Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight into your Customer's Expectations, Align your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business by Adele Revella

Author:Adele Revella [Revella, Adele]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781118961506
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2015-02-23T14:00:00+00:00

Step 1: Mark Up Your Interview Transcript

As soon as you complete an interview, send your recorded interview to a transcription service to have it converted into a written document. A simple Web search will lead you to dozens of companies that accept online file uploads. Any of them can usually complete the transcription in less than a week for a charge of roughly $1 per minute.

Don't skip this step, as your interview transcripts contain the verbatim quotations that will make your buyer personas speak from the heart, voicing the real concerns and attitudes that your stakeholders need to hear.

With the first transcript open on your computer, read the interview from the beginning. When you find a quotation that answers one of the questions in the 5 Rings of Buying Insight, use the comments feature in your word processing software to highlight the quotation and label it with the relevant insight.

Because you started the interview by asking buyers about their Priority Initiative, you are likely to find quotations early on that help you to convey the triggering events and people that set the decision-making process in motion. Mark any quotations that answer this question with a “PI” for Priority Initiatives.

As you continue to read your buyer's story, you will find quotations about the changes buyers expected to gain from this solution—these should be marked “SF” for Success Factor. Remember that Success Factors sound like benefits statements, so keep an eye out specific business or practical outcomes as well as personal aspirational statements.

You will find Perceived Barriers “PB” insights throughout the interview, and especially in the places where you probed about how the buyer eliminated a few solutions from consideration. Buyers will also speak early in their stories about the barriers that prevented them from addressing this problem much sooner. Perceived Barriers often focus on people who got in the way, previous negative experiences, or capabilities that are missing from some solutions.

The questions that probed on how buyers eliminated options or why they kept certain solutions under consideration will also give you quotations that you can mark as Decision Criteria “DC.” These differ from the other insights because they describe the specific features or capabilities of the company or solution that were most important to your buyer. You will also find these quotations in response to your probing questions about what the buyer wanted to learn while reading a white paper, visiting a website, or attending a demo.

As you read through your buyer's story, mark quotations “BJ” for the Buyer's Journey insight whenever it describes who was involved in the decision and what the buyer did to evaluate options.

Not all the insights you mark on the transcript will fall easily within these five neat categories; some comments may encompass two insight categories simultaneously. In particular, the differences between Success Factors and Decision Criteria seem to cause confusion.

As a shorthand aid, think of Success Factors as benefits: scenarios that buyers believe will change after they complete this purchase. These might range from results

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