How to Create 100% Accurate and Detailed Buyer Persona

Why customers avoid us and big data fails

Adele Revella: Well, the main reason is because those customers are so wily. I mean, back in the day when I started in marketing, we didn’t have the Internet. I know this makes me sound really old and customers really had to come to us to get answers to their questions. And so back in the old days, and I almost feel like I should have a horse and buggy when I say that. But really, before the Internet, we knew a lot more about buyers because they didn’t have another way to get information other than to ask us. And what’s happened now is that when people are making a buying decision, they are avoiding us, they’re avoiding our salespeople, they’re avoiding us as long as they can. And they’re going and getting the information that they think they need to make an informed buying decision by talking to everybody else and you know, their peers, their colleagues, they’re going on the Internet, they’re doing their own research, they’re reading reviews, they’re doing everything they possibly can to hold off talking to us until they’re well along in their buying decision. And so how are we going to get to know them? They’re not interacting with us. That’s the problem.

Louis: This is a very good point and this is really important to come back to. A few years ago, before the Internet came about, businesses were much more local. So you had your own shop and you were interacting with your customer all day, every day. And if you had a little bit of an interest into your customers well being, you would really understand them because you just talk to them every day. Right. So you would be able to really make changes to your buying experience pretty quickly.

Adele Revella: Right, right, right.

Louis: So this is a very good point because we tend to forget how business used to be done before Internet came about. And I wasn’t actually expecting this answer, which is great. So thanks for providing this first bit of insight. But let me jump and follow up with a question that I know you would like to answer. I thought that Big Data was kind of the answer to Everything. Right. Like a few years ago, big data was everywhere. And this was the answer to every business problem. So big data is here, yet it doesn’t seem to answer the problem of understanding people.

Adele Revella: Yeah, so the thing about big Data is it’s capturing digital conversations. And you know, I invite everybody that’s listening to this. I don’t know what products and services you sell, but think about whether your buyers are really in a digital environment having a conversation that you can listen to and analyze through technology, through big data. And the fact is, is if we think about customers and their interactions, that’s different than buyers and their interactions. So a buyer is somebody who doesn’t yet own what I’m trying to sell to, and a customer is someone who already owns it. And there’s a. So there’s a different phase here. And when I talk about buyer Personas, I’m talking about trying to understand that buying decision, that buying experience. And what we know from our work is that most buyers aren’t discussing their think, you know, they’re not sharing their thoughts digitally about a buying decision over Twitter. Maybe they’re sharing it on Facebook, but if that’s the. And maybe they’re sharing it nowhere online. But if, but we can’t get at Facebook. Facebook is a closed, closed environment. And that data is not mined. You can’t mine that for big data. So what do we learn? We learn about when they’re already shopping. We learn whether they went to certain sites and what they were shopping for. But we don’t get inside their preferences, their attitudes, their concerns that would really help us understand how to, how to have a relationship with them.

Louis: So let’s get on to the step by step, because you’ve introduced the subject very well and this is true. I mean, how can you mind what is in people’s minds? At the end of the day, a lot of decisions that are made are not even rational. A lot of them are emotional based on previous affinity with the brand based on the situation and circumstances. So obviously Big data doesn’t really answer that. And obviously you need to develop empathy yourself in order to understand why decisions are being made. And by the way, I do like the difference that you’re making between buyer Persona and the customer Persona. So in this episode, we are really trying to nail the buyer Persona side of things. So I do believe that you have a very thorough step by step methodology to help businesses to come up with their buyer Persona. So how about we go about trying to come up with this step by step together?

The single most important interview question

Adele Revella: Yeah. So the Key is to first recognize that buyers, you know, we’re going to talk about a form of research here. And when people think of research, they usually think of surveys, you know, those sort of really horrible, boring things that you fill out online. And all you ever find out about are the things that you ask people. So you didn’t learn anything from that. Or maybe we think about focus groups, but that has some flaws in it as well. I don’t want to spend too much time on that, but I’ll come back to the right thing to do, which is to get on, to get with someone who has recently been through the buying decision, actually purchased or spent money to solve the problem that you solve, and have them have a conversation with you about everything they did and thought about as they went through that real live buying decision. And so what’s the reason I wrote a book about this is because I’d had hundreds, probably of these kind of one hour conversations with people like you, Louis. And it sounds, I want to just make this sound really simple, because it is simple in a way, but a lot of people get stuck. And that’s why I wrote the book, to tell people even more detail. But the principle is this. You want to have a conversation with someone. No survey, no scripted questions. The only scripted question I want you to ask them is this one. Take me back to the day when you first decided that you needed to solve this kind of problem or achieve this kind of a goal not to buy my product. That’s not the day. We want to go back to the day when you thought that it was urgent and compelling to go spend money to solve a particular problem or achieve a goal and just tell me what happened. And the key to this interview, to this, is a conversation now where without a script, we ask people to reflect back on that moment and to go as deep as they can into what changed at that moment. And I’ll just pick one. Since we’re approaching the end of the year, you know, in January, just about everybody wants to lose weight. We eat too much at the holidays, and now it’s time to lose weight. Right? And so take me back to the day when you first decided that you needed to lose £5 or £10, or that you needed to become more fit and tell me what happened. And people will talk about how they want to be in better shape or they want to be healthier or they want to look nicer. But what we do after people give us that answer is we get them to go deep. Like, okay, why didn’t you do it sooner. What really changed? To have you decide that now’s the time to lose weight or to. Now’s the time to secure your Internet infrastructure, or now’s the time to go on a big vacation or remodel your home. You know, it’s really getting people to talk at length about what changed at that moment, and then to have just very gradually walk them through every single thing they did and thought about as they went through that real decision.

Louis: Right. So you said a lot of things here, and I need to break it down from research with my customers, my listeners. Sorry, not customers. Even though they are paying with their time to listen to this, they do. Like when things are being broken down into smaller parts, smaller chunks. So the first step that you actually mentioned is to identify people who bought from you recently, Right? I think that could be a very first, a very good first step.

Who to interview and how many conversations you need

Adele Revella: Thought about buying from you and didn’t.

Louis: Okay, so would you go about. Would you interview those two types?

Adele Revella: Yes.

Louis: Okay, so we make a group. The easiest people to contact are people who bought from you recently. They are probably eager to talk to you, more likely than any other group because they just bought from you. So you might be able to get them easy when it comes to people who haven’t bought from you but nearly did. How do you go about finding those people?

Adele Revella: Well, you know who they are. If they considered buying from you, you have some contact information. And, you know, Louis, this might surprise you, but depending on how much time people invested with you in making that decision, people who didn’t buy from you are actually more likely to speak with you than people who did.

Louis: Hmm, that’s interesting.

Adele Revella: Well, remember that people who have had a bad experience are more likely to talk about it than people who had a good experience. Right?

Louis: Yeah, that’s true. That’s true.

Adele Revella: And so it’s surprising to people. And of course, we can learn from both groups. So I don’t want to. I like the way you broke that down. So we should definitely interview people who bought from us because we learn what we did, right? And this is good. It can reinforce what we’re doing correctly. And it can also tell us that some of the things we’re doing, although we might have done them right, really didn’t have any influence on the buying decisions. So maybe we can do less of that or spend less money there.

Louis: No. Yes, that’s a good point. So we do need to balance the findings of actual customers with the findings of people who haven’t become customers. So let’s say we identify A bunch of them. And what do you think is a good number to start with? How many conversations do you feel someone should have in order to get good insights?

Adele Revella: Well, you’re going to be really shocked at this, Louis, but it’s a small number. And people, you know, when people think of research, they think they need hundreds or dozens. But of course, when we do this research for our customers, we have very, very experienced researchers and we only do 10 interviews. Now, for someone who’s just starting out, the first interviews may not go so well and you may need to do more. But honestly, and here’s what we’ve discovered because we do so much, thousands of interviews is after. Once you’re skilled at this, after the 10th interview, you’re not likely to learn anything new.

Louis: Yes. And I’ve heard that before. And it’s similar to things related to website usability. Once you’ve Talked to like 10 or 20 people, you kind of have covered the vast majority of issues on your website, for example. So that makes sense. Absolutely. And I think it’s less underwhelming, less overwhelming straight away when you talk about 10 interviews instead of 50. Because 10 interviews of what, roughly 30 minutes, 45 minutes.

Adele Revella: Yeah, we schedule our interviews for 30 minutes. Now, we find that people sometimes won’t stop talking at the end of 30 minutes because they find this kind of a conversation so compelling and interesting. So most of our interviews actually go 45. But 30 minutes is a good time to schedule with people because it feels like something that’s manageable for them and for you.

Louis: Right. And I get this question quite a lot and we talked about it in past episodes, but I think it would be interesting to have your take on it. How do you convince people to spend 30 minutes on the phone with you? Those people are usually very busy.

Getting busy people to talk to you

Adele Revella: Yeah. You know, it’s surprising that when you’re working with customers or people who have really invested a lot in this buying decision, and I should probably pause there to say that this approach to learning about your buyer’s decision works best when your buyers are spending a good deal of time, at least days, weeks or months, sometimes longer, going through that evaluation. And it’s really important to them that they get it right. And the more your buyers are sort of emotionally and time wise invested in that decision, the more likely they are to talk to you and the more insight you’ll gain from the interview.

Louis: Okay, so this is probably even more relevant than if you’re selling a B2B product that is quite complex. It sounds like this approach is Less relevant if what you’re selling is a very simple product like, like T shirts or things that are, that don’t require a lot of research, a lot of thinking, a lot of emotions. Right.

Adele Revella: It’s any, any decision. So we do a lot of consumer work, but only for what we call high consideration buying decisions. So I’m buying a new house. I’m figuring out where to send my kids to school. I’m buying a car. I’m making a big investment in remodeling. Where am I going to retire? Where am I, you know, senior living. I have to put my mom in a, in a home now. Those kinds of things that. The point is, if I interviewed you about that carton of milk you just bought at the store, and I asked you to take me back to the day when you decided to buy it and talk to me about how you weighed your options and thought through the choice, it wouldn’t be very interesting because you didn’t give it much thought.

Louis: Okay.

Adele Revella: So the more thought your buyer gives the decision, the more likely. I want to get back to your question that they’ll talk to you now. So I would encourage people, if they’re selling products that are sold at retail, in a grocery store, on a shelf that people give no consideration to it just sort of knee jerk, they buy it every week. It’s no decision at all that maybe that interviews aren’t going to help them that much. But that’s where big data helps because that’s where the whole transaction is more likely to occur online. So this method of doing these interviews is best. Where buyers spend at least a few hours or days thinking about and looking at different choices and making one, and then they’ll talk to you because it was a big investment for them in doing this evaluation. And so there’s nothing wrong with also paying them. An incentive if you like, but because people ask me that, it’s fine to do that, but you’ll be surprised that maybe 3 out of 10 people will talk to you.

Louis: Yeah, from my experience doing it, it’s amazing the amount of people who are interested in helping you out. As long as you frame it the right way. As long as you say this isn’t a sales call, I’m not trying to sell you anything. All I’m looking to do is improve the way we communicate, is improve our product, and we’re not trying to sell you anything else. So let’s go back to the steps just to break it down again. So we identify people who bought from us recently, people who haven’t bought from us recently, but who engage in the process and spend a few hours, days, weeks, months, years thinking about this purchase. And we interview them. Do we interview them face to face or do we interview them over Skype? How do we do that?

Adele Revella: We do all of our interviews over the phone or Skype. It’s the same. It’s okay to do them face to face, if that’s convenient. The important thing is, however you do them, that you record the interviews, that you have an audio recording of the interview so that you can capture every word that your buyer speaks. Because what you’re going to want to do, if you’re going to share this with other people now, if you’re the only person, if you’re a very small business and this is just for your own use, and nobody on your team, no marketers, no agencies, no one is helping you, then it’s fine, you don’t have to record it. But if you’re trying to build a Persona and share it with anyone so that you can align people around what matters to your buyers, then you need a recording, and that’s what’s most important.

Louis: Okay, so we have this person and we just. We basically do the job of a journalist, right? We ask them questions. We try to get to the bottom of how they discover the product and the first thought that they have. About the product, Right?

Adele Revella: Correct. Not about the product, about solving the problem. Because people don’t. And this is always a surprise. People think, oh, you know, we sell products and. Or we sell a service or we sell a solution, but really, it’s really back. Sometimes when buyers are first thinking about it, they don’t know what they need to buy. So we want to go to that earliest thought where they said, I need to do something about this problem.

Louis: And that begs the question. As I mentioned in the introduction, one of the popular episodes recently of this podcast is the Jobs to be Done introduction that I’ve done with Claire Sullentrop. So how does this approach differ from the jobs to be done approach?

Adele Revella: Well, and I’m not an expert on jobs to be done, but so many people that talk to me, come up after they hear my keynote, will say, this is a lot of things in common with the jobs to be done. I think the biggest difference is that jobs to be done is usually around a particular. I’ll call it a use case, like a website that we’re thinking about. What job is the buyer trying to do? On our website, we’re looking much more broadly at the whole buying decision. And unless Every thought your buyer is going to have is related to. So certainly they have a job to be done. The job is go solve this problem. But for the interview methodology we’re using, it’s so much broader than just around one channel or one channel experience. It’s around across all the channels, all the exposures, all the resources they turn to. One of the things we learned is buyers are going to their peers consistently. We’re capturing all of that.

Louis: Okay, that’s interesting. I guess, to be fair to this approach, I do believe personally that those two approaches are extremely similar. And I struggle to find any differences, if not by the names, by the way you guys got to the. To this point. So I think regardless of the name we give them, I’m very happy that many, many, many people are spreading the word and championing this approach to actually understand people, to interview people, to build product and experiences that they want. So regardless of the way we call it, I’m just very happy that many people are calling it.

Adele Revella: The buyers are happy too, Louie, because they are really tired of their terrible. They are trying to get a job done, and it’s very hard for them, and that’s frustrating for them.

Louis: Exactly right. So we are talking to 10 people. We are asking them this single question. Can you repeat this question again that you mentioned?

Adele Revella: Sure. So take me back to the day when you first decided that you needed to either solve this problem or achieve this goal. And whatever that blank is there, you would, you know, whether when you first decided that you needed a new marketing automation solution or you first decided that you needed to take your family on a big vacation and tell me what happened.

Louis: Okay. And then they start talking to us, and we start to ask why, why, why? We really drill into the journey. We really are curious about what they’ve done. So, okay, now let’s say we have those interviews done and we’ve done a few, and we are starting to be more comfortable with it. And we have those 10 interviews. How do you make sense of all of this data, really, that sits with you like all of those transcripts and all of those notes that you just took?

The five rings of buying insight framework

Adele Revella: Yeah. So this is where we want to send the recordings out to be transcribed. So we have every word. And then we’ve built a model to take all of this transcript data and organize it around five categories. We call it the five rings of Buying Insight. So what we would do is we’d go through a single every each interview, and we would highlight any quotes where the buyer described these five things. First of all, what Was the trigger that question we just asked? What was the driver for making this decision? We find all the quotes related to that and we recommend putting them in Excel and a worksheet so you have all the quotes. And what was the key thing that the buyer was saying in that quote? You know, my kids are getting older, and I think this might be the last time we could go on vacation together. And so the key thought would be we’d have that whole quote where the kids were about that. And then in the Key Thought column, we’d put, kids are getting older and that’s the driver. And then we do that same thing for all the other four rings of insight. Finding all the quotes related to the benefits. We call them success factors. What are all the results the buyer expects from making this investment? The third place where we’d look for quotes from across all the interviews is barriers. We call it perceived barriers. These are all the objections your buyers have to making this investment and or to making it with you. If you’re talking to people you lost or to people that you won but might have lost, maybe they’ll say to you, no, you know, I almost didn’t buy your solution, or I didn’t buy your solution because it doesn’t have this, or we decided to stay with the status quo and not go on vacation because of this and this and this. And so all those quotes get put into the Excel worksheet around or Google Docs, whatever, around the perceived barriers. The fourth insight is decision criteria. These are all the capabilities that the buyer cared about as they weighed all of their options. So this is, you know, does your resort, Is it four star? Is it five star? Is it three star? How much does it cost? Does it have a swimming pool? Can I walk to the ski lift? All of that goes into the decision criteria insight. And then the last insight is called the buyer’s journey. And this is as your buyers go through telling you their whole story. These are all the places they went, all the steps they went through to weigh all their options and arrive at a conclusion. And all the people that were involved, you know, if I’m going on a ski vacation, did I ask my husband what he thought and did his. If he influenced that decision, then he also goes into the buyer’s journey.

Louis: This is a fantastic framework, really, the way you’ve summarized that into five steps. I think I’ve seen it on your website. So listeners can go to the Bayer Persona Institute and search for that on Google. There is definitely resources there where you can look into more details on those five steps. But what I really want to talk about briefly before coming up with the next steps is that the beauty of this approach, I believe, is it prevents people to tell you lies or to tell you things that they believe will be true in the future but might not happen. So when you ask them a question about what would you like to have in the future? What new features would you like us to build? Or what new products would you like us to build? People are notoriously very bad at predicting the future. However, they are very good at telling you about their problems and recalling information, as long as it’s not that far away in the future. So I do like this approach for this reason, and I think it’s the reason why so many crime investigators use this approach as well in order to interrogate suspects, because people can’t lie when you make them tell the story backwards. So it’s really interesting. So we have those five things, and you basically said, take the transcript and start to organize them into a spreadsheet. So you would basically create one sheet for the first circle, another one for the success factors, another one for the barriers. Is that it or how do you categorize it?

Organizing interview data into actionable patterns

Adele Revella: Yeah, exactly. So one for. I’d have all the quotes from all, let’s just say 10 interviews where buyers to all 10 people talk about their priorities and what triggered. So that goes in the one spreadsheet. Then all their everybody talked about all the things that they thought would be better once they made this purchase goes in success factors, all their objections go unforeseen barriers, all the capabilities of your company and your product or your service go in decision criteria. And then all the quotes related to their journey go on a fifth spreadsheet. And now you can start to using the spreadsheet function, start to group similar quotes together, and you can start to see patterns. Oh, you know, across all, you know, six of the people I talked to all talked about this one driver or this one objection. And then you can have multiple quotes where you get to hear your Persona, not a single individual, but your Persona, talking about that key thing that matters to them and that we now know we need to address in our marketing.

Louis: So what might happen and what will definitely happen from experience is that you will see patterns, as you mentioned, you will see things that keep coming up. So you group them together. And I suppose then it requires a bit of common sense or a bit of work on the spreadsheet to understand how to group those together. Because what might happen is that you might have one big buyer Persona that seems to be not 90% of the people you interviewed are very similar. But what might happen as well is that you might have half of people matching a specific criteria while the rest will follow another one. Right?

When to create multiple personas vs. one

Adele Revella: Yeah. So, Louis, now you get into the part of this that’s really fascinating because now you can start to say, well, are there differences in the market that if we went to market differently for different types of buyers, where we would actually win more business, and this is the only time you should worry about differences that you find is if you see that there’s some differences you’re finding. You know, half the buyers think this, or even a third or even, you know, 10% of the buyers think a particular way. And now we can say, well, as a company, we’re going to be more competitive if we go, and we can actually beat our competitors and win more opportunities if we go start marketing to different people differently. But the worst thing you can do, and this is some of what I am trying to correct, is people are coming up with way too many Personas just because there’s differences. The only time you should care about the differences is if it represents a competitive advantage for your business.

Louis: Okay, so that’s interesting take on things, because that’s something that we haven’t talked about yet. And I’m really happy that when we talk about buyer Persona, not even once have you mentioned age or where they live or their jobs or stuff like this. Right. Because this is what I believe when you talk about Personas to marketers in particular, they will think about this traditional marketing Persona that we’ve been taught about, which is, okay, how old are they, what jobs do they have, etc. Etc. So you haven’t mentioned that at all because you know that even people can have different jobs, different ages, different demographics, but if they all have the same triggers, the same journey overall, if they share the same barriers, then there is no point differentiating them. Right?

Why demographics don’t matter for buyer personas

Adele Revella: Correct. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for saying that, Louis. Yeah. Just because you’re probably 20, 20 or 30 years younger than I am doesn’t even mean that you’re more technical than I am. You know, there’s so many assumptions. Or just because you’re male and I’m female, you know, we. The old, old school approach to segmenting our market was around demographics, around data like age and gender and income levels. And if you’re selling like, you know, we’re. If we’re doing a study for senior living, then we do care how old you are and probably even what gender you have but if we’re selling a marketing automation solution, it’s absolutely ridiculous to care about your hobbies or how many kids you have. And so people, I don’t want people to be distracted by that kind of information. Unless after you’ve done those five rings of insight, then you can go backwards and say, oh, you know, we’re now starting to see that everybody who answered the question, question this way has a particular is in a particular age group or income level. I mean, we did a wealth management solution and you care about that stuff. But you’ve got to make sure you’re only collecting useful data about your buyers or you’ll just go crazy.

Louis: Yes, thanks for saying that. So because marketers are overwhelmed, I mean, that’s a fact, they are more and more overwhelmed. And as I said in the introduction, I do believe that if people do that well, do this exercise well, of interviewing people, they will get clarity back, they won’t go crazy, and they’ll be able to take better decisions. Let me give you an example. I’ve actually received a lot of emails recently from listeners and I get to know them better. And I talked to a few of them recently as well. And the key stuff I’ve learned is that I basically have two main buyer Persona. I wouldn’t say buyer because they don’t buy, but they listen and they spend their time on it. I would have marketers and then I would have founders, and particularly founders who are tech oriented. So they are not marketers at all. However, they do want to use marketing in order to sell their stuff. Those two Personas are really opposed marketers and founders. And so they have two different jobs, two different problems they are trying to solve. And I found that out by just talking to a few and this is very clear to me now. So it means that the next episodes will be catered towards those two audiences now. And I don’t really care where they live. I talk to a lot of people from different countries. I don’t really care about a lot of things. But the pattern that kept coming up was the fact that marketers wanted to do something in particular while the founders wanted to do something completely different.

Adele Revella: Exactly. Very good, Louis.

Louis: Thanks. Appreciate you encouraging me on this. We have those summaries now, so we’ve grouped those information together into patterns. And what’s the next step? Because I think people are visualizing a buyer Persona to be this sort of profile in an A4 page with a picture on the left and the name and stuff. Right. So how do you put that together? Like what’s the next step?

Creating the actual buyer persona document

Adele Revella: Yeah, yeah. So. Well, there is. You mentioned our website. It’s buyerpersona.com and, yeah, there’s an example buyer Persona on the resources page that you can look at, but because the visual here is helpful. But yeah, so we actually put the quotes in the buyer Persona. We have a slide, one separate slide for each of the five rings of insight, and show the key findings, sort of what were the key insights, the patterns. And then you can keep the quotes. Because you mentioned the emotional aspect of the decision, Louis, And I want to underline that buyers get really emotional, even, believe it or not, about really mundane. You mentioned technology. I mean, 85% of our clients are in tech. And, you know, people. I still remember speaking at a conference one time and somebody before me talking about, well, disaster recovery is pretty boring. Well, it sure isn’t boring to the guys that have to solve that problem and get your sight back up. You know, it’s. These people are very emotional about these and the quotes. That’s why I want you to keep those recordings and transcribe it. Those. Keep the quotes in the Persona. That’s what makes it a living, like a human being that’s having this problem.

Louis: How do you spot the emotions inside those quotes?

Adele Revella: Well, people are swearing. I mean, they’re like. They’re worked up, and they’re, like, saying, oh, gosh. I’m thinking about a study we did recently with automotive dealerships, and, you know, people saying, you know, there isn’t a single solution out there that works. Nothing works. And the companies that are selling these solutions don’t care about us. And if anybody would build a solution that worked, we’d all change. And, I mean, it’s easy to see it. It’s right there. When we present. I sometimes have to read this out loud, and it’s some pretty strong language that people use.

Louis: Yeah. And you know that in this podcast, you can curse as much as you want.

Adele Revella: So it’s okay. Yeah, okay.

Louis: It’s okay. I’m not gonna force you. Right. So that’s really insightful, and I’ve learned quite a lot from this, step by step. I guess the last step I’d like to hear from you is that. So we talked about the Persona and how to come up with the different rings, as you mentioned, and all of that, and summarize that into profiles into 1, 2, 3 customer Personas. Buyer Persona. Sorry, can you share with me an example of a client? You don’t have to name the client, but a client you’ve used this methodology with and how you apply your findings into their marketing.

Turning insights into marketing content and strategy

Adele Revella: Yeah, this is very important, and thank you for asking, Louis, because when I started to write my book, the manuscript for my book, I went back to clients and I found out a lot of people were kind of getting the Personas and then stopping. And so now with almost every engagement we do with clients, we follow up with a workshop. And it’s in the book. It’s in chapter eight in my book. Where. And. But I can explain it pretty quickly here. You take every insight inside those five rings, and typically we might have 30 insights across the five rings. So, you know, maybe not balance, but maybe four or five triggers and maybe six or seven success factors and, and, you know, five or six procedures and so forth. And what you do now is think of these as something that your buyer is thinking about and doing when they’re on your website or engaged with your salespeople or your marketing content. And every single one of those topics represents something that you should be building a response for. You should be building marketing content around. And so what we talk about is getting your subject matter experts together, looking at those key insights, every one of them separately, and building an answer, and then making a commitment to build content around the ones where you really have something unique and valuable to say, or even if it isn’t unique, just the fact that you alone understand that the buyer’s asking that question because you did these interviews and now you know that, and that you are providing straight, simple, clear answers to buyers who have that need, that concern. This alone is a way to differentiate your company.

Louis: Do you have a specific example in mind? I’m curious to see if there’s anything that could really be something you remember that had a tremendous effect.

Real example: How Symantec changed their entire message

Adele Revella: Well, of course, you know, without getting into naming our clients, but yeah, I mean, I can think of. There is one story that I talk about from many, many years ago in my keynote, so I can share it here with permission. Symantec. A lot of people know their antivirus product called Norton Antivirus. And we were helping them prepare for a launch. And this was to small and medium businesses. And they were very excited about all this new security that they built into this new product. And they were going to go to market talking about this advanced detection solution that they created, this network around the world. And when they went out and interviewed small business owners about antivirus, what they discovered was that their customers didn’t want to use Norton because it made their computers so, so slow. It took forever to reboot the computer. It took Forever to download their email. And people were just, it didn’t matter if the antivirus was supposedly the best in the world, if it made their computers too hard to use. So they, despite the fact that product managers and senior management at Symantec were fully committed to going to market with this whole story around their advanced detection network, once they came back with evidence from the buyers that this was not the key issue in their buying decision, they changed. Their go to market message was, you know, the security solution that won’t slow you down. I don’t have it in front of me right now, but swallow up system resources or affect your business ability to, you know, to get your work done. So this was counterintuitive. It wasn’t anything. It was addressing a perceived barrier rather than a benefit which everybody thinks we’re supposed to talk about benefits. But what if your benefits are the same as your competitors benefits? And frankly not enough marketing is focused on something like what Symantec did. And being able to go out there and say what really is affecting our buyers ability to choose us is something that’s in a perceived barrier and taking that on head on.

Louis: This is tremendous. This is a great example. This is what I was looking for. And to talk a little bit more about this, I’ve done this exercise before in the past for a few companies and for myself. And the best way I can describe this is that once you’ve done it once, you will know what we mean by the clarity and the fact that you will be able to use that in your marketing. It’s difficult to tell you use these barriers to leverage your marketing or to leverage what you can say or use these benefits instead of this one. Basically, once you have this picture really clear of this buyer Persona, the answer will be in front of you really clearly how your marketing should sound like, where you should go, which channels you should use, what messaging you should use. It’s just the best way to get clarity. So what I would really encourage anybody to do right now is to take literally just five hours of their time, which is 10 interviews and talk to those people, talk to those customers and people who haven’t bought from you and you will get the clarity that you need. You will be able to do marketing better.

Adele Revella: And you know what Louis, even if you do a couple, you will honestly I tell people just do commit to do two or three. It will start. You will get addicted to this. I mean it is addictive. I will say that this is almost like cheating. You know, frankly I developed this methodology because I’d sat in so many meeting rooms trying to write a tagline or a marketing message. And frankly, after two or three hours of that, I will agree to anything. Just let me the hell out of this room. Right? And so it’s. So if we would just take those same two to three hours that we’re all sitting around a table making shit up. So you said I could use the S word, right? You know, if we would stop. If we would just use that same time to just go. Each of us talk to a few customers about their buying decision, not what they like about the product. Forget all that. And that’s a good thing to know, but not for this exercise. And then we could come together and say, when people are buying, here’s what they’re worried about. Here’s. You know, the biggest competitor most of us have is the status quo buyers. We are losing more business to people doing nothing than we are to our competitors. Why is that? You can find out.

Louis: You know, Adele, I’m glad It took you 48 minutes to use the word shit. It’s good. It’s good. You finally feel yourself in this interview. No, seriously, though, this is it, right? This is it. This is a really important topic, and this is why I’m going to keep talking about it in this show until more and more people use it and discover the power. That sounds really simple when you think about it, but the power of just understanding people and use the right thing, the right messaging, the right marketing to connect with them. So, Adele, what do you think marketers should learn today that will help them in the next 10 years, 20 years, 50 years?

Adele Revella: Well, I really, you know, we’re in the age of the customer. I mean, we. This is, again, in my age. I can tell you for sure. This has radically changed. It’s just going to keep getting stronger. Customers have so many choices, and if we don’t nail this, if we don’t get this absolutely right, forget it, guys. I sometimes worry as a career sales and marketing professional that buyers are just going to so ignore us because they’re doing it more and more all the time, that we’re just going to become irrelevant. They’re going to go ask their friends, and they’re going to buy what their friends bought, and we’re going to lose our ability to be useful to them or persuade them at all. So I just. I feel like this is life or death for us. It really is. We have got to understand what they need, and we need to realize we’re in business to serve the needs of our Buyers and our customers. And it’s not just the people who chose us already. And that’s a lot. I know, but we’ve also got to make it work for the buyers or we’re not going to have any customers.

Louis: And things are changing all the time, right? You introduce new products, you have new competitors coming up. The market is changing, things are changing around you. So this isn’t an exercise that you will do once. This is an exercise you will keep doing over and over again because things will constantly change. So this skill that you can have, that you can gain pretty quickly will be a lifelong skill. And that will give you a strong competitive advantage because nobody is doing it. Nobody else is doing it. Almost nobody else.

Adele Revella: Yeah. Well, we know a lot of companies that are doing this. Obviously, we’ve been growing like crazy, but not enough. I mean, it’s such a small percentage of people still. Unfortunately, most of those buyer Personas are those stupid profile things. This is Harry and he’s married to Sally and they’ve got two kids and a dog. And yeah, we want to sell it. Makes me sick. Really does.

Louis: But this is great. And this is why I was saying that the jobs to be done approach, your approach to me are basically the same thing. You’re fighting against the same thing. My guest, Claire Suhlentrop in this episode of the Jobs be done say the exact same thing. I’m sick of those so called Persona profile that don’t mean anything. So I’m glad you repeated that as well because when we talk about buyer Persona, at first I think a lot of people could have thought this is where we were going, but this isn’t the case. So that’s great to hear that. What are the top three resources you would recommend? Marketers and founders in particular?

Adele Revella: Well, your customers. As a matter of fact, we’re just rewriting our website and our number one, our number one headline is we interview the only experts that matter, which is your buyers. Your buyers are the experts. So read what your buyers read. Talk to your buyers. There’s a million great marketing books out there. Of course I want you to read mine, but the fact is everybody’s basically telling you the same thing and different versions of it. In the decades I’ve been in this industry, the whole secret is in your buyer’s voice, in your buyer’s mind. You’re going to hold my feet to the fire, Louis, and make me name a book boy?

Louis: No, you don’t have to name any books or podcasts if you don’t want to. I Feel that in order to nail the message of this episode, let’s not mention anything else bar the customers. This is the only resource you really need. And this is something I tend to find myself saying quite a lot as well. So. So let’s keep to that. And Obviously your website, buyerpersonal.com, your book that you wrote that is really insightful, that was published two years ago. Is there any other way listeners can connect with you, Adele?

Adele Revella: Oh, well, sure. I’m on Twitter eyerpersona. I’m on Facebook.com buyer Persona. Yeah. LinkedIn, buyer Persona institute at LinkedIn or my personal LinkedIn Adele Revella. So would love to stay in touch with your listeners. And, you know, because we’re trying to. Mostly what we’re trying to do is educate people. Otherwise we’re afraid buyer Personas are going to just go the way of the, you know, they’re just going to be useless after a while. People keep doing stupid stuff, then we’re not going to get anywhere.

Louis: That should be the tagline of this show. Stop doing stupid stuff.com I should buy this domain.

Adele Revella: You know, that’s dedication in my book. So my book is dedicated to every marketer who questions the wisdom of making stuff up. And to your point, you know, Wiley published my book and I did write dedicated to every marketer who questions wisdom and making shit up. And they wouldn’t let that go. So it’s making stuff up. But there you go. You know what I was really thinking, Louis?

Louis: Oh, I knew it. I knew it already. Right? Adele, you’ve been absolute pleasure. Thank you so much once again for your time.

Adele Revella: Thank you, Louis.

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