Buyers, Sellers, and the Message
Tips for Product Marketers on the quest to become more audience-centric.
Product Marketers strive to understand the audience, build the message, and enable the messengers. To do this successfully an audience-centric approach is required from beginning to end. The Product Marketing Community, led by Rowan Noronha (Head of Product Marketing, Cognizant) brought together a diverse group of bright B2B marketing Leaders to dive into this topic.
Joined by Beth Caplow (Research Director, Portfolio Marketing, SiriusDecisions), Meg Murphy (CMO, IBM Systems), and Fred Studer (CMO, FinancialForce) we explored recent SiriusDecision research and discussed the imperatives of taking an audience-centric approach.
If you’re up for the webcast, you can check it out here. If you’re looking for some quick takeaways from our discussion, keep reading!
The First Imperative: Defining Buying Groups
While every buying scenario is unique, they typically fall into one of the three categories: independent, consensus, or committee. This is a helpful way to consider the complexity and dynamics of a deal at hand. Independent buying scenarios are typically deals at a lower price point, involving 1–4 people. Consensus buying scenarios expand to involve multiple people across multiple departments. Committee buying scenarios are the hefty ones. These scenarios involve big deal sizes, many people (15+), long cycles, and likely require executive-level buy-in.
Who’s who in the buyer group
All of these scenarios involve a group of people coming together to make a purchase decision. Whether big or small, it’s crucial to understand the different roles in the buyer group so that you can appeal to each. Here is a quick intro to the key players:
- The Champion: This player has a pain, and is looking for a solution.
- The Influencer: A trusted voice of reason, asking the tough questions and carefully considering product performance.
- The Decision Maker: Has the purse strings. This player is going to need to be convinced of the business value and ROI.
- The User: This is the person’s who day-to-day is going to be affected by the product. It’s important to show them how it will be affected for the better!
- The Ratifier: Likely joining the buyer group from another department, this player is asking the tough questions about pricing model, contract structure and more. They are likely from legal or finance and are concerned with the broader impact on the business.
Here’s a catch: buying scenarios, buyer groups, and buyer personas are always changing. Often you have to quickly become familiar with a new environment and new key players in order to take advantage of a market opportunity or to react to a disruptive force. These frameworks provide a helpful way to organize new information so that you’re able to act with purpose.
Imperative Two: Developing Sales Personas
Buyer personas have become a widely adopted tactic for understanding the buyer. Here’s a hot tip: we can use a very similar approach to understand the various people who sell our product. When we do this, we can better understand what’s needed for success.
In big organizations, there can be multiple selling roles. BDRs, Sales Engineers, AEs (and often Customer Success reps) are all trying to appeal to that same buyer group, although under different circumstances. Sales personas can help you uncover how to make each of these roles as successful as possible.
How are they motivated? What is their comp structure? What type of training works well for them? What assets do they find most useful? What information do they need in their specialized sales role?
When you ask these questions you will start to discover how to make it easier to sell. And guess what? When you make it easier to sell, you make it easier to buy!
Once you’ve created these personas and are familiar with the sales day-to-day, you can start to enable sales in a more powerful way than ever before. You can help sales identify where the prospect is in the buyer journey, and supply them with the most important material (message, context, assets) to support the deal.
Imperative Three: Customize the Message
Here’s where the Product Marketing magic comes in — crafting the message. Your message (or story, or unique value proposition) should focus on the differentiated value that you offer. When well-crafted, your message should be able to consistently engage the various members of the buying group at various stages of the buying cycle.
Coordination and consistency are vital to the success of the message in the market. This means sales (and when I say sales, I mean all different sales personas) need to be aligned to an unwavering message and enabled to communicate that message to the market.
Want to keep learning?
There’s a lot more insight where this came from. To dive deeper into how to take an audience-centric approach as a Product Marketer, check out our full discussion. We will be having part two of this discussion on March 28th, where we will dive into the remaining three imperatives. Join us live!
A huge thanks for Beth Caplow, Meg Murphy and Fred Studer for the great conversation!
The product marketing community is on a mission to help you become an architect of growth. If your up for new perspectives, fresh ideas, and a popping network — join us. We’ve got six awesome events lined up across North America in 2019!
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