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Guiding Your Product Launch with Buyer Personas

with Adele Revella

Are your launch plans focused on a product? Attend this session to see why companies use buyer personas to guide their launch team’s strategic and tactical efforts. This webinar shows you that personas -- an “example” that represents each of the people who will influence the buying decision – can deliver the insight that drives three of the most critical success factors for any launch

  • Sales people will actively and accurately promote the new solution.
  • Marketing messages will be well differentiated and resonate with the target buyers.
  • Product management will not be overwhelmed by sales support requests.


Watch Guiding Your Product Launch with Buyer Personas

 

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About the Presenter

Adele RevellaAdele is the developer of the acclaimed Pragmatic Marketing seminar, Effective Product Marketing. Attended by thousands of product managers and marketers throughout the world, Effective Product Marketing is a roadmap for those who are lost in a list of tactics and want a way out of the madness. She has consolidated more than two decades of relevant experiences into a process that shows marketers how to think like their target audiences, including buyers, customers and sales people.

In the 1990’s Adele served in executive roles at three technology companies, guiding product management, marketing and sales teams to achieve leadership positions in untapped markets. Her market-driven approach was also heavily influenced by her tenure at Regis McKenna, Inc., the PR firm that defined technology marketing during the 80’s, plus five years running her own market research and consulting firm at the end of that decade.

Adele has a particular focus on buyer personas and writes the Buyer Persona blog.

Interviews

Posted by Nick Gilbert at 2008-09-05 05:07 PM
When conducting interviews to create a persona, if we dont use standard questions what does the process look like to merge them into a single profile.

Interviews

Posted by Adele Revella at 2008-09-08 12:36 PM
As you conduct interviews you will be working towards gathering the information that I covered in slides 7-9. After a few interviews, review all of your notes and see if you can find a pattern in the data you collected. Then create a single story that is a composite of everything you heard. If new interviews reveal additional detail, add that information to the story. And please don't be limited by the fields that I covered in the webinar. If you discover other information that will help your team to achieve the goals that I discussed, include that too.

Question

Posted by Nathaniel Weiss at 2008-09-05 05:07 PM
What do you do if the user profiles are conistent, the buyers are not, but the buyers are the ones that drive the buyers to purchase?

Consistent buyer personas

Posted by Adele Revella at 2008-09-08 12:36 PM
I'm glad that you realize that the buyers are the key to your success. Now you need to find a segmentation approach that will allow you to develop buyer personas. We didn't cover this in much detail in the webinar - just very briefly on slide 26 - but if you look at that picture you will see that you need to do more interviews until you can find groups of buyers that are alike. For a launch, the most critical aspect of the persona for your segments is their buying criteria -- is it really true that none of your buyers are alike in this respect? It is always possible to find differences between people -- we need to look for what they have in common.

Users vs Buyer Personas

Posted by Mike Neiswinger at 2008-09-05 05:07 PM
What distinction should we make between USER personas and BUYER personas?

User vs buyer personas

Posted by Adele Revella at 2008-09-08 12:36 PM
I answered this in more detail during the Q&A at the end of the webinar, but will give a short answer here for those who have not listened to the archived version. User personas are commonly built to help development create a product that satisfies the "using criteria: for the product -- the capabilities that satisfy a user once they own it. IF the user is part of the buying process (this is not always the case) we recommend that you build a persona for the User Buyer -- capturing the user's "buying criteria" -- those capabilities that user evaluates prior to its purchase.

No Sales Team

Posted by Cheryl Tang at 2008-09-05 05:07 PM
if your product is a b2c product and there is no sales team, how would using buyer personas be different? or is it the same?

B2C personas

Posted by Adele Revella at 2008-09-08 12:36 PM
While we spent a lot of time in the webinar focusing on sales people as the beneficiary of the work that marketing does to develop buyer personas, please remember that we talked about their importance for messaging -- a very important aspect of all marketing environments. In addition, although we didn't show examples of how personas impact decisions about the marketing mix, this is the reason that we included the section on slide 9 about how this persona looks for new ideas and information. In fact, buyer personas are widely used in B2C marketing, where the need for marketing research and competence is more fully understood than in the B2B world.

Rule#3

Posted by Michael Guilfoyle at 2008-09-05 05:07 PM
About your rule #3 for talking to the market - if you develop areas to explore, can you develop open-ended exploratory points that you want to delve into, such as "describe you process around (subject matter), in order to kick off the discussion?

Rule #3

Posted by Adele Revella at 2008-09-08 12:36 PM
Yes, absolutely. In fact, I always start an interview by introducing a potentially hot topic and asking about its relevance. This requires a bit of advance research -- see the first three bullets on slide 22. Before I conduct cold call interviews, I use these techniques to develop a conversation starter, and then allow the questions to evolve from there. In fact, I usually have about three "themes" that I want to explore. The hardest interviews are the first ones, so I try to do those in person at conferences until I gain confidence in the themes. Once I have some topics that consistently work, its time to work the phones.

Use Scenarios

Posted by Scott Bradley at 2008-09-05 05:07 PM
Best practices when documenting product requirements. My products have Use-Scenarios, but also a lot of "non-functional" requirements that are related to Use Scenarios. Should I try to blend them, or list them separately?