Doing complex B2B marketing?
Want to DEEPLY understand your market and your buyer personas?
👉Then screw buyer persona research👈🏻
…at least the way most go about it.
Sounds harsh? Maybe, but the way it’s mostly taught and done is incomplete and makes_no_sense for services w/ long sales cycles, buying committees.
Here’s how oldskool buyer-persona-thinking needs to be flipped (It’s simple)
1. Start with the ideal customer (as in: company) profile: a narrowed-down, hyper-clear definition of the ideal customer for whom you can get results, is easy to sell to and who can afford your services.
2. Then uncover the situations/stories/processes at play BEFORE and DURING the need for your solution arises.
Yes, you have to understand and map the subconscious mind of your target market and understand what’s going on even before the need for your solution arises.
Then you have to map the typical internal processes that go on as they’re searching for a vendor. What decision criteria come up, what departments have a say, what obstacles get in the way.
And we ain’t even talking about individual people yet!
3. Once you have the org-level things down, only then do you go into the individual personas who have a major say in analysis and decision making.
