Buyer Personas by Adele Revella, Book Review

Finding Your Ideal Client:  Buyer Personas

A few years ago, based on the recommendation of David Meerman Scott, on his blog, I decided to purchase and read Buyer Personas by Adele Revella.

I find it interesting that many people are making a lot of money on LinkedIn using lead generation. I read the book, Connect by Josh Turner, which is excellent, but it doesn’t explain how to find your ideal client. In fact, many of the people who talk about making money using lead generation, never talk about how to discover your ideal client.

Hinting at something is not the same as explaining it.

Some people may think that you are supposed to know who your ideal client is, but that is frequently not the case. You have two kinds of clients, ideal and prospective. Ordinarily, you can evaluate your current clients to identify your ideal one, and use that information to target prospects. But what happens when you are starting a new business, how do you find your ideal client? At one point I knew exactly who my ideal client was, but in the process of reinventing myself, I am no longer sure.

As a blogger – one of the many hats that I wear – I learned that it’s important to create reader profiles, and for every blog post you write, write to one of the reader profile that you created. I must admit that even though I created and refined the five reader profiles, I often forget to use them when writing a blog post.

I also believed that a reader profile was not necessarily the same thing as an ideal client profile. So, I was delighted when David Meerman Scott wrote a blog post about Adele Revella’s Buyer Personas.

After reading the first few pages of this book, the question I kept asking myself, “How can I create a buyer persona if I am starting a new business and do not have any buyers yet?” This was very important for me. I have finished reading the book, and it is an excellent one, loaded with lots of useful information. For a very small business such as mine, most of the information is not relevant to me.

However, it’s often said that you don’t know what you don’t know, and Buyer Personas alerted me to many things I didn’t know about the topic. Like many people, I thought that a buyer persona was similar to a reader profile or a client profile, but I now know that’s not the case. I will share some eye opening moments later in this article.

“Buyer Personas are archetypes of real buyers that allow marketers to craft strategies to promote products and services to the people who might buy them.”

It is worth noting that personas are not people, but representations of them. The best way to create a buyer persona is to interview buyers who have already weighed solutions like the one your organization offers. Hearing and relating to your client’s story is critical to understanding your buyer. What is the trigger for a buyer to seek out a solution such as yours? What are the phases that occur before a buyer purchases a solution? These are very important questions that I have thought much about before I read Connect.

One thing that some people may think this is simple, but was a mind changing idea to me, is that a buyer persona consists of a buyer profile and buyer insights.

Buyer Profile:

Describes the person – demographic information – that you assign to a fictional name.

Buyer Insights:

Describes the when, how and why aspects of the buying decision. You get an understanding of a buyer’s concern and expectations, their likely reaction to the product or service offering, and what motivates him or her to consider a solution such as yours. This type of information is important because it reveals information such as:

• “Which buyers are receptive, and which will ignore you no matter what you say.
• Which aspects of your solution are relevant to them, and which are irrelevant.
• What attitudes prevent your buyers from considering your solutions.
• What resources your buyers trust as they evaluate their options.
• Which buyers are involved in the decision and how much influence they wield.”

When you use both the buyer profile and buyer insights, you have the information that you need to win a buyer’s business. The most useful section of the book for me was the Five Rings of Buying Insight.

Does every company need to create a buyer persona? The answer is it depends. It depends on whether the solution you offer is a low-consideration buying decision or a medium-high-consideration one. If your product is low cost and people do not give much thought to buying it, you do not really need to create a buyer persona. On the other hand, if a buyer takes a long time to evaluate a product or service such as yours because it is high cost, then it’s important to create a buyer persona.

The Five Rings of Buying Insight

Insight 1 – Priority Initiative:

What reason does a buyer have for making a purchase? Why does a buyer allocate time, money and political capital to purchase a solution such as yours? When is a buyer receptive to your message? What is the trigger that causes the buyer to want a solution such as yours? These are very important questions which made me want to find out more, with my business in mind. This insight is important because marketers can use it to “define, defend, and execute strategies” that prospective buyers can relate to at the earliest stages in their decision making process.

Insight 2 – Success Factors:

What outcomes matter the most to buyers of a solution such as yours? What are the personal or operational results a buyer can expect when he or she buys a product or service such as yours? When you have done this correctly, you do not have to guess as to which aspects of your solution is most beneficial to buyers. This insight is an important one because you know exactly what’s troubling to your buyers. This allows you to give them back the control, which is comforting. Additionally, think of Success Factors as the benefits that the buyer will realize after purchasing a solution.

Insight 3 – Perceived Barriers:

What prevents buyers from choosing your product or service? This is important because when you know what the barriers are, and who is behind them, it provides key information that will allow you to reassure your buyers that your solution is the best.

Insight 4 – Buyer’s Journey:

This is the story that buyers use to evaluate solutions, eliminate options, and make a final choice. This kind of information is a gold mine because it enables you to identify the influencers who are involved at every stage in the decision making process. You also get to understand how the final decision was made and how much influence each person had over the decision. When you have this information, you are able to align your sales and marketing activities to target buyers at each step of the decision making process. This helps the buyer to see you as a possible solution.

Insight 5 – Decision Criteria:

What are the most important attributes of a solution to the buyer? What capabilities do buyers use to evaluate the solutions that they are considering?

Adelle Revella recommends that you conduct at least eight to 10 buyer interviews. She does a very good job of explaining the interview process, how to ask follow-up questions to get the information that you need. “You are trying to understand what happened in the buyer’s environment that triggered the search for a solution. You are also going to attempt to learn what steps were taken to investigate options, and discover what worked and didn’t work about that experience, and hear it expressed in the buyer’s words.” Therefore, you are going to ask the buyer questions that will unearth those responses.

Revella provides voice mail and email scripts to use when you contact a buyer to interview, and she talks about who is the best person in the organization to conduct the interview. And she walks the reader through the process of what to do when you have the responses from the buyers. You'll know how to compile and aggregate the information and how to pick out powerful statements. This section is instructive, but wasn’t that relevant to me simply because I have over 20 years of experience interviewing people. It was reassuring to know that I am conducting interviews the correct way.

Have you read?

How to Interview: What I Learned after 20 Years of Interviewing People

You will also learn how to find people to interview. Two methods Adele Revella mentions are mining your company’s sales database and hiring a professional recruiter. I liked the section on the types of buyers to interview. Another piece of advice in Buyer Personas that I found useful and instructive is that when you are conducting a buyer interview, it’s important to ask a “How” question rather than a “Why” one because the latter is more confrontational. I have never thought about that before, and it makes a lot of sense.

Types of Buyers to Interview

1. People who considered you and chose you (your customers).

2. People who considered you, but chose a competitor.

3. People who considered you but decided to keep things as they were, to maintain the status quo.

4. People who never considered you and chose another (either they chose a direct competitor, or if your solution is a new innovation, they chose a different way to solve the problem.

Interviewing people in Group two provides the most valuable data because they can give you insights into what went wrong and why you were not the best option for them. Despite this, it’s important to have buyers from all four groups, and select people who went through the process within three to six months before the interview, so it is easy for them to recall the experience and can give you meaningful information.

I did not read Buyer Personas with the intent of reviewing, my main concern is getting information to target my social media profiles. This book has great content that larger companies can use to really target their sales and marketing messages to get the best clients. And for people like myself, who are interested in learning how to create a buyer persona to use on their social media profiles, there is definitely something in this book for you. I have already started to make a list of people to interview regarding the new service that I will be offering.

I will also be reading Talking to Humans by Giff Constable next. In the meantime, you can read “12 Tips for Early Customer Development Interviews,” which is the foundation for the book.