How do you convince your company that it's worth the time to invest in researching and making buyer personas?

Firstly, know that there are ranges of budgets to create buyer personas depedning on if you go with an agency or do them in-house. I’ve worked for a company where we paid $100K to an agency to make buyer personas, and another one where I had to figure it out on a shoestring budget (< $1000). I honestly had so much more fun and learned so much more doing it the scrappy way! What did I use my scrappy budget for? I used budget for incentives to get clients, prospects, and churned customers to ta ...Read More

As they say, the proof’s in the pudding. If you work with folks who don’t see the value, it’s only once you get people using them and benefitting from them that they’ll be asking for more.  In general I think Product Marketing is about using your customer expertise to place smart bets on the places that are going to move the needle.  If you have a lot of conviction that personas are needed, you should place that bet.   Alternatively, if you’re not sure of the impact they’ll have, it might be wor ...Read More

Your leadership will be focused on the ROI of the budget and time spent developing personas. The most salient metric for these exercises will be customer acquisition costs. I would look at trends in customer acquisition costs over time, across segments, and across channels. This helps illuminate where there are pockets of inefficiency. On the qualitative side, it can also be valuable to gather sentiment from your customer-facing teams (i.e. sales and customer service) on how the lack of personal ...Read More

Personas are the way you bring segmentation and targeting to life by understanding what ‘motivates’ the buyer. If you don't have a good sense of the motivators, needs, and wants of your buyer, then i’d make a bet that your marketing spend isn't optimized and your deal cycle times are longer than they should be. There is a meme going around on LinkedIn right now that compares the demographic information of Prince Charles and Ozzy Osbourne. They both fit the same demographic category, but they cou ...Read More

First of all, *hugs*. I've worked on both the vendor and client sides of research, so I've had the opportunity to work with many different teams with varying levels of interest in market research. When I'm working with a team that isn't "bought-in" on the value of market research, it's usually due to one of the following reasons: They're in "start-up" mode and not creating space within their processes to leverage market research insights They haven't made it a priority to upskill their team on h ...Read More

Understanding your buyer persona, and their priorities will help you better understand your ideal customer profile. Your marketing team does not want to waste $ on generating leads that go no where, and your sales team wants leads they can easily convert. Are these complaints that exist at your organization today? There are only so many budget dollars available. If the problem you solve is not one of the highest priorities of your buyer, then it will make selling challenging, especially in tough ...Read More

There's a lot of reluctance around investing in buyer persona research that comes from a "so what" sort of experience in the past. You're going to have to establish what you want to accomplish with the buyer persona research as well as how to operationalize the research so that it isn't just a deck that sits there collecting dust. Prove that the content strategy requires the buyer persona research. Show that segmentation is proving valuable in email open rates and asset downloads. Show that ther ...Read More

We just finished our company’s first true Personas project and took clear steps to convince many teams that have never worked with personas before. The most important of which was to call a meeting, present the idea and ask a selection of people from each of the 4 teams that would most use them to quickly come up with the personas (sales, content + growth, customer success and product) they thought made sense. In a quick brainstorm we came up with wildly different answers from each team and even ...Read More

In the Enterprise B2B space, my experience has been the scrappy way. Mostly because I prefer to do it myself, by collaborating with product management and saless. I might spend $$ (if I have) to either buy some strategic research say for example from Forrester, that I did one time. Or to run a custom survey as Mary mentioned above. In the survey I am looking for more than just learning about the person's job, interest, challenges, pain points. I also want to know how their organization is struct ...Read More

Why do you want to do the research?  For marketing content/reports? Show the CMO and CEO all of the ways that you'll be able to get value out of it e.g. packaging up into a report for demand gen, webinars, event presentations, etc. etc. For insights to influence product roadmap? I'd expect PMs to get pretty excited about having more market data to influence decision making Anything else: it's the why. Why should they care, how can your market research others do their job better and help the whol ...Read More

Try to understand where any resitance might be coming from and be sure to tie your research to business outcomes.  Digital transformation in market research A variety of self-serve tools exist today that weren't available even a decade ago! They save both time and money (vs. relying on an external agency)---your team just needs to learn how to use them: Messaging: run A/B tests with your LinkedIn campaigns and let the numbers speak for themselves! Version ads, landing pages, visuals, terminology ...Read More

Make key stakeholders part of the process before you launch studies, and afterwards, leverage internal communications channels and technology to bring the voice of the customer and your learnings alive for all teams.  Get input on the interview guides/surveys and hypotheses you are testing Share quotes, graphs and charts Celebrate positive feedback Create video compellations with tools like Descript Summarize key learnings Hold an "open house" for all interested to hear the learnings Research is ...Read More

This really depends on the leadership team and company culture. Some organizations have a culture of "execute and iterate" first, whereas others will like to be more throughout from the beginning. This culture is unlikely to change with the viewpoints of one person, so I recommend choosing the company you work for very wisely!  However, there are ways you can set yourself up for success in any company: Start talking with customers BEFORE you need to. Chat with 1-2 a week. Enough to get a pulse, ...Read More

First off, full disclosure, this is what I do for a living, so it is difficult to answer this in a way that is neither biased nor self-serving.  With that out of the way... Step one, start by being a product marketer. Product marketers spend all day every day answering each buyer's "What's in it for me?" So do the same internally. Build your persona (who's budget this comes from; how high up the approval must be; how the "buyer" will use and benefit from this) and then the business case around i ...Read More