places this can go Andy.

0:16:44.9  As – let’s say they went on the websites, so I’m going to say to them, “So great, when you were on those websites, what did you learn about the companies that seemed most interesting to you?”

And, “What was hard to learn that you needed to learn?  What was it you noticed that of the companies that you decided to continue to consider, what was it that those companies talked to you about that the ones that you didn’t consider didn’t?”  And it’s actually slower than this, but I’m trying to do this quickly.

0:17:16.8  And, you know, because it’s about and it’s about listening to that buyer’s answer and finding the places where they get a little worked up, where they’re like, “Oh my gosh, I had to dig through 16 white papers before I ever got to this one thing that I really needed to know.”

And it’s about, you know, almost elevating that emotion and that issue by probing on it a little bit.  “Oh wow, that must have been really frustrating.  What were you hoping to find that wasn’t – that you couldn’t find?”

0:17:47.5  “And how did that factor into your decision to continue to consider that company?”  And then we go to the next step right?

And then we say, “Ok, so now you’ve found them – you went online and you found four companies, what did you do next?”

And then we listen to that answer and we say – and here’s the most important thing, as we’re walking the buyer slowly through this journey, and I’m assuming this is a buying decision that doesn’t happen in the grocery store — “We just walked in to buy a carton of milk.”

We’re not going to learn anything here.  But this is like something that the buyer gave a lot of thought to, there was a lot at stake at getting it right, and that can be consumer or B2B.

0:18:28.7  I’ve had people say to me, “Gosh, if I’m going on a big vacation or sending my kids to the right school, this is still a big decision.”

0:18:36.1  “And as you started to consider those four companies – and what did you do next”, and then continuing to ask buyers at every step, “What did you learn about those that you continued to consider, and what did you learn about those that you decided not to consider further?”

Because even though – going back to those Five Rings of Insight, people will sometimes conclude falsely that they should organize the interview around those five insights.  And they’ll ask questions related to those five categories.

0:19:11.4  That doesn’t work.  It’s about getting the buyer sort of out of the context of what we want to know and asking people a bunch of survey questions.

0:19:20.1  Surveys are the worst for doing this.  And it’s actually getting them inside their story, caught up in the emotion of that story and telling that story to you that you get insight.  0:19:28.5

Andy:  0:19:29.8  There’s a few things I wanted to ask about, and the first is one thing, almost just more pointing out – and with all the questions that you are asking, it’s very clear to me at least, but it might not be to listeners, that you’re wording the questions in a way where you’re not leading the person you’re interviewing.

You’re not setting up, “Oh, were you thinking about this, is that why you did this?”

You’re more just asking them very free form to kind of fill in the blank rather than leading them a certain direction.  Is that a good thing to highlight?

Adele:  0:20:03.1  Oh Andy, I love you.  Exactly.  I could spend ten minutes on all the things not to do in the interview, and one of them is to you know, basically – especially because you’re on the phone with the person, they might start to like you and you say, “Well, you know, wasn’t it important that the product do x,y,z?”

0:20:22.2  And the buyer’s likely to say, “Oh sure, that was important.”  We didn’t learn anything from that.  0:20:28.0  You know.

And what we get – and this is what’s – the problem with traditional approaches to market research when it comes to buyer personas, is that – in research terms, it’s called confirmation bias.

0:20:41.8  We get people agreeing with us, and this is why a lot of people have given up on market research.  They say, “Well we didn’t learn anything we didn’t already know.”

0:20:52.5  Well, that’s because you asked questions that you care about.  You’re only going to learn something you don’t already know by letting the buyer tell you what they care about.  This isn’t about you.  This isn’t about asking the buyer, “Well did you see that direct mail campaign I sent out, and did you like it?”  0:21:08.8

Andy:  0:21:11.9  It’s not about your ego, it’s not about just making yourself kind of validated.

Adele:  0:21:15.9  It’s the opposite of that.

Andy:  Right.

Adele:  0:21:17.0  We want to get on this and we want – I mean, you know, if entrepreneurs, my gosh, we are struggling to stay alive.  We need to know the truth.  We need to know exactly what’s in the way of buyers choosing us.

0:21:32.5  And if we need a feel good day, let’s go to the golf course or go skiing.  Let’s not go get on the phone with buyers.  You know.

Andy:  0:21:42.1  Yeah, you gotta separate those and it’s something where it can be a bit scary, but truthfully, from my perspective, the best thing that can come out of these are those insights that you never would have expected.

That when you heard it you just kind of say, “Oh.  That is not at all what we were planning on.  Not at all what we were thinking about, but I get it.”

0:22:01.0  And when you get those insights, that’s when you’re able to actually make changes that improve the business rather than just keep sailing the course you’ve already set.

0:22:09.7  And the other question I want to go back to, is you had mentioned that surveys are horrible for this type of thing.  And I just want to ask why is that?

Adele:  0:22:20.5  Well, because surveys are a way to validate or invalidate your own thinking.  It’s not a way to learn anything new.

And that’s because in surveys, you only get answers to the questions that you think to ask.  0:22:34.1  And that’s just the – we got to write down questions and yeah, we can have some open-ended questions, although you don’t tend to get any – again, you only can get that first answer to an open-ended question.  You’re not going to get the followup probing question.

0:22:50.3  And then, when you put down all the answers with multiple choice answers, you have now basically constructed an environment where the buyer is likely – all you’re going to know is do they agree or disagree with you.  0:23:01.5  You’re only getting validation.

0:23:04.4  So the – surveys have a lot of value, and we do work with clients where we do surveys after we’ve done the interviews, but the purpose of the survey is to take a relatively small number of interviews, the results of that – those five insights and find out or validate those across a larger segment of the market.

0:23:25.9  And if you’re trying to – if you’re making an about the company decision and you’re going to go invest millions of dollars or try to get funding, you know, then you probably want to go get – do a survey to validate the results of the interviews.

0:23:40.0  Even though, frankly – and we’re just working right now on a study where we are doing – we are getting 600 people to respond to the results of a huge study we did for a client.  And we already have and updated to know that we didn’t get one new piece of data from that survey.  From 600 – that we didn’t learn from the 20 interviews that we did.  0:24:02.4

Andy:  Ok.  Wow.

Adele:  0:24:04.4  Yeah.  Like wow!  Like wow!  And because that’s the other thing people think.  Well they think, “I have to go talk to 100 customers, where am I going to have the time?”  You know, it’s shocking how few interviews you need.

0:24:16.7  Usually, if we’re not going to look at different types of buyers or different kinds of decisions or different parts of the market, we only recommend ten interviews.

Andy:  0:24:28.2  How did you come up with the number ten?  Like how do you know this is enough?

Adele:  0:24:32.6  Yeah that’s a really scientific answer.  It actually is.  Because we charge – for our clients we charge by the interviews and so plenty of people have come along and said, “Oh I don’t think ten is enough.  We have enough money to pay you to do 20 or 30 or 40 or 50.”

0:24:48.5  So we do that and we’ve kept track.  Did we learn anything new after the tenth interview, and we didn’t.

Andy:  0:24:54.6  Are there cases where that’s – it makes sense to get more?  Or is that just for most things you’re looking at.

Adele:  0:25:00.5  Yes.  Yeah, we have plenty of studies where we do more than ten and here’s the place where that makes sense.

0:25:07.6  One is, if there’s anything you want to learn about what’s different about different parts of your market.  So that might be different roles in the buying decision.

You know, we’re going to sell to the C-level executive and to an IT manager.  Or we want to know how the user thinks.  So then we would do six at least, maybe eight, with each of those roles.

0:25:31.2  The other one would be different geographies.  You know, we’re doing business in China as well as the US, or you know, Latin America as well as the US, and we want to know what’s different.

0:25:41.6  Or, next one is industry.  Although I’ll give you a little secret.  The differences between industry aren’t as significant as people think.  But industry is one of the places where people tend to think – want to investigate differences.

0:25:56.9  And then the last one is company size, and company size can make a big difference if you’re talking about a range that spans from very, very small businesses up to enterprise companies, or something like that.

0:26:09.0  So, whenever you want it – the simple answer is, and I try to give a few examples there, is if you want to know what’s different between different types of personas, go interview six to eight people in each of those hypothetical different areas, and let those five rings of insight – the patterns you see in those five rings of insight, tell you whether you actually need to go to market in different ways for different personas.

0:26:39.1  Because if you don’t, that’s going to save you a lot of money and a lot of time.  And that’s the way to find out.

Andy:  0:26:47.2  Now that’s really good advice.  And the one thing I would say to listeners is that if you are going out of this interview, if you pick up Adele’s book, Buyer Personas and you say, “Ok, I just need to do ten interviews, I’m done”  — the first ten interviews might not be the best.

0:27:02.2  You might need a few more of these while you’re really getting down the process to make sure you’re actually extracting those insights.

0:27:07.7  But I think you make a great point, Adele, that once you do know how to conduct the truly probing interviews, it doesn’t take as many – nearly as many as people would expect.

Adele:  0:27:17.7  Yeah, so these are, you know, highly trained and skilled people doing the interviews.  You’re right, thank you for making that.

Chances are, for a lot of your listeners today, some of those first interviews are going to feel pretty clumsy and – here’s a way for your listeners to think about this, because they’ll pick up on this.  Pretty soon, they’ll start to hear the same thing in every interview.

0:27:41.7  And at that point, it’s time to stop.  Or let’s just say there’s a point of diminishing return that’s pretty rapid after that.

Andy:  0:27:49.0  And I would completely agree.  When I did these myself, the first time we were getting ready to do another batch, the first time through, those first few interviews, they’re a bit nerve-wracking, you could tell I didn’t cover all the five rings of buying insight.

I didn’t push back in some areas where I should have.  But I got better and over time, they got a lot more productive.

0:28:11.3  And then yeah, they got to a point where they almost – I knew what they were going to say.  I still let them say it, but the same things would come up again and again.

0:28:20.8  And that was when we kind of took a step back and said, “Alright, what do we do with this?”

And I think this is actually a good transition point for us, because a lot of people I’m sure are asking the same questions.

0:28:30.0 So, just doing these interviews gives you a lot of immediate insights, but how do you kind of turn these insights into something actionable that you can use to grow your business?

Adele:  0:28:40.0  Yeah so, perfect.  And yeah, I wrote a whole chapter in the book where I go into this in excruciating detail.

Because – I’m going to give you a short answer but people will probably – you know, it’s a pretty inexpensive investment if you’re going to do this right – to go by the book.

And the fact is is that now you have from those five rings of insight, you’re probably going to have 30 different insights.

0:29:07.6  You know, maybe they’ll be four different priority initiatives that trigger – five, six – you’ll have a few success factors, a few barriers, etc.

0:29:15.4  And so, what you want to do is now sit down with your team and – or with yourself.  You know if you’re the person doing this, and say, “This is what matters to my buyer.  What can I say in response?”

And you take every single one of those insights – and by the way, for the listeners, you should be recording these interviews and having those recordings transcribed so that you aren’t trying to take copious notes, because you’ll fall behind, you won’t be a good listener if you’re doing that.

0:29:51.1  And look at those quotes in each of those insight areas and say, “You know, I’m not there in front of the buyers when they’re doing this.”

By the way, buyers are getting more and more willy.  “They’re just not contacting us, but they’re out on our website”, or they’re somewhere in the you know, buying decision, trying to deal with this question.  “How do we respond to that question?”

You take those one at a time and make sure that you’ve got a clear and crisp and hopefully, well differentiated response to that question.  To that buyer.  0:30:27.1  We call those buyer’s expectations.

So you now have the list of literally everything that matters to your buyers as they’re going through the decision.

0:30:36.8  And this should guide the answers – your answers to those questions to those objections, to those questions about your capabilities – should be the core of your strategy for the content on your website, your inbound or outbound marketing activity.  Your sales engagement with your buyers should all be focused around those topics.

0:31:00.9  Even if you’re doing challenger sales, you’re trying to really, you know, make some kind of critical change – the buyer’s thinking about this buying decision – which a lot of small companies are – understanding their existing mindset is the foundation for now changing that mindset.

Andy:  0:31:20.7  And I feel like at this point it’s – going back to what we had talked about before, with the number of interviews – when you know you’ve done enough.

I feel like at this point, if you don’t really know an answer to your question, if you feel like you’re still making assumptions, then it’s probably time to go back and fill in the blanks with a few more interviews, because it’s really important, at least in my opinion, my perspective, to not just go based off your assumptions.  0:31:46.2  Because so often, those are just wildly wrong.

Adele:  0:31:48.6  Yeah, the biggest problem we all have, and I’ve marketed I don’t know how many hundreds of products, is that – and you know, this is my third company, so I’m also an entrepreneur myself, and we know so much about our own business environment that it’s really hard to get out of our own way and recognize that our buyers A: don’t know as much and that – I’ve had people say to me when we’ve presented the results, “Really our buyer is that stupid?”

0:32:23.0  You know, it sounds terrible, but it’s not that people are stupid, it’s just that they don’t live 7 by 24 in our environment.  They have a boatload of other things on their mind, and we get this echo chamber of our own reality that is really dangerous.

Andy:  0:32:45.6  Yeah.  I mean, for us, we’re in the help desk space.  The support space.  Very few people live in that space.

Our customers, what they care about is running their business.  And support, to a lot of them, is an afterthought.

And we do want to change that a bit, because we do think it can improve their business, but at the end of the day, their goal is not to become the world’s foremost expert on customer support.  They just want tools that will solve their pains and will solve their problems, and just let them get back to the rest of their business.

0:33:13.6  And you’re right, it is so hard to get out of that mindset 0:33:17.3 – seven days a week, 24 hours a day, we’re living that industry, we know everything about it.  And even if we think we can kind of take away 0:33:25.7

Adele:  0:33:29.4  It is.  And, you know, I’ll tell you, when the buyer sits down and they’re evaluating your solution, Andy, and your competitor’s solution, and they’re laying them side by side, and you know, — this is why I say this almost like cheating.

When you know, when they’re looking at the attributes of your deliverables and your solution and the buyer’s not as informed about these differences as you want them to be, right?  Because if they knew the difference, they’d only buy yours, but they don’t.

0:33:59.8  And so, we’ve got to get inside that decision mindset and really say, “Well, before we can educate them, we’ve got to understand what they’re looking at and you know, at least…”  — and this is particularly important for the early stages of the engagement with the buyer.  Getting into their consideration set.

0:34:20.1  If you focus only on what’s different and better about your help desk solution, the buyer who’s not educated about the need for that might just disappear.  So, if you know – and this is like, so upside down from how we were all trained in marketing.

Figure out what your unique selling proposition is, focus on what’s unique – no, no, no, that works – you need that somewhere along the line, but first you’ve got to get their attention and that means talking to them about what they think is important.

Andy:  0:34:51.4  Yep.  I can’t emphasize that enough.  And that is really, in my opinion, one of the biggest takeaways that I hope listeners get from this, is that buyer’s personas shouldn’t be something that you kind of lock a team in a room and they come up with themselves.

0:35:05.3  You need to get out there and you really need to understand what your buyers truly care about, how they see the market, how they see all of this.

0:35:12.8  And Adele, you walked us through a ton of specifics and I hope all my listeners do go out and get the book, Buyer’s Personas:  How to Gain Insights In Your Customer’s Expectations, Align Your Marketing Strategies and Win More Business.

Because it was – honestly, it was actually a relatively easy read, because when I was going through it I was just nodding my head saying, “This makes so much sense.”  But it was really transformative for me, so I hope my listeners do take me up on that.

0:35:40.2  But before we wrap up, Adele, I like to just ask all of my guests a few, kind of, just rapid fire questions.  0:35:46.3  And so I’ll go through them pretty quickly, but your answers don’t need to be too short.

0:35:50.7  And the first one is just, currently, what do you find yourself spending too much time doing?

Adele:  0:35:55.9  As an entrepreneur.  Gosh.  You know, working inside the business versus on the business.  I’m continually challenged as, you know, the CEO of a company that’s growing rapidly.

To extract myself from, you know, dealing with individual inside the business – 0:36:17.2  [Inaudible] how are we delivering value to a customer now and how do I continue to step back and work on the business.  That’s hard.

Andy:  0:36:24.9  Super hard.  And it’s one of the bigger challenges an entrepreneur faces.  How to do that.

0:36:30.9  And I’m curious, as someone who is a thought leader in the space, you clearly are an authority on buyer’s personas and have done a lot of learnings yourself from experience, but beyond that, who do you find yourself learning from?  And this could be books, it could be people, it can be anything.

Adele:  0:36:48.3  Well, I learn the most from my customers.  You know, I do read a lot and I read practically – I try to read everything I can.  It’s hard, but I still.  I’m always at a loss to recommend a particular book.

0:37:04.8  Really, the biggest learning comes from me just constantly listening to not only our buyers but our customers.  You know, what are their needs?  What are their challenges?  And just trying to respond to that.

0:37:18.8  And I think that’s one of the competitive advantages that small businesses have.  That gets harder and harder as you get bigger.

Andy:  0:37:23.9  And then the last one is just, what is the next challenge that you’re going to be tackling in your business?

Adele:  0:37:29.1  Ah.  Well, we’re launching some new services in the first quarter.  And so what we’re trying to do is come up with a way to make sure that once companies have these insights, and have built the response, sort of the answer to all those questions, we’re going to be launching a new service that is very easy way to get your story in front of your customers without – and take advantage of the fact that customers only want to hear from their peers and they are going to their peers for advice.  They’re skipping the vendor interactions and so we’re launching a service around that.

0:38:13.0  And that service is only going to work for our existing customers, but we’re pretty excited about it, because we want to make sure of is that people that invest in buyer’s personas, and invest in building a strategy around that have a clear and demonstrable way to show that it moved the needle.  That it did help them win more business.

Andy:  0:38:29.9  That’ll be super exciting to see how that goes as you start rolling that out.  And for listeners who have enjoyed hearing everything that you had to say, they want to learn more, whether it’s through your books, whether it’s through your services, where are the best places for them to go to learn more from you?  Or work with you?

Adele:  0:38:49.8  Well, the best place is our website at BuyerPersona.com.  But we’re also on Facebook.com/BuyerPersona.  I’m on Twitter @BuyerPersona.  I’m pretty much all – it’s all about Buyer Persona.  I wrote my book and titled it BuyerPersonas.  It’s pretty boring that we just keep using that same thought over and over again huh?  But that’s how to find us.

Andy:  It works.  Alright.  Well, Adele, this was great chatting with you today.  You shared a ton and I know my listeners will get a lot out of this, so again, thank you so much for the time.

Adele:  Thank you so much for having me Andy, it was absolutely my pleasure.