Jim Kraus: Empower Your Marketing with Buyer Personas

The beauty of modern marketing doesn't rest solely within the realm of creativity, design, or storytelling— it's in understanding who your buyers really are.

I'm thrilled to have Jim Kraus, the President of the Buyer's Persona Institute, joining us. With a robust career spanning over two decades, Jim has devoted his expertise to various marketing roles and has thrived as a market researcher.

Throughout our conversation, we explore the importance of buyer personas in determining marketing and sales strategies. We also consider the implications of the buyer's journey, their specific needs, and their potential concerns. As a bonus, Jim offers essential insights from his rich experience, sure to enlighten you on creating accurate and effective buyer personas.

So hit play and transform your marketing strategy with insights that are as real as they get. 

Specifically, this episode highlights the following themes:

• The groundbreaking shift from fictional customer avatars to buyer personas.
• Balancing sales conversations with integrity and competitiveness.
• The methodology for developing potent buyer personas.

Links from this episode:

• Know more about Jim Kraus: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimkraus
• Learn more about Buyer Persona Institute: https://buyerpersona.com

Want to give your podcast the boost it needs to stay ahead of the competition? Check out honestpodcasts.com and take the first step toward achieving your podcasting goals!

And if you have a guest in mind who you think would be a great fit for this show, drop me a line at hello@honestpodcasts.com. 

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 1:56 About Jim Kraus
• 5:48 Understanding buyer behavior, needs, and decision-making process
• 6:48 Creating fictional perfect customer is self-focused
• 12:01 Identifying problems and solutions for marketing success
• 14:13 Define buyer's pain and expected outcomes precisely
• 17:45 Interview recent buyers to understand their story
• 19:49 Qualitative interviews: aim for at least ten
• 24:20 Identify buyer barriers to illuminate purchasing hesitations
• 27:45 Addressing business ethics in a competitive market
• 31:05 Prioritize lead quality, understand buyer criteria effectively
• 35:39 Summarizing the buyer's journey and key influencers
• 37:46 Identify key influencers and address purchasing objections
• 41:31 Takeaway

Transcript

Jim Kraus [00:00:00]:

The approach that we use to develop buyer personas is we talk to recent buyers. That's the only way to do it right, because they are the experts. And when I say recent buyer, talk to buyers that have made the exact buying decision you're trying to influence over the past three to six months, because they've literally went through it. And the way to approach it is interview them like a journalist would, where your whole objective as the interviewer is to understand their buyer's story.

Jim Kraus [00:00:24]:

You.

Travis Albritton [00:00:28]:

Welcome back to the Honest Marketing Podcast, where you learn proven strategies to grow your business without selling your soul. I'm your host, Travis Albritton, and today the episode today is just incredible. That's all I can really say. My guest, Jim Krause is the president of the Buyer's Persona Institute, where they do really deep buying journey research for companies to help them understand not the hypothetical journey that their buyers are going through before they make a purchasing decision, but the actual journey, the real pain points, the real obstacles from real people. So that way their sales and their marketing teams can make informed decisions about how to position their product or service, how to speak their customers language, and all the different ways that you can leverage that kind of information to help you. So we talk about the difference between building a buyer's persona versus a fictional customer avatar, which is something that a lot of businesses are very familiar with. So we talk about the pros and cons of each of those things and really walk through deliberately their methodology when they work with businesses to help them understand the journey their buyers go through before they make a purchasing decision. I know that I learned a ton from this episode.

Travis Albritton [00:01:31]:

I'm going to go back and re listen to it at least a couple of times to make sure I got all the nuggets out of it, but definitely make sure you stick around to the very end where I'll give you my number one takeaway. But here it is. Let's dive in. Well, Jim, welcome to the podcast. Happy to have you here. And I'm very personally just very excited about all of the things we're going to be talking about because they're things I've been thinking about, and I'm just glad that I get to talk to you about it and so I don't have to figure it out on my own. I just get to steal all of your wisdom and experience.

Jim Kraus [00:01:54]:

Awesome. But great to be here, Travis.

Travis Albritton [00:01:56]:

So for those that are listening to the podcast, could you just give a little bit of background on yourself and your experience in the marketing world and then a little bit about the work that you do at the Buyers Persona Institute?

Jim Kraus [00:02:07]:

Yeah, so my career has been almost exclusively spent in the marketing realm, both in different marketing professions and as a market researcher. I've been doing market research for over two decades now. So for long time in a lot of different industries, both on the client side and as a consultant. And that's really my passion is understanding the market, but really understanding people and buyers and what makes them tick and how do you educate and influence the decisions that they make. I've always just been fascinated by that stuff. So it's been a real natural fit, me being in this profession. And then currently, I'm president of Buyer Persona Institute, which is a perfect match for what I like doing, because our whole objective and what we do and what we like to educate, marketers how to do is how to really understand the buying decisions that their prospective buyers make, really to walk in their mind, to really understand what are the things that are going to be really add value to them. What are the things that are going to make them confident buying from you? So that those types of things can inform all the marketing and sales decisions that you make.

Jim Kraus [00:03:15]:

So what I like to say is what we do is we're the foundation of the marketing house, right? We're trying to provide insights that allow you to do all the things that you do to really attract and convert business.

Jim Kraus [00:03:27]:

Yeah.

Travis Albritton [00:03:27]:

And what I love about that, just that perspective and really the philosophy that runs that is it's so easy to just get in the habit of throwing spaghetti on the wall and seeing what sticks or trying a bunch of stuff at the same time. And then it works, and it kind of works, but you're not sure which of the 17 things you tried actually led to the sale of their conversion. And so I love how you guys have a different approach of let's really reverse engineer the best principles that are leading to the desired outcomes and how do we replicate that for every buyer that's coming through your pipeline to really maximize the results. So I want to first start off with just really digging into that terminology, that phrase buyer persona because a lot of people will be familiar with ideal Customer avatar or just avatar in general or Ideal Customer Profile, those kind of ICP ICA acronyms. What is different about the approach to outlining and I guess clarifying a buyer persona for your business versus going down the avatar creation path.

Jim Kraus [00:04:28]:

Yeah, so let's maybe start this at a high level and we can dig down deeper as we go here. But the simplest way to think about it is when you say buyer persona, a lot of marketers and sellers or anybody whose job it is to influence buyers, they will think of that fictional avatar, right, where you're trying to portray a particular role or individual involved in the buying process. That could be a consumer. It could be somebody that's making a buying decision within a business. So an example could be we're going to have a buyer persona for the CIO. Let's say you're selling technology solutions to companies, and we're going to learn as much as we can about the CIO in certain size companies, in certain industries. And we're going to describe things like what are their demographic, typical demographics, what are their attitudes, what are even their overall priorities or goals. And the objective there is just to try to, from a marketing perspective, try to figure out where do I find these CIOs and how do I connect with them in some meaningful way? By trying to profile them as much as possible.

Jim Kraus [00:05:30]:

And those are fine, but we can do better than that, right? So the buyer personas that we do and we try to really educate marketers on is buyer personas. That really you're developing buying insights about a specific buying decision that you're trying to influence. And that's the key difference.

Jim Kraus [00:05:48]:

Right?

Jim Kraus [00:05:48]:

So if you think about let's just pick a buying decision. So let's say you're a company that sells CRM software, right? Pick anything. We'll just pick CRM software. What you're trying to understand is what are the kinds of things that buyers that you're selling to, what are they going to want to know and what are they going to want to experience from the moment that they initially start looking for alternatives all the way until they make a final decision? What are the things that you need to know as a marketer that you're going to be able to develop marketing and sales strategy that's going to influence that behavior. And the only way to do that is to understand the buying decision. What are their goals in that purchase, what are their fears and concerns about making the purchase, what are the key requirements and decision criteria they're going to use, what are all the steps in their purchase process? You got to get to that level of insights about the buying decision rather than just profiling people involved in the decision. So at a high level, that's the fundamental difference. And the buyer personas we focus on is what I just mentioned.

Travis Albritton [00:06:48]:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense because I've certainly been a part of many exercises creating this fictional person, this perfect profile of a customer. Two and a half dogs, lives in Charlote, two and a half dogs, two and a half kids. Right. And you're trying to figure out like, okay, if I could from Clay mold, the perfect person for my product or service. That certainly has some validity in that it gets you more consumer focused rather than self oriented. But if I reflect back on all the times that I've done that, it was actually very self focused, because it's really asking the question, who do I wish my customer to be? And how do I wish for them to interact with my product instead of actually understanding the reality of how they're interacting with me on my business, how they perceive my marketing and my sales? And so important to make that distinction and really make sure that any energy that's spent in this direction is really focused on the reality of what people are experiencing and going through as they're trying to make a decision whether to buy your product or somebody else's.

Jim Kraus [00:07:55]:

Right. And what I like to do a lot of times is when we have a chance, when we have an opportunity to talk to marketers. A lot of the hypothetical I give them is think about at the end of the day, what is the primary thing that you're trying to do in your role as a marketer? And when I say marketer, I'm using it broadly, right? Really, anybody that's trying to educate and influence prospective buyers, whether you're in a marketing role or not, for that matter. And that's what you're trying to do. You're trying to influence buyers. I mean, that is your job, right? That's the thing you're trying to figure out, like, how do I get them to be aware of us? How do I get them to consider us? How do I get them to seriously consider us and get us through if they're winnowing down their options? And how do we convert business? Because if you think about that and then say to yourself, all right, what are the things I need to know to be able to do that?

Jim Kraus [00:08:42]:

Right.

Jim Kraus [00:08:43]:

I can guarantee you that it's probably not going to be a lot of the profiling characteristics that we just talked about. What it's going to be is very specific buying insights. And let me just talk about the guts of a buyer persona. It's probably a good place to segue, if that's all right with you, Travis. But there's really five types of buying insights you want for your buyer persona. The first one we call priority initiatives, and these are triggers. So these are literally what are the things that are getting your prospective buyers starting to look for your type of solution at that moment in time? What's the thing where they're saying they're throwing up their hands and saying, enough is enough, what we're doing isn't working, or we have this new opportunity that we want and we need this, or maybe there's an organizational change or what have you, but what is the thing that's actually getting them going? And the reason that's important is because you want to meet buyers where they are, right? Where are they starting?

Jim Kraus [00:09:34]:

Right.

Jim Kraus [00:09:35]:

Second thing we call success factors, and these are outcomes or benefits. These are what is the specific outcomes they are looking from making that investment with you. So if they're whatever product, service or solution that you're selling, there's going to be some really specific things that those buyers want to get from that purchase.

Jim Kraus [00:09:52]:

What are they right.

Jim Kraus [00:09:54]:

At the end of the day, what are those things?

Jim Kraus [00:09:55]:

Right.

Jim Kraus [00:09:56]:

Third thing we call perceived barriers, and this is a really important one. A lot of the work that we're involved in is with companies that sell more high consideration, what I'll call high consideration products and services. Where you've got your buyers, there's multiple decision influencers. They're looking at different alternatives. It's probably maybe an elongated type sales cycle, et cetera. So when you have a high consideration buying decision, there are going to be buyer fears and concerns. There's going to be things that are going to make them nervous about making the investment with anybody. One of the biggest challenges salespeople have is buyers want to stick with the status quo, right? And the reason for that is because they're nervous.

Jim Kraus [00:10:38]:

The other thing that perceived barriers will reveal to you in your persona is what are the things that are eliminating providers? What are some key concerns that are actually getting providers cut from elimination? That's the third one. The fourth one is decision criteria. And this is where you really get into the weeds, right? This is when you're revealing your persona. All the questions that you can expect your buyers to ask you, either directly or indirectly. It's how they're evaluating their options, right? And that's when a lot of times you get down to actual product features, interactions with sales teams, post sale support, all those kinds of things. That when the buyer is getting closer and they're really evaluating their options and they want to feel confident they're getting in those weeds. So you want to know what those are. And the fifth and final part of your buyer persona is buyer's journey.

Jim Kraus [00:11:24]:

And those are what are the steps for this particular product or service? What are the steps in a typical buyer's journey? What are the information resources they use? Who are the people involved? So if you take a step back from all of this, if you have those five insights, those insights in each one of those categories, now you've taken all the guesswork out of your marketing. Like I said earlier, this is the foundation, right? So now there's all kinds of things you can do with that information, from sales enablement to messaging, positioning campaigns, thought leadership. It all stems from that. Those are the five key things.

Jim Kraus [00:12:00]:

Yeah, I want to dig into each.

Travis Albritton [00:12:01]:

Of those things very specifically. I'm glad that you brought it up because I actually have it in my notes. Like, okay, I want to go line by line because this really is once I started putting my notes together and doing research, I'm like, wow, this is incredibly powerful and it's so simple when you lay it out. But it's not something that is common knowledge or something that people typically go through this exact kind of process to get an idea of the whole journey of somebody going from problem aware to solution aware to product aware to making that purchasing decision. So I want to start at the priority initiatives, the pain points and trigger events. And I think a lot of marketers, when they think about that, or a lot of business owners, they think about what is the main thing that I'm solving with my business? Have you found that to be a direct link? Like, this is the problem that I solve in my business. And that also happens to be the pain point that my ideal buyer persona is experiencing? Or does that diverge often where they're actually experiencing other things that you wouldn't anticipate, but they lead to a similar conclusion with the kind of solution they're looking for?

Jim Kraus [00:13:03]:

It depends really, on whatever the particular solution that you're basing your buyer persona on. Sometimes there's a really tight linkage, other times not as much. And again, it really just depends.

Jim Kraus [00:13:14]:

Right.

Jim Kraus [00:13:14]:

So if you're a typical business, you're buying products and services or a consumer, different products and services for different reasons, it may link to an overall objective, maybe a top priority, and sometimes it may not as much. I will say to your point, it's very unlikely there'll be no linkage.

Jim Kraus [00:13:31]:

Right.

Jim Kraus [00:13:32]:

Because the fact that they're actually starting to seriously look at different options and thinking about making this purchase means that it's something that's got to have some importance to them or it's become such a raging pain point in their business that they've got to do something about it. Right.

Travis Albritton [00:13:49]:

Yeah. And when you think about top of funnel marketing initiatives where you're trying to capture people that don't even know who you are yet, they're searching for solutions based on the pain. Like, that's the origin of their journey. Right. I have a headache. It's like, I don't know, aspirin Ibuprofen, Advil, I don't know what the right solution is. Some of them, I don't even know they exist. I just know I have a headache and I want to get rid of it.

Travis Albritton [00:14:13]:

I think really making sure that any kind of marketing or sales initiative and as you're building your buyer's persona, getting super clear on those problems and how they are self identifying their pain points so you can speak directly to them is really key. So I love that you kind of expanded on that a little bit. Now let's talk about success factors, because I've heard this worded different ways. I like how you define it, results or outcomes that buyers expect from purchasing a solution like yours. I've heard it phrased as like, what's the promise that your business makes? What's the offer? What's the magic wand solution? But for somebody who's trying to put together again, not from a company oriented perspective of this is what we want the solution to be, or how we want it to be perceived. How does this conversation shift when you start from the buyer first and really think about what are they looking for in the results and outcomes versus, well, this is what our business creates, so.

Jim Kraus [00:15:09]:

This is what the results or outcomes should be. Yeah, I mean, we could talk about this later about how you develop your buyer personas. But essentially the net of it is you talk to recent buyers that have made that buying decision. And the reason I mentioned that is because the point you bring up is such an important one, because it doesn't matter what you think, or even if you have a point where you say, we know our product or service can help this, and we know it can help 20 things. Well, the reality is, if you're talking to buyers and you're really understanding the exact buying decision they went through, I can guarantee you it's not 20 things. It's probably five to seven things, roughly, that are going to be really important to them, and you want to understand what those are, and you want to understand how they talk about it.

Jim Kraus [00:15:52]:

Right?

Jim Kraus [00:15:52]:

So one example, we just did a buyer persona study for MRI machines. So if you think about the tunnel MRI machines, if you've ever been in one of those tubes that they slide you in or you know somebody that has. One of the things that we found out in that is that scan times, reducing the time it does to scan was an absolutely imperative outcome. Now, that was linked to all kinds of benefits for we did it with hospitals. So we talked to recent buyers in large hospitals that bought an MRI machine. And faster scan times leads to a whole bunch of different things, like higher patient satisfaction, stronger patient retention, more revenue opportunities, a whole bunch of other different things. And they're all important. But when you talk to buyers, they're talking about scan times.

Jim Kraus [00:16:39]:

That's how they're thinking about it. That's how they're evaluating competitors. That's how they're reading about things. And again, that's just one example of something where, okay, well, that tells me if I'm somebody who's in marketing, I don't want to not talk about patient satisfaction or retention and all those good things. Those are outcomes you want to talk about. But wow, scantimes, is that's something they're just fixated on, right? So why fight that, right?

Travis Albritton [00:17:03]:

Talk about it.

Jim Kraus [00:17:04]:

Right.

Jim Kraus [00:17:04]:

Think about how you can talk about your scantimes, benchmark it against other companies. Talk about the advantages of having it. So that's a way to really, again, not have to guess at what is the heart of the matter.

Jim Kraus [00:17:17]:

Right?

Jim Kraus [00:17:18]:

Let them tell you what's the heart of the matter.

Travis Albritton [00:17:21]:

And was that an insight that you collectively, whether it was you or somebody on your team doing the interviews, discovered through that research process that was not intuitive in the beginning?

Jim Kraus [00:17:34]:

Yeah.

Jim Kraus [00:17:34]:

So the approach that we use to develop buyer personas is we talk to recent buyers. That's the only way to do it.

Jim Kraus [00:17:41]:

Right.

Jim Kraus [00:17:41]:

Because they are the experts. There is no other expert out there on this.

Jim Kraus [00:17:45]:

Right.

Jim Kraus [00:17:45]:

And when I say recent buyer, talk to buyers that have made the exact buying decision you're trying to influence over the past three to six months, twelve months at the most, because they've literally went through it and they love talking about it because it was an important buying decision for them, whatever it is. And they will tell you everything that was really important to them. And the way to do the interviews is, rather than giving them like, here's a list of 20 things, tell me what's the most important. The way to approach it is interview them like a journalist would, where your whole objective as the interviewer is to understand their buyer's story. You go into it completely blank, right? You should have no pre assumptions about anything. What you want to do is you start with, take me back to the day when you first decided you needed X, whatever X is. That's literally the only scripted question that we would recommend using. And then you understand what is the initial triggers and you start probing as far as how did you figure out who you were going to even what your options were? And how many companies are options did you consider and how did you window down your choices? And there's a whole bunch of prompts and probes you can do.

Jim Kraus [00:18:52]:

But the important point here is you're understanding their story. So that our litmus test is when you get off the interview, you feel like, I got it. I know everything that was important to them in this decision. I know all the key steps that they took. I know all the concerns that they had. I know what are some of the really things that were really specific that they wanted to know about. I know the things that were superfluous to them. And that's really the insights that you're.

Travis Albritton [00:19:19]:

Looking for and what's a sample size that you aim for, right? Because I imagine it's easy to say, okay, I did three interviews and they all said the same thing, so that must be the answer. But what's the volume that you're looking for to get a good enough sample size to be able to identify the right trends and not be led astray by maybe these three hand picked interviews all said one thing, but if we interviewed 40 more people, then we would have discovered those three are the outliers. What's your approach to thinking about a big enough sample size to do that research?

Jim Kraus [00:19:49]:

I mean, these are quote unquote qualitative interviews when we do these, and we recommend doing as many interviews as you can or want to, but minimally, you want to do at least ten. And the reason for that is we've done hundreds of these and we have found anything more than ten, we do start getting diminishing returns. As far as new insights, I wouldn't say there's no value in doing more because you get more buyer quotes. The buyer personas you want to have a lot. We can talk about buyer quotes and how important they are in your persona, but you get a lot more richness and nuance. If you're doing a study where you're trying to figure out you have a buyer persona and you're focused on a buying decision and you feel like, hey, we're targeting two Enterprise size groups, one really small, one really large, and we really think there's some differences, then you'd want to do six to eight interviews in each one of those segments. So you've got enough. So you probably do like twelve to 16 interviews, but generally speaking, ten to 15 to 16 interviews is generally plenty.

Jim Kraus [00:20:53]:

You can do quantitative survey research afterwards as well to validate that and do some additional segmentation. And that's another whole discussion we could probably have. But you can get 90% of the way there just by doing these in depth, one on one interviews with recent buyers.

Travis Albritton [00:21:08]:

Well, I'm really happy you said ten, because that feels achievable for somebody that's busy and has a lot on their plate.

Jim Kraus [00:21:13]:

Right.

Travis Albritton [00:21:15]:

I've seen some people say, well, if you want, because you think about like, phone surveys and it's like, well, we did this survey and we phone dialed 7000 people, it's like, man, I can't do that. That's a lot of people, but ten, I could do ten. Let's drill down a little bit on buyer quotes and how you use them both for creating the buyer persona kind of report on the back end, but then all the strategic ways that a company can use those quotes in their marketing and sales collateral. Because I think about testimonials, I think about case studies. But I imagine there's a lot of different ways you can leverage that key insight that a new customer gives you in order to both inform your own marketing strategies, but then also appeal to prospects that are still on the fence. In that nervous phase that we talked.

Jim Kraus [00:21:59]:

About, yeah, no, the buyer quotes are really important. So, I mean, the buying insights that we create in each of the five categories is looking across the interviews, right. And you look for patterns and the data to come up with the insights. But once you do that, you really want to support each insight with direct things that buyers actually said. That's important for a number of reasons. I would say the three most important ones are one is it adds instant credibility to your buyer persona.

Jim Kraus [00:22:27]:

When we do client readouts of buyer.

Jim Kraus [00:22:30]:

Personas as an example, if we're helping a company with one of them, instantly they're like, wait a second, these are the people we're trying to sell. Just it becomes obvious really quickly, right. This isn't Jim Krause's opinion. This is what buyers want.

Jim Kraus [00:22:45]:

Right.

Jim Kraus [00:22:45]:

That's what we're representing, the voice of the buyer. So that's number one. The second reason is kind of what you're alluding to is that if you're somebody in a marketing or sales profession and you're trying to figure out what's your messaging, what are some of the hot buttons? How do I get in the head of these buyers? Listening to them talk about this stuff directly is just absolutely invaluable. Like hearing what they're actually saying. And some of it probably you're like, oh, gosh, I can't believe they're talking about it this way, or say it.

Jim Kraus [00:23:12]:

But that's the reality.

Jim Kraus [00:23:13]:

That's your buyer, right? You want to know that. And then the third thing that's super valuable is competitive insights. So these are ideally, you do these as double blind studies. Ideally is the way to do them, where they have no idea that if a company is doing a persona study, that it's for that company and the company should know who you are. That way it's completely objective. But the nice thing if you're able to do that is you get a lot of insights about your competition, right? What are the perceived strengths and weaknesses of competitors? How are they marketing and positioning their products? You get insights about pricing, so it's another value add. And it really comes off the page with the buyer quotes because, again, hearing the people you're trying to sell to and a lot of times these are deals you don't even know about, right. You're not just talking to your current customers.

Jim Kraus [00:23:58]:

That's really important. You want to talk to people that have made this buying decision. They could be a customer. They could be somebody that looked at you and didn't choose you. They could be an opportunity you never even saw.

Jim Kraus [00:24:08]:

Right.

Jim Kraus [00:24:09]:

But you would want to. Right. You want them in your sales pipeline, right? You didn't get that one, but you want to know what they think, obviously.

Jim Kraus [00:24:15]:

Yeah.

Travis Albritton [00:24:16]:

So you can get the next one, right?

Jim Kraus [00:24:18]:

Exactly.

Travis Albritton [00:24:20]:

That's the hope. Always the hope. So let's keep moving down your five rings of buying insight, which you have this really wonderful graphic on your website, just kind of makes it all look very feng shui. Talk about perceived barriers. And I think this is something that, as marketers and salespeople, we can kind of project what we think the perceived barriers are, the common ones being time and money, or it won't work for me or those kind of things. And that may work for certain industries, but it's not as universal as people may think. So when you're doing this buyer's persona research, what kind of barriers are you looking for or keying in on? When you're doing those interviews, what kind of questions do you ask to illuminate the barriers or the things that were making them hesitant to make a purchase? Is it very generic? Like, what kind of hesitations did you have when you were thinking about making this investment or this decision? And how deep do you get on the rabbit hole of, well, I just want to make sure that I worked with a reputable company versus, well, I really didn't want to have to answer to my boss when we had to make the same sales decision six months later because I made a. Mistake.

Travis Albritton [00:25:31]:

It's like, how deep are you able to go and how deep do you want to go in order to get the insights that you need to really understand what's happening?

Jim Kraus [00:25:40]:

Yeah, so perceived barriers is one of my favorite ones of the five, right? Like, if I had a favorite child, it would probably be that one. And the reason for it is because it is your greatest opportunity to differentiate yourself. Because anything that falls into the category of perceived barriers means by definition and how we group them, that it eliminated a provider.

Jim Kraus [00:26:00]:

Right.

Jim Kraus [00:26:01]:

It was something that a provider and it doesn't always have to be a feature or a capability. It could just be like you said, which is they just didn't have the industry experience that we wanted, or we wanted somebody with a deeper client roster or whatever. And you could realize and say, well, that's obvious, but okay, it's obvious maybe, but it's true. So it's still important, right. Something to know. So anyway, from an interview perspective, there's a couple of ways we go about it. I mean, one way is we do ask very specifically about did you have any concerns about making this investment? Right? Earlier you told me you were doing XYZ. Were there any concerns about moving away from that? Right? And some buyers will say, no, they can't wait to move on, others will articulate things like, yes, we had these concerns, et cetera.

Jim Kraus [00:26:46]:

Or we'd ask questions like were there any concerns about where things might go wrong or things might fall short, did you have any concerns about that? And then the third way that we would ask it is getting into specifically what are some of the things that eliminated providers? So as an example, in an interview, if somebody says to us, we looked at seven providers and then at some point we kind of windowed it down to three, we're going to ask really specifically those four providers, what happened with those four? And it could be the same reason. It could be different reasons. One, it could have been a product feature they didn't have. Another one could be their reputation, another one could be because they didn't like their post sale support. It could be any one of those things. But those are all things we're trying to understand. And again, going back to what I said earlier, if you know those things and you can check those boxes, those are great differentiators, right? Because we're telling you that there are providers getting eliminated from that particular barrier that's out there.

Travis Albritton [00:27:45]:

So I want to follow up with a personal question related to my specific business, because I had a sales conversation where one of these barriers came up and I basically self selected out of the acquisition process for context my business. I produce podcasts for other businesses. They want to do branded content, content marketing, things like that. And I was having this conversation and they were asking me very pointed questions about very specific guarantees that another business in my space makes. And I know basically how they deliver it and what they say they do and what they can actually do are very different things. And so, on one hand, it's like, I feel an obligation to just tell you that this other company is full of nonsense, and they're just marking up a third party software that you could manage yourself. But on the other hand, it's like, okay, well, if this becomes a recurring theme that this is something that people see in the marketplace and want, how do I speak to that in a way that's both filled with integrity, but then also see it as an opportunity to capture some market that I might otherwise lose to a business that could basically lead someone astray with really fancy copy and then leave them disappointed six months from now.

Jim Kraus [00:28:59]:

Right. Yeah.

Jim Kraus [00:29:00]:

I mean, it's a decision of what you want to do with it.

Jim Kraus [00:29:02]:

Right.

Jim Kraus [00:29:03]:

Because one is you can continue kind of fight that battle or just have that ouch moment kind of thing, I'm sure, like, when you're having these conversation with them, or just figure out how could you offer that capability to yourself.

Jim Kraus [00:29:14]:

Right.

Jim Kraus [00:29:14]:

So that goes away. Usually I think the way to do it is just to try to educate these prospective buyers in good faith and just say, even without mentioning the company, even if you probably know it, just let them know and say, hey, that's great. Good luck on this one. Try to make sure that try to give them some advice about how to ensure that it goes well and to watch out for this. I don't know if you can go with it too much farther than that.

Jim Kraus [00:29:41]:

Right.

Jim Kraus [00:29:42]:

Because if you try to tell a prospective buyer that, hey, they're missing something, that usually doesn't go too well, even though if it's 100% accurate. So that's a sticky wicket, so to speak.

Travis Albritton [00:29:54]:

Right. And in the B, two B space, there's always a temptation to like, oh, I'll just be everything to everyone. If they ask for something, oh, yeah, we can do that. We can do that. Especially if you're in a service oriented business.

Jim Kraus [00:30:04]:

Well, the example I would give you is just from a personal anecdote is our usual, like, when I'll get on the phone with somebody who wants to talk about buyer personas, many times we'll talk to people that are on a track of doing these fictional avatars, these audience based profiles. And again, there's nothing wrong with them. In fact, the personas that we do, we actually have a buyer profile page where we actually provide that. We recommend that be part of your persona. But don't just end there. Generally what I try to do is I just try to talk to them about these two different types of personas and ask them, which do they think would be more useful and valuable, and they either see it and I don't want to say they get it. It's more of they see it and they see value in it or they don't.

Jim Kraus [00:30:49]:

Right.

Jim Kraus [00:30:49]:

And if they do, great, then we would happen to be a great fit. If they don't, and the audience profile is more kind of the path they're on for whatever reason, that's fine too.

Jim Kraus [00:31:00]:

Right.

Jim Kraus [00:31:00]:

Then it's not a match, and we're still here if things change.

Jim Kraus [00:31:04]:

Yeah.

Travis Albritton [00:31:05]:

And as long as you're continuing to fill your pipeline with more leads, then it's okay to let one slide if it's not a good fit, because it's going to be a headache later on to try and service that client anyways. So as long as you fix your lead problem, then you can make those kind of choices. Let's move down to number four decision criteria, company and solution capabilities that buyers investigate as they consider their options. So I imagine at this point, you're trying to figure out what are the things that they're interested in, what are the features, the pieces of your offer that resonate the most with them, and the pain point they're trying to solve, and just kind of like their research phase. I'd be curious if this is also the point in the journey where pricing comes in when they're doing this kind of research, or is that at another step of the process, pricing usually that.

Jim Kraus [00:31:53]:

Comes in with decision criteria, or it may come up as a barrier.

Jim Kraus [00:31:57]:

Right.

Jim Kraus [00:31:57]:

If it is a reason that some companies are getting deselected because it's just the price is too high, or the TCO is there, or the ROI, however buyers think about it for your particular product service solution, and it can vary depending on what it is. That's usually where a price would come up in one of those two things, decision criteria. It's the one insight area of insight of the five that we talked about that when we communicate it as part of personas that we do, we put it in the form of a question because we want people to think about it in that way. And the reason it's important to think about it in that way is because these are literally the questions that buyers are going to be asking when they evaluate you.

Jim Kraus [00:32:36]:

Right.

Jim Kraus [00:32:37]:

So it's good to think about that way. So, as an example, we'll talk about the MRI one we talked about earlier. One of the decision criteria would be what are your scan speeds? Right. There could be other things associated with scanning speeds.

Jim Kraus [00:32:50]:

Right.

Jim Kraus [00:32:50]:

That could be just a technology piece of it, and we put it in the form of a question. So the reason that's important is because now you start thinking like, okay, now I've got buyers that are making their way through this sales funnel we talked about. They're getting deeper into it. Now they're going to be asking some really specific questions. It could be about our product. It could be certain features, it could be our reputation, it could be our experience, it could be our service, it could be anything.

Jim Kraus [00:33:15]:

Right.

Jim Kraus [00:33:15]:

We find those things out. If you're doing your persona, you want to find those things out. But these are the really detailed things that you want to be prepared for.

Jim Kraus [00:33:23]:

Right.

Jim Kraus [00:33:23]:

You make a decision whether you want to actively market around them or it might be just things that you've got some ready answers to that you've really thought through and they're good answers.

Jim Kraus [00:33:33]:

Right.

Jim Kraus [00:33:33]:

As far as somebody has to worry about after sales support, great. We have something ready for you that can make you feel really confident that.

Jim Kraus [00:33:41]:

We'Ll be there for you, kind of thing.

Travis Albritton [00:33:44]:

And is the place that most companies leverage kind of the answers or the counterarguments to these kinds of objections? And like FAQs on their website marketing copy about US. Feature solutions, is that how that's then integrated in to help with the buying process to warm that prospect through the pipeline?

Jim Kraus [00:34:02]:

Yeah, FAQ is a great one that they use. We see it, use it in sales pitches. Or when you get into more deeper, if you're doing actually second meetings with a vendor, for example, or you're doing demonstrations of your solution, if it's something you're demonstrating, you're showing them, it could be something you tick through.

Jim Kraus [00:34:22]:

Right.

Jim Kraus [00:34:23]:

And the nice thing about that is you're proactively addressing it and maybe you're addressing it before they even ask. It even better.

Jim Kraus [00:34:28]:

Right.

Jim Kraus [00:34:28]:

I mean, that's the whole goal here is at the end of the day, you want the buyers to look at you and say, hey, they get us, they know exactly what we need. It's almost like they're reading our mind.

Jim Kraus [00:34:37]:

Right.

Jim Kraus [00:34:39]:

That's what you're really looking for here and that's what you want the personas. So yes, you can use the decision criteria in those kinds of ways. And Frequently Asked Questions is a great way to use decision criteria.

Travis Albritton [00:34:50]:

Perfect. All right, so we're on number five, step number five, buyer's journey. So this is Actions Taken, Resources Trusted, and Decision Influencers involved at each step in this buying decision. Now, this is a little bit different than how I would have defined that term buyer's journey because most people think about buyer's journey as like stages of awareness or they go from this kind of understanding to this kind of understanding and then eventually they get to the decision point. But this is really geared more towards who are the people that they trust and look to to give them guidance in the process of buying whatever product or service it is that they're looking for. Is that accurate?

Jim Kraus [00:35:28]:

Yeah, it's part of it. The way I like to describe this one is it's the behind the scenes view of everything that happened in that buyer's journey from the moment they started looking until they made a decision.

Jim Kraus [00:35:38]:

Right.

Jim Kraus [00:35:39]:

So if you had a let's say it was a B to B decision and a lot of stuff was going on within four walls of a company. You had a camera and a microphone and you were able to capture everything, anything that was meaningful in that entire buyer's journey to see actually what happened. We're not going to that level of detail. But you want to be able to outline what are the major steps that are going on, right? So how are they initially identifying what's out there? How are they doing research just to figure out what are their options are and how are they engaging with those different options? What information sources are they using and do they trust the most, whether it's online or publications or social forums, or peers and colleagues in networking and all the above, you want to know what all those things are and then you get into the later stages as well. So you just want to be able to outline what those steps are. And the other really important thing about buyer's journey is determining who the key influencers are. And again, we're not trying to do a buyer persona on each one of them, right? So using the MRI example, just to stick with that example, we probably identified eight, nine different decision influencers in a hospital for an MRI. We're not trying to deliver a buyer persona for each one of those.

Jim Kraus [00:36:49]:

And you don't want to market differently or tailor it significantly for each one of those. Because once you get into a purchase like that, you want to know what the buying committee in totality, what's important to them. Do you want all their viewpoints in that? Absolutely. But you want to know what are all their viewpoints? So you do want to know who those decision influencers are, just because it is important to know, because they may have different views on things. But those are the major parts of the buyer's journey. So it's not detailed journey mapping. So people that do a lot of consumer research, they do paths to purchase and research that's really detail oriented. These are more like, here's the 1012 15 major steps that typically go on to buy your particular product or service.

Jim Kraus [00:37:35]:

Here's how people are getting smart about it, here's their kinds of interactions they're having with providers so they really get to know what they offer and to start building some type of trust, et cetera.

Travis Albritton [00:37:46]:

And I imagine that the value of that is not only identifying, okay, like speaking about hospitals, these are the administrative roles that have to sign off on a purchase like this. We need to consider what those conversations look like between the person running the acquisition process to decide which MRI to buy and all the people that have to sign off on it. So that way we can maybe in advance speak to some of those objections internally from someone that's not a part of the buying decision to help that person walk through each of those steps. Would you also then as part of that research identify here are the key kind of public influential figures, whether it comes down to because I'm thinking more along the lines of affiliates or people that you want recommending you. That if someone types something in, like best mattress for someone over 50, it's like, well, who's the YouTube channel that's doing the best around? That kind of content. And how do we integrate in with them so that they recommend us as a part of this buyer's journey? How much of it is that as well?

Jim Kraus [00:38:45]:

Yeah, you want to get as specific as you can. So if you're interviewing a recent buyer and they do we did some online research, your next question should be, oh yeah, tell me a little bit more about it. Like, what did you and you know, Google comes up. It's amazing how much Google comes up or search. Right. Still comes up quite a bit, even for the most sophisticated product services and solutions. But at any rate, yeah, you want to dig into that and find out are there specific websites they're going to or forums or publications or influencers, as you said, certain people. So yeah, it's always when you're doing these interviews, it's always the second and third question you ask where you get the gold, where the nuggets are.

Jim Kraus [00:39:22]:

And that's a great example of it. So if you can get as specific as you can, for sure, definitely.

Travis Albritton [00:39:26]:

Now, we've covered a lot of ground. I'm going to have to go back and listen to this to make sure that I pull out all the nuggets and can selfishly use them for me and my business. Where's a good place for people to go if they want to get some more resources from Buyers Persona Institute? Or know if you have a book on how to walk through all these steps. Where's the best I say that facetiously already knowing because we talked about the fact that the book's a good resource. Where should people go next if they want to continue learning about how to create a buyer's persona for their business? And then what would be the next steps for a business owner that wants to explore working with you to help them with this work?

Jim Kraus [00:40:01]:

Yeah.

Jim Kraus [00:40:01]:

So buyer Persona Institute. Our website is buyerpersona.com. So pretty easy to remember. You'll find all kinds of resources there. Many of them are free. Most of them are free. Like, we have templates there. We have different guides that you can use.

Jim Kraus [00:40:16]:

We also have an online master class for a couple hundred bucks for folks that want to get really in the weeds on how to do this. And that's a self paced class that you can sign up for on our website as well. Other place I would say is feel free to link into me, Jim Krause or Buyer Persona Institute. We have a LinkedIn page is also great. We have a newsletter that we put out where we talk about buying insights within and outside of Buyer Personas. And then, as you mentioned, we have a second edition of Buyer Personas, the book that's coming out in the summer that we're pretty excited about, where we're taking the first one that came out probably eight, nine years ago. And we're just putting more detail in there about how to develop buyer personas, how to use buyer personas to get real improvements in your marketing and sales activities. So we're really excited because we're bringing a lot of the knowledge that we've gained, quite honestly, from our clients over the past eight to ten years and trying to get that all in the book so that it provides a lot.

Jim Kraus [00:41:16]:

Of value for folks. Perfect.

Travis Albritton [00:41:18]:

Well, all those things we link down in the Show Notes below so you can go and check those things out. Jim, thank you so much for your time and everything that you shared. I know that I personally benefited from it quite a bit, and I know all of our listeners did as well.

Jim Kraus [00:41:29]:

Great.

Jim Kraus [00:41:29]:

Thanks, Travis. Appreciate it.

Travis Albritton [00:41:31]:

So I would say that my number one takeaway from my conversation with Jim is how important it is to talk to real people when you're doing this research, it's so easy to just say, I'm going to do some searching around on the Internet, I'm going to look at social media, I'm going to read some reviews. But you really get to the meat and the heart of what people are thinking and experiencing when they're trying to decide what to purchase or how to fix their problem when you actually just have a conversation with them. And I love that you don't have to do this hundreds of times. If you get ten recent customers on the phone and can talk to them through why they made the purchase decision that they did, why they went with you or somebody else if they decided not to go with you, and really identifying those trends that you continue to hear, to see, where do I need to focus my marketing? Where do I need to focus my sales? Can I tweak my offer to better resonate with these kinds of people? And you get that by talking to real people. It's very hard to get that level of specificity when you're just kind of doing generic market research because you have a to do on your to do list saying, understand your buyer at a deeper level. Now, if you want to learn more from Jim and the Buyers Persona Institute, definitely go to their website, Buyerspersona.com, which is linked in the Show Notes below. Download their free templates, check out their paid offers. Or if you feel like you're in a position where you really want someone with their expertise to do this research on your behalf and really catapult you forward when it comes to understanding your customers, and the decisions they're making before they buy something like what you offer.

Travis Albritton [00:42:53]:

Definitely consider hopping on the phone with them, hopping on Zoom and chatting about what they could look like. Well, I hope this interview was just jampacked with awesome information for you and that you can walk away with some practical things that you can do to make your business that much better. Thanks for listening, and until next week, be honest.