Digitalisation has changed how (potential) customers search, decide and buy. But it also harbours many opportunities in marketing. In order to take this into account in marketing and sales and activate the potential, you need to develop empathy for leads and existing customers in order to design the approach, content and processes accordingly. Detailed buyer persona profiles are the tool of choice.

The buyer persona method is used to profile ideal customers and prospects.

In the past, target groups were defined for this purpose. But target groups don’t buy, it’s always people who buy. So we have to build up a much more detailed empathy for our desired customers. The keyword is ‘deep persona profile’.

Superficial ‘on-pager profiles’ such as ‘Klaus is 32, has a dachshund, a wife, two children, listens to techno music and drives an SUV’ fall far short of the mark. You can’t derive anything from these profiles. They usually end up in a drawer or as a ‘nice’ picture on a meeting wall for a while. These persona profiles are really superfluous.

Targeted buyer persona profiles need to be much more detailed and have a much greater scope!

In working groups with marketing, sales and, depending on the task, service and/or product management, we collect the potential customer types that come into question. It is important to define the group of people who will start the buying process. The position is usually chosen as the selection criterion, but sometimes the function or task is much more meaningful. In B2B, it is also important to profile the buying centre in order to take this into account in the customer journey analysis and the nurturing processes. In the next step, the collected buyer persona types are prioritised and profiled in interdisciplinary working groups.

We usually spend at least one day collecting relevant information about the persona and the buying centre. This process not only helps to gather knowledge from all minds, it also builds empathy and optimises cooperation between marketing and sales.

We often hear discussions about whether there is a better method than personas. But why not add useful methods such as ‘Jobs to be done’ or the KANO model to persona profiling?

• Buyer persona for marketing and sales
• Corporate persona: Profile persona type of your own company
• Digital buyer persona: profile information of the buyer persona for activities in LinkedIn (organic activities and adverts / campaigns)
• Candidate persona: Persona type of ideal applicantsEmployee persona: Persona type of employees
• User persona: persona type of users
• Community persona: persona type of community participants

In all application areas, the aim of persona profiling and the empathy that should be built up is to be able to make deductions. Deductions for approach, performance, content, processes and activities. A persona profile is only as good as the derivations and actions that arise from it. I have created hundreds of persona profiles with my clients over the last 12 years. The findings and conclusions were always enlightening and goal-orientated. The persona profiles became the basis for my work.

It is best for marketing, sales and possibly also service or product management to collect the possible persona types. This group then also discusses the prioritisation and the teams for persona profiling according to the given sales targets or application scenarios.

I call my approach ‘Deep Buyer Persona Profiling’ according to the Schuster Model®, as I combine several elements:

• Profile data / demographic data
• Behavioural preferences according to INSIGHTS MDI®
• Meta programmes
• KANO model
• Jobs to be done

An extended question set with 5 posters and card sets with 80 cards each for B2B, B2C, behavioural preferences, benefit analysis, meta-programs expand the persona profile:

• Pain points
• Subsequent pain (pain chains)
• Unconscious pain points
• Target states
• Decision criteria
• Obstacles
• Search behaviour
• Performance factors
• etc..

Based on this collected information, we also create a detailed benefit analysis, derive ‘value propositions’ and create a detailed customer journey analysis that is suitable for marketing automation processes and sales processes. The ‘Deep Buyer Persona’ profile is therefore an optimal foundation for automation processes, content, social selling, performance measures and personal communication in sales.

How reliable is a buyer persona profile? The information is usually collected from a fairly small group and most of the information is provided by the sales department. How can you rely on this profile data? After all, costs are produced and communication is controlled on this basis. We therefore recommend verifying the persona profiles, deriving corresponding interview questions in the workshop and defining the activities together:

• Sales invites customers and conducts interviews.
• The back office asks the questions during customer contact.
• How can you use events to interview personas? Define presentations and discussion groups to discuss persona topics and initiate conversations.
• How can you derive personas for other countries? Our partner conducts persona interviews in 23 languages to transfer persona profiles to other countries.
• What do you do if you have too little information on personas? We offer you market research.

If you integrate the interviews into your day-to-day business and ask the defined interview questions at every customer contact, you will build up persona monitoring and not only regularly receive new impulses, but also stay up to date with changes.

Detailed persona profiles are the absolute basis for success in the areas of lead management, existing customer business, cross/up-selling, account-based marketing, candidate and employee experience management.