Buyer personas—those semi-fictionalized representations of your ideal buyers—should be the driving force behind your messaging and marketing initiatives. Without understanding what kinds of topics they want to learn about and what current challenges they want to overcome, your efforts are a shot in the dark.
When I worked in a marketing role, I found that conducting interviews helped my team develop and refine our buyer personas successfully. Generally I advocate for talking with three different groups.
- Your sales team
- Your customers
- Prospects who chose not to purchase from you
Based on my years of conducting interviews with these three types, I gained a few key insights.
Insight #1: Existing customers are usually happy to talk with you.
Particularly when you explain that you simply want to gather information to help you become a better organization to do business with. Getting on their schedule can be the real hurdle. With that in mind, plan ahead and don’t be surprised if this turns into a long-term campaign.
Insight #2: Your sales team might feel threatened.
Salespeople tend to feel very proprietary about their relationships with existing clients. Your plan to reach out to customers could make them nervous.
Salespeople can also become very anxious about the idea of you interviewing any prospects they lost deals with. Losing deals tends to be a painful and disappointing experience (I’ve worked in sales, so I know how it feels). Your salespeople might fear you’re looking to catch their mistakes or blame them for messing up a deal.
To avoid a political minefield and possibly impeding your ability to sustain a collaborative relationship with sales, it’s necessary to set the right tone. Here are three points I recommend you make with salespeople.
- Explain that you’re not planning to pester existing customers or waste their time.
- Reassure salespeople that you’re not looking to find out what they did “wrong” with deals that fell through.
- Be clear you’re your goal is to thoroughly understand what buyers want so that you can create messaging and content that will generate more high-value leads and/or help sales close more deals.
When salespeople understand that you’re in their corner, they usually become much more relaxed and have no trouble supporting your efforts to interview customers and prospects.
Questions to Ask during a Buyer Persona Interview
Salespeople:
- Which key people were involved in evaluating the deal?
- Who was the person who called you and said, “We’ve decided to buy”?
- Who signed the contract?
- Who said they had budget authority?
- Who seemed to really have budget authority?
Customers:
- Which key people were involved in evaluating the deal?
- Who else did you evaluate during your buying process?
- Where did you go to get information as part of your evaluation?
- What sources do you most trust when researching solutions to your business challenges?
- What did you like about X brand versus our brand?
- Which companies made your short list, and why? How did you make eliminations?
- What were the key questions you required an answer to when you were making your decision?
Prospects Who Didn’t Buy:
- Who else did you evaluate during your buying process?
- Where did you go to get information as part of your evaluation?
- What sources do you most trust when researching solutions to your business challenges?
- Were we selling to the right person in your organization?
- What were the key questions you required an answer to when you were making your decision?
Many deals, particularly complex sales, involve multiple individuals. Gartner Group reports that firms with between 100 and 500 employees involve an average of seven people in their purchase decision. The more people you add to the mix, the more convoluted the story of the deal and how it was won or lost.
The Perks
These interview questions are your chance to look for unseen elements and patterns that can help you devise and refine how you appeal to your buyer personas.
For example, you might find that the sales team assumed they were selling to the person who signed the contract, when in fact the Chief Financial Officer was the one who made the purchase decision. I’ve seen cases where people were embarrassed that they didn’t have the authority to buy, or people who were trying to act as buffers for their bosses during the sales process.
Other times customers will disclose information to you that they won’t to sales. Once I conducted a buyer persona interview where my interviewee told me about some major difficulties he had been having with one of our major competitors in getting shipments delivered on time. He probably would have never told the salesperson about it because he might have assumed the information would be used by sales to leverage a better deal. But he saw me as an impartial listener.
For me, this information really impacted our messaging. We started showcasing our 99.4% on-time delivery rate in our messaging, and that became a critical component of winning future deals.
One final tip is to be aware that the responses you get may not align with what you think your strengths are. Your CEO might love to conduct webinars and think he’s really good at them, but if your buyers come back and say, “I never listen to webinars. They’re a waste of time,” then it’s time to put your marketing dollars elsewhere.
