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“So what brings you in here to see me?”

That question is spoken countless times every day in doctors' offices, car repair shops, bank loan offices, law firms, and hundreds of other professional establishments. What usually follows that question is the customer's narrative describing their problem.

“My daughter is entering college next year, and I want to explore loan options for her education.”

“It's probably nothing, doctor, but I've been wondering about a small change I've noticed recently…”

“The engine has been making the strangest sound when I drive downhill. It all started right after I loaned the car to my brother-in-law, who said he used it to move his large collection of Civil War cannon balls.”

“I'm concerned that my cat has been pacing back and forth at night and making very loud howls.”

Listening is an essential part of any first meeting. It's how professionals learn about their customers' concerns, goals, and expectations so that they can present a relevant solution.

Yet in many organizations this one-to-one communication between marketing professionals and their customers is infrequent – if it happens at all.

How often do you have an opportunity to listen to your customers describe their problems? Do you know how to ask the questions that will make this conversation valuable for you and your customer? And most important, do you know how to apply what you've heard to become a more effective marketer?

The art and science of asking probing questions and carefully listening to your customers' responses lie at the core of the buyer persona concept. It's the key to discovering their mind-set and the motivation that prompts them to purchase a solution like yours.

One marketing professional confessed to me after conducting her first buyer interview, “This is almost like cheating; like getting the exam paper weeks before the final. Instead of trying to guess what matters, I now know not only what the customer wants – I realize how she goes about it.”

This is the power of the buyer persona. Built around a story about your customers' buying decision, the buyer persona reveals insight into your buyer's expectations and concerns as they decide whether to do business with you, choose your competitor, or simply opt to do nothing at all.

This book will show you how you can listen to your buyers' stories to gain insight into the factors that trigger their search, how they define success, and what affects their final decision that a particular approach is the best one for them. We'll show you how the buyer's personal narrative reveals language and phrases that will resonate with other buyers with similar concerns, and how to define and focus on the activities that compel buyers to take action. You will see how giving buyers the clearly articulated information they seek, in the language they understand, when and where they need it, is the essence of effective marketing.

Why Is Everyone Talking about Buyer Personas?

In the simplest terms, buyer personas are examples or archetypes of real buyers that allow marketers to craft strategies to promote products and services to the people who might buy them. During the past decade the term has almost become a marketing mantra.

But as this book will show, the growing interest in buyer personas has resulted in confusion about how they are created, how they are used, and their ultimate effectiveness.

It's the intention of this book to provide some much needed clarity.

The marketer's need to understand the market is hardly new. But the depth of insight required is increasing exponentially as technological advances demand that organizations rethink how they sell everything from music and books to bulldozers and information technology. Michael Gottlieb, a senior director of marketing and business strategy at one of the world's leading software firms, described it this way: “What we are selling is changing; who we are selling to is changing (some are people we've never sold to before); and how these customers want to be engaged, marketed, and sold to is changing, too.”

Buyer personas have a lot to do with attaining that kind of alignment, but not in the way that marketers often use them, which is basically to build a profile of the people who are their intended customers. Rather, the contention of this book is that when buyer personas evolve from authentic stories related by actual buyers —in the form of one-on-one interviews —the methodology and presentation allows you to capture the buyer's expectations and the factors that influence them. Then, and only then, can you truly stand in your buyer's shoes and consider the buying decision from the buyer's point of view. This goes way beyond buyer profiling – but most marketers don't realize that.

As a veteran sales and marketing executive, trainer, and researcher, I've worked with thousands of marketers in hundreds of companies. Not long ago, I met with executives from a large corporation who had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for research on “buyer personas” that was essentially worthless. The company had purchased profiles about the people who buy from it, but these failed to capture the crucially important stories revealing how buyers make this type of decision. I've also seen companies purchase oversegmented research that defined dozens of buyer personas, a number that would be feasibly impossible for them to market to with any effectiveness.

In both of these cases, the company had lost its way by focusing on the goal to build buyer personas without a clear plan to ensure that they contain useful findings.

Naturally, it's far easier to make educated guesses and assumptions about what buyers may be thinking based on extrapolations of your own knowledge or intuition. That's certainly how large aspects of the marketing community have functioned for decades. But the climate of social and technological change favors companies that embrace a culture of buyer understanding that allows them to adapt to customer needs. Just consider the major technology players that have receded or disappeared: AOL, Digital, Polaroid, Wang, AltaVista, Netscape, Fairchild Semiconductor, Palm, Sun Microsystems. The list could run for pages. Each of these companies was outrun by competitors who possessed greater clarity about their buyers' expectations.

Will This Approach Work for You?

This book is for marketing executives who wish to avoid that kind of dire scenario, whether they work in the business-to-business (B2B) or the business-to-consumer (B2C) arena. It is specifically aimed at marketers of “medium- and high-consideration” products, services, and solutions – buying decisions that require a considerable investment of your buyers' thought and time. Examples of high-consideration decisions range from selecting the right vendor of capital equipment or picking which college to attend to carefully choosing a new car or the most appropriate location for office space. This decision-making process differs markedly from impulse purchases made in a grocery store or at the checkout register.

When you consider that we want to interview buyers to capture their story, it is easy to understand why a detailed narrative about a choice between exotic vacation destinations would be immensely useful. In contrast, little insight would be gained as a result of asking a buyer to explain why she decided to purchase a particular pack of gum.

Although the Internet has given us instant access to immense knowledge, even the most sophisticated applications of Big Data won't reveal what you can learn by listening to your buyers' stories. Just as there is nothing to acquaint you with a foreign culture as intimately as staying with a native family in their home, the best way to gain deep insight into the mind-set of your buyers is to spend quality time with them.

The buyer persona methodology outlined in this book will help companies avoid the consequences that inevitably engulf organizations that fail to listen intensely to their buyers. In the pages to come I will explain how you can use buyer personas to craft successful marketing strategies based on insight that would otherwise be nearly impossible to acquire. I will show how this can be done without exorbitant investments in money, time, or labor. It just requires adhering to a well-defined process, mastering a few skills, and honing your analytical thinking. This is a craft and a set of skills that can be learned, and this book will serve as your primer for how you or your organization can achieve this.

We've organized this book into three parts. In the first three chapters, you'll learn what a buyer persona is and what it is not. You'll find out why so many buyer personas are not as useful as they should be and what you need to do to ensure the success of your buyer persona initiative.

In Part II, we'll help you decide whether you want to build your own buyer personas or use a third party to do this work for you. You'll learn about every aspect of the methodology that you or your contractor needs to employ to interview buyers about their decisions, collect and analyze your findings, and use these to build insightful buyer personas.

Finally, in Part III, we'll share step-by-step guidance about how to use buyer personas to define your marketing strategies. You'll learn how to rely on buyer persona insights to develop your messaging and marketing activities and align with your sales organization, and in the final chapter, we'll recommend a place to begin and explain our vision for the future role of buyer personas.

We are excited that you share our interest in buyer personas and hope that this book will help you join the growing ranks of buyer expert marketers.