, an independent digital publication with an international scope, providing insights and resources about strategic branding, published the following article written by .

Buyer personas are often viewed as a fictional profile of the ideal customer created through market and audience research.

But did you know that developing buyer personas using insights from real customers is not just a more powerful and accurate approach, but also one that empowers you with a deeper understanding of your audience?

By exploring the world of buyer personas built from the words of real and recent buyers, you can avoid speculation and gain access to a wealth of real, applicable information that can enhance your brand positioning and strategy.

In this article, you will not only learn what a modern buyer persona is and the five rings of buying insight, but also how to build a buyer persona based on real customer鈥檚 insights. You will also discover how to practically apply this information for your brand positioning strategy.

The post The Branding Journal Features BPI Article on How to Define Accurate 色花堂s for Strategic Branding appeared first on 色花堂 Institute.

, an online publication dedicated to providing marketing professionals with information on marketing strategies, tactics, and techniques for consumer and business-to-business brands, published the following article written by .

How to Elevate B2B 色花堂s Through Strategic Survey Insights

Demystifying 色花堂s

Before we discuss how surveys can enhance buyer personas, it鈥檚 critical to debunk common misconceptions about what they are and what they are not:

色花堂:听A detailed blueprint providing deep insights into specific buying decisions, including purchase triggers, desired outcomes, concerns, key decision criteria and the buyer鈥檚 journey.

Buyer Profile:听Often mistaken for a persona, a buyer profile merely describes characteristics of individuals or roles involved in the buying decision with little to no insight into what actually influences it.

Buyer personas that include insights about the buying decision provide precise guidelines for crafting transformative marketing strategies. In contrast, buyer profiles, which lack this depth, often require you to rely on conjecture to fill significant informational gaps.

From One-On-One Interviews to Strategic Surveys

Marketers who use one-on-one interviews with prospective buyers to develop buyer personas gain deep insights into their potential customers鈥� needs and preferences. These qualitative discussions reveal critical decision-making factors and the entire buying decision journey from the buyer鈥檚 perspective, uncovering detailed motivations that drive purchases.

Incorporating survey research adds breadth and further validation. Surveys engage a broader segment of the target market, enhancing the statistical reliability of the insights and providing a more comprehensive view that supports strategic marketing decisions. This approach ensures a robust understanding of buyer behavior, crucial for crafting effective marketing and sales strategies.

Now let鈥檚 dive into the key ways that surveys can enhance your buyer personas:

Confirming and Validating Insights:

Broadening the research through surveys helps confirm the initial insights are accurate and representative of a larger market. This step increases confidence in the buyer persona鈥檚 validity, which is crucial for creating organizational buy-in and developing effective marketing strategies.

Determining the Relative Importance of Buyer Expectations:

Surveys are particularly effective in recognizing which buyer expectations are most and least crucial. Doing so helps marketers prioritize features or messages that will influence the buying decision the most.

Testing Marketing Messages and Value Propositions:

Surveys provide an excellent platform to test and refine marketing messages before they are rolled out. By presenting various messaging concepts to the target audience, companies can determine which messages resonate best. This testing can be structured to assess messages based on clarity, relevance, uniqueness and persuasiveness.

Understanding Buyer Segments:

Surveys can help uncover significant differences in preferences and priorities across different market segments, such as variances by company size, industry or geographical location. These insights are critical for customizing marketing strategies that are more precisely aligned with the needs of specific buyer groups.

The post Chief Marketer Features BPI Article on Elevating 色花堂s Through Survey Insights appeared first on 色花堂 Institute.

We are often asked about the value of conducting survey research to validate and enhance 色花堂 insights developed from one-on-one interviews with buyers. Based on the hundreds of studies we鈥檝e been involved in, there has never been an instance where survey research invalidated the buyer insights from the initial interviews. However, survey research can increase your confidence in the findings and enhance them in several important ways.

Conduct One-On-One Interviews to Build Your 色花堂

If you鈥檙e a marketer and have taken the time and effort to develop a 色花堂 based on , you鈥檙e in a terrific spot.

These 鈥渜ualitative鈥� interviews give your prospective buyers the time to talk about their entire journey鈥攆rom the moment they have an initial need for a solution that you offer until the time they make a final buying decision.

Fresh from the often-harrowing experience of days, weeks, months, or, perhaps, even years dominated by the search for a solution to their problem, buyers can articulate exactly what triggered them to begin, and with the right prompting, reveal incredible details about what transpired as they cast a wide net for all available options before they ultimately chose one.

By looking for patterns in the data across these interviews, they reveal exactly what your prospective buyers need to know and experience to have confidence buying your solution.

Based on the 5 Rings of Buying Insight^TM, these 色花堂 insights take all the guesswork out of your marketing, enabling you to develop strategies, content, and messaging that connects with buyers, breaks through the clutter, and drives more sales.

Read In-Depth Breakdown of the 5 Rings of Buying Insight^TM for 色花堂s here.

听

Enhance Your 色花堂 with Survey Research

If these one-on-one interviews are the foundation of your 色花堂 house, think of survey research as the framing, drywall, plumbing, and electricity that make the house even more useful. Conducting a survey with a larger number of buyers will validate, refine, and extend your 色花堂 insights so you can make even better decisions about how to influence them.

Here’s four ways that survey research will enhance your 色花堂 insights:

1. Confirm the Accuracy and Validity of Your 色花堂

Surveying a larger number of buyers increases the statistical validity that the buyer expectations you identified from your initial interviews are accurate and representative of the markets you鈥檙e targeting. For some organizations, that increased level of comfort is worth the extra time and resources needed to complete this additional step, particularly when your 色花堂 is the foundation of your marketing strategies and messaging.

There are various ways to achieve this in a survey but asking buyers a mix of open-ended questions (free-form responses) and closed-ended questions (e.g., ratings, rankings, select from a list of choices, etc.) does the job well. You can do this for each of the 5 Rings of Buying Insight^TM or pick-and-choose if there are certain insights you鈥檙e more focused on than others.

For example, let鈥檚 say a healthcare MRI machine manufacturer interviews recent buyers of MRI machines and develops a 色花堂 for this buying decision. Here are two questions they can ask in a survey to confirm each Success Factor identified from the initial interviews.

Q1. 听听 In the space below, please indicate all the important outcomes or benefits you are expecting from this MRI machine purchase.

_______________________________

Q.2听听听 On a 10-point scale, where 鈥�1鈥� is 鈥渘ot at all important鈥� and 鈥�10鈥� is 鈥渧ery important鈥�, to what extent is each of the following an important outcome that you need from a new MRI machine? (Rate Each)

1. Improve image quality
2. Better retain existing patients
3. More easily acquire new patients
4. Improve staff productivity through faster scans
5. Improve patient comfort through a quieter and roomier machine
6. Expand our operations by performing additional procedures
7. Reduce expenses

Q1 is an open-ended question where buyers have the opportunity to speak (if a phone survey) or type in (if an online survey) their response. It eliminates the risk that buyers will be influenced by any of the Success Factors listed in Q2.

Q2 is a close-ended question where buyers rate each of the seven Success Factors on a 10-point scale. By asking Q2, you鈥檒l also get direct input on each of the seven Success Factors. Since these were identified from the one-on-interviews, there is a strong likelihood that all or most will be regarded as important to buyers, but this is the opportunity to validate that assumption.

Click here for buyer personas examples.

2. Determine Which Buyer Expectations are the Most Important

Not all buyer expectations are created equal鈥攖here are assuredly some that are more important than others. Through survey research, you have an opportunity to identify which buyer expectations are the most (and least important) in their buying decision. This is often referred to as 鈥渞elative importance鈥� since the importance of something is considered relative to something else.

For example, let鈥檚 say eleven Decision Criteria are identified in the MRI machine 色花堂. The MRI machine manufacturer should develop strategies to address each of these questions since buyers use them to evaluate the options, and each is likely to come up at some point in their buying journey. However, it鈥檚 also reasonable for them to ask which of the eleven Decision Criteria are the most important to buyers to prioritize their marketing activities, messages, and resources.

Here are four different ways to determine the relative importance of the eleven Decision Criteria:

• Select Top One or Two: Have buyers select the top one or two Decision Criteria that are the most important in their buying decision out of the eleven. It鈥檚 also useful to ask buyers which one or two are the least important and report on those results as well.
• Rankings: Have buyers rank the eleven MRI machine Decision Criteria from one (most important) to eleven (least important).
• Chip Allocation: Have buyers allocate 100 鈥渃hips鈥� (or points) across the eleven Decision Criteria. The more chips a buyer allocates to a Decision Criteria, the more important it is. You can allocate as many or as few chips as you want to each of the eleven Decision Criteria.
• Choice-Based Exercise (such as Maximum Difference Scaling): Have buyers go through a series of questions, like the one below, where they indicate which Decision Criteria is the MOST important in their buying decision and which is the LEAST important. Using this approach, buyers answer a series of questions where four of the eleven Decision Criteria randomly appear on the screen (in the case of an online survey). The survey will continue to ask and collect which is the MOST and LEAST important. You can typically gather all the survey data you need by having buyers answer four to six questions just like this (one after another) where the four options vary randomly from question to question.

Example of a Choice-Based Survey Question

The Chip Allocation and Choice-Based approach, require a bit more analytical sophistication to use, but have the advantage of revealing the importance of buyer expectations both hierarchically and by order of magnitude (how much more important one Decision Criteria is versus another).

3. Test Value Proposition and Market Messaging Concepts

One of the first things that organizations do after developing a 色花堂 is refresh their market messaging or develop entirely new messaging altogether. Once you develop the messages, survey research provides a great opportunity to test them with prospective buyers before you start using them in the market. By doing so, you will identify which messages influence buyers the most and gain additional insights to fine tune them for success.

Let鈥檚 stick with the MRI machine example. Based on the 色花堂, an MRI machine manufacturer might develop the following four message concepts focused on reducing scan times:

1. In an independent study, our MRI machine produced images that are at least two times faster than any other machine on the market
2. By reducing scan times, you will improve patient satisfaction and increase the number of appointments you can handle on a daily basis
3. Our 3.0 Tesla magnet, intuitive user interface, and efficient workflows enables you to get patients in-and-out of appointments more quickly
4. Faster imaging sequences will improve the productivity of your clinicians and image technicians

Here are four different ways to test these messages in a survey:

• Ratings: Have buyers rate each message on a 10-point scale for things such as:
  • Clarity鈥攈ow clear and well understood the message is
  • Relevance鈥攈ow well the message aligns with buyer needs
  • Differentiation鈥攈ow different or unique the message is
  • Compelling鈥攖o what extent the message sparks a buyer鈥檚 interest in your solution

• Select the Top Message: From a set of messages, have buyers select the one that is the most important (or influential) in their buying decision.
• Ranking: From a set of messages, have buyers rank each of them from most to least important in their buying decision.
• Choice-Based Exercise: Described earlier, this approach is perfectly suited to test message concepts because buyers select which is the MOST important and the LEAST important in their buying decision.

Learn more about using survey research to enhance your 色花堂s here.

4. Identify and Understand Buyer Segments

When it comes to high consideration buying decisions, it鈥檚 important to understand buyer expectations across the entire buying committee. This is the core of your 色花堂 and what the 5 Rings of Buying Insight reveal.

However, there are times when important differences in buyer expectations may exist across different 鈥渟egments鈥� of the market鈥攕uch as by company size, industry, geography or a buyer鈥檚 role.

For example, if an MRI machine manufacturer targets both large hospitals and smaller independent imaging practices, it鈥檚 conceivable that some of the needs, expectations, and aspects of the buying journey could vary across these two cohorts. If they suspect that this is the case, it’s appropriate to do a deeper exploration of each of these segments in a survey. Doing so will confirm or refute their suspicions and provide the buying insights needed to tailor their marketing approach if they decide to do so.

As with most things related to survey research, there are different approaches to achieving a particular objective鈥攊n this case, identifying any meaningful differences in buyer expectations across different segments of the market. Fortunately, the approach we recommend is straightforward and can be achieved in three steps:

• First, complete enough survey interviews in each segment so a reliable evaluation can be made between them. If you鈥檙e working with your in-house market research team or a third-party research firm, they can help you determine how many survey completes are enough, but the important thing is to design the study so you have a sufficient number in each segment to analyze the results within them.
• Second, complete a thorough side-by-side comparison of results between the segments in your study. This should be done across buyer expectations for each of the 5 Rings of Buying Insight.
• Third, based on this comparison, and your own capabilities, decide whether or not it鈥檚 worthwhile to tailor your marketing and sales approach within certain market segments.
  • If there are meaningful differences between the segments that your company has unique capabilities to address, take a more tailored marketing approach to each segment accordingly.
  • If there are no significant differences between segments, or your company doesn鈥檛 have unique capabilities to address any of the identified variances, then take one, consistent approach to both segments.

Conclusion

Surveys are one of the most popular forms of market research and a great way to validate and enhance 色花堂 insights. None of the four areas above are a must; you have the flexibility to focus a survey on whatever buying insights you think would be the most worthwhile. However, in our experience, these are the areas that provide the most useful learnings because they bolster stakeholder confidence in your 色花堂 and provide additional buying insights that enable you to market and sell to buyers even more effectively.

Need Help Building Your 色花堂s? Let鈥檚 Talk!

The post 4 Ways Survey Research Will Enhance Your 色花堂s appeared first on 色花堂 Institute.

The Marketer鈥檚 Challenge

In the simplest of terms, marketing鈥檚 role is to increase awareness, consideration, and preference for an organization鈥檚 solutions among a market of prospective buyers. The end goal of course, is to enable sales and win more business.

While the objective is clear, challenges abound for marketers trying to develop a real connection with prospective buyers, particularly for high consideration products and services where:

• The buyer has to live with the decision for a period of time and switching costs are high
• It is often a purchase decision the buyer has never made before or does infrequently
• Buyers weigh multiple options and often struggle to make apples-to-apples comparisons
• There is concern, if not fear, about making the wrong decision
• There are several 鈥渕oments of truth鈥� in the decision including who buyers consider initially

There is a lot at stake for these buyers. Insight into these concerns is the starting point for marketers of high consideration solutions. And, unlike sales professionals, marketers don鈥檛 have the face-to-face interactions that help them to understand a prospective buyer鈥檚 attitudes, needs, and concerns at a deep enough level to develop effective marketing strategies and content. The result is often buyer hypotheses based on a combination of sales anecdotes and secondary research rather than any real insight from actual buyers of your solutions.

Flip the Marketing Challenge into an Opportunity Using 色花堂s

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

What is a buyer persona? Built from interviews with recent buyers, a buyer persona tells you what prospective customers are thinking and doing as they weigh their options to address a problem that your company resolves. Much more than a one-dimensional profile of the PEOPLE you need to influence, actionable buyer personas reveal insights about your BUYERS鈥� DECISIONS — the Priority Initiatives (triggers), Success Factors (desired outcomes), Purchase Barriers, Decision Criteria and Buyers Journey that drive prospective customers to choose you, your competitor, or the status quo.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

If you are ready to commit to an informed and targeted approach to marketing, there is a pragmatic path forward enabled by buyer insights:

First, demonstrate early on that you REALLY understand prospective buyers in the context of the purchase decision they are making, including what the buyer needs to get out of their investment and concerns that they have. At the moment when buyers decide to look at their options, a precious opportunity awaits you. But only if you can deliver content that resonates so deeply with the buyer that they have the confidence to put your brand on their list of potential providers.

Unscripted interviews with people who have recently evaluated a solution like yours will tell you which pains cause your buyers to seek change 鈥� to stop everything and pay attention now. Within a buyer persona, we call these Priority Initiatives (or triggers) and understanding these is the first step towards developing the right content and approach to reach buyers as they begin their journey.

Second, reframe the prospective buyer鈥檚 situation in a new way that helps them see that their problems are not only solvable but will lead to a better place once remedied. This provides the buyer with tangible evidence that something better IS out there and that you, as the 鈥渢rusted advisor鈥�, can help them get there.

Within a buyer persona, Success Factors are the inverse of the pain points your buyers feel, explaining what they want to achieve once they purchase a solution like yours. Leveraging Priority Initiatives (triggers) and Success Factors (desired benefits), develop thought leadership that communicates with buyers with such amazing clarity that buyers say, 鈥淚 hadn鈥檛 seen my situation that way, but now that I do, I realize that there is a clear path to success and must make this a priority.鈥�

Through verbatim quotes from buyers, you will also know how to describe the Success Factors that matter to your buyers. Instead of copying your competitor鈥檚 message that the solution is 鈥渓ightweight and easy to use,鈥� you will know how buyers evaluate this attribute and why it is important. Your buyer interviews will tell you everything you need to know about how to make your benefits so specific that they educate and resonate with your buyers.

Third, credibly address ALL the purchase barriers and decision criteria that prospective buyers have. Within your buyer persona, Purchase Barriers are those things that prevent a prospective buyer from choosing your solution or deciding not to invest in anything at all. Decision Criteria are the key questions that buyers need satisfactory answers to if they are going to choose you. Proactively and convincingly addressing these components of the decision process is a crucial step in earning a buyer鈥檚 trust and their business.

Leveraging your buyer persona, use Purchase Barriers and Decision Criteria to focus messaging on your solution鈥檚 capabilities that best address a prospective buyer鈥檚 top concerns and questions. By doing so, you will begin to separate yourself from other providers who rely on scatter shot, featured-based messaging that is unfocused and undifferentiated.

Finally, connect with buyers at all phases in their purchase journey. Develop strategies, content and experiences that provide prospective buyers with everything they need at all the pivotal moments in their journey. This will ensure you continuously make the cut as buyers ween down their options.

Within your buyer persona, Buyer鈥檚 Journey insights, if developed from interviews with recent buyers, will reveal all the purchase steps taken, decision influencers involved, and resources used and trusted that will directly inform your strategy.听

鈥淲ork smarter, not harder鈥� – Allen F. Morgenstern

As marketing professionals, we need to listen to Mr. Morgenstern鈥檚 advice. Rather than continuously turning out new marketing campaigns, reams of content for every conceivable occasion, and feature-heavy messaging, let鈥檚 all take a collective breath and focus on what鈥檚 truly important to the buyer.听 Everything else is white noise that will quickly fade into the abyss.

The first step is putting yourself in your buyer鈥檚 shoes. The only way to do that is to talk to them, listen, probe for clarity, and listen some more. Only then will you understand 鈥渢heir story鈥�, as it happened, including all the steps they took in their purchase journey and why they made the decisions they did along the way. With these insights, you will be able to confidently focus your attention on marketing activities and content that has a real chance to improve sales performance. Deprioritize or even eliminate the rest.

If you want to know how to conduct interviews with your buyers, attend our online听色花堂 Masterclass or听contact us, we would be happy to interview buyers and reveal everything you need to know about their buying decisions.

The post Turn a Marketing Challenge Into an Opportunity With In-Depth Buyer Insights appeared first on 色花堂 Institute.

Built from the real words of real buyers, a buyer persona tells you what prospective customers are thinking and doing as they weigh their options to address a problem that your company resolves. Much more than a one-dimensional profile of the PEOPLE you need to influence, actionable buyer personas reveal insights about your BUYERS鈥� DECISIONS — the specific attitudes, concerns, criteria and purchase journey that drive prospective customers to choose you, your competitor or the status quo.

Simply profiling people that influence the buying decision results in too many personas and not nearly enough marketing guidance.听 By comparison, a buyer persona focused on the purchase decision provides insights into what your buyers need to know and experience before they will buy from you.听 Our clients often tell us that personas developed from the authentic voice of real-life buyers is like a 鈥渃heat sheet鈥� that informs every marketing and sales decision they make, from positioning and messaging through content marketing and sales enablement.

The logic and ROI behind this are simple 鈥� when you know how to help buyers evaluate your solution on their own terms, you build a bond of trust that competitors can鈥檛 match.

色花堂s Are Ideally Suited for Medium-To-Complex Purchase Decisions

Think about a time when you were involved in a medium-to-complex purchase decision whether in your personal or professional life.听 Not something inconsequential or that takes moments to decide (like buying a pack of gum) 鈥� I mean a purchase decision that takes days, months, or even years to evaluate and likely includes multiple decision influencers.

Examples of personal decisions that meet these criteria might include buying a home or deciding on a college for your child to attend.听 Business examples could include purchasing a new technology solution, selecting insurance benefits to offer employees, or choosing a consulting firm to advise you on an important issue your company is wrestling with.

Solutions that involve medium-to-complex purchase decisions share certain characteristics that have important implications for those developing marketing and sales strategies:

• There鈥檚 a lot at stake 鈥� the decision has important ramifications for the customer
• It鈥檚 often a purchase decision the buyer has never made before or does so infrequently
• The customer is probably going to have to live with the decision for a meaningful period of time (or incur high switching costs)
• Fear is a driving force in the customer鈥檚 decision 鈥� i.e., the fear of making the wrong decision is often as powerful as the enthusiasm of making the right one
• The customer will be weighing multiple options 鈥� and is likely struggling to make apples-to-apples comparisons across these alternatives (as we鈥檝e learned from conducting thousands of buyer interviews)
• There are several 鈥渕oments of truth鈥� in the purchase decision 鈥� at multiple points during the sales process a solution or provider can be dismissed as an option simply because they are not meeting the prospective customer on their own terms

5 Rings of Buying Insight^TM for 色花堂s

In this context, it鈥檚 easy to understand why medium-to-complex purchase decisions require more from marketing and sales than simply articulating the key features and benefits of your particular solution (everyone does that) or trying to connect with a certain buyer role through demographic, psychographic, or firmographic profiles (with no authentic connection to the specific solution they鈥檙e considering).听 There is simply too much at stake in the customer鈥檚 decision for these surface tactics to influence their behavior.

If you doubt this, think back to a time when you were involved in a medium-to-complex purchase decision.听 I鈥檓 willing to bet the provider you chose did better than other alternatives you considered on several fronts:

1. They fostered a genuine appreciation for your situation 鈥� in particular, what caused you to allocate time, budget, and resources to resolve a particular situation now (this is Priority Initiatives, the 1^st Ring of Buying Insight used to develop a buyer persona)
2. They understood how you defined 鈥渟uccess鈥� in very specific terms and were able to credibly demonstrate or convince you that their solution would enable you to achieve them (this is Success Factors, the 2^ndRing of Buying Insight)
3. They alleviated fears or concerns you had about the purchase, whether personal or professional (this is Perceived Barriers, the 3^rd Ring of Buying Insight)
4. They sufficiently addressed all of the factors most important to you in your purchase decision (this is Decision Criteria, the 4^th Ring of Buying Insight)
5. They knew how to best reach and communicate with you and other key decision influencers (this is Buyers Journey, the 5^th Ring of Buying Insight)

When it All Works

A buyer persona, developed from the 5 Rings of Buying Insight^TM and sourced from interviews with real-life buyers of your solution improves the ROI of all your marketing and sales activities including thought leadership, demand generation, lead nurturing, and sales plays.听 It provides the insights that guide every one of these decisions creating authentic connection with the buyers you need to influence.

If you want to know how to conduct interviews with your buyers, attend our online听色花堂 Masterclass or听contact us, we would be happy to interview buyers and reveal everything you need to know about their buying decisions.

The post The Critical Differences Between a Buyer Profile and a 色花堂 appeared first on 色花堂 Institute.

Last week, KS&R was able to officially announce its partnership with 色花堂 Institute (BPI) and my new role as BPI鈥檚 President 鈥� Press Release. I won鈥檛 sugar coat this, I鈥檓 thrilled! Here鈥檚 why鈥�.

I鈥檝e known Adele Revella, the Founder of BPI and author of the definitive book on buyer personas, for many years and have followed her career closely. Like minds as they say, but we have always shared the same fundamental beliefs that made this partnership virtually a no-brainer. Beliefs such as:

• Asking the right questions of recent buyers and REALLY listening to them will significantly improve marketing and sales ROI
• If one of the end goals of marketing is to develop a deeper connection with prospects (and it should be!), then buyer insights HAVE to inform your strategies to do so
• Buyer insights should also SIMPLIFY your marketing and sales strategies by enabling you to focus on what really matters to prospects 鈥� i.e., complexity 鈮� better
• Semi-fictional representation of a potential customer or market segment is not enough 鈥搃nsights about the actual BUYING DECISION moves the needle

From a methodology perspective, this last point might be the most important because it ensures your buyer persona tells you exactly what prospective customers need to know and experience before they will buy from you. It鈥檚 a critical distinction in how BPI approaches buyer personas and the single most important reason I 鈥渟igned up for this gig鈥� and am confident we will continue to provide significant value to our clients going forward.

On a personal note, I鈥檝e led high-performing market research teams on the client and supplier side for three decades now. In that time, I鈥檝e been involved in hundreds of research studies across what seems like every conceivable topic important to a strategy, marketing, sales or product professional. At this point in my career, three things matter most to me:

1) Working with a talented, client-focused team
2) Having a direct and positive impact on our clients鈥� business
3) Leveraging my own expertise and experience to enhance the value we provide clients

Consequently, BPI is the perfect 鈥渘ext chapter鈥� for me. The BPI team is A++ in every way; BPI鈥檚 core methodology is acutely focused on improving marketing and sales performance; and there are opportunities to enhance what we currently offer to provide even more value to clients (more on that in future communications).

Full speed ahead indeed!

The post Full Speed Ahead鈥�. appeared first on 色花堂 Institute.

When I joined an ecommerce company as CMO in early 2000, everyone was trying to cash in on the Internet explosion. Pre-revenue start-ups were enjoying ridiculous valuations, and this company was a step ahead of all of them, leveraging a decade of experience building similar solutions for mainframe computers.

Those first few months were every marketer鈥檚 dream. A constant stream of tradeshows attracted buyers who had prioritized investments like ours. We had a unique message and made sure it was memorable, distributing little purple cow tchotchkes to everyone who saw our demo. Sure, a few competitors could enable B2B ecommerce, but our prospects would have a way to remember that we 鈥渕oooved cows鈥� (or any complex product) at Internet speeds.

We were exceeding every goal, generating so many qualified leads that our salespeople struggled to keep up.

The perils of ignoring product-market fit

Yet by the end of that year, our company was out of business. And unlike a lot of Internet companies that crashed during the 鈥渄ot com鈥� bubble, our failure had nothing to do with overspending.

We failed because our solution couldn鈥檛 deliver the benefits we had promoted. Our first customer installations revealed the severity of the issue – the database we relied upon for our mainframe solutions couldn鈥檛 respond at the speeds required by ecommerce customers. Our fate was sealed when one account sued us, taking ownership of our intellectual property in a last-ditch attempt to save their jobs.

You could argue that our untimely end was a product problem, and that our marketing team did a great job. In fact, we had earned so much attention that our demise was big news. On one social media platform, people were turning our purple cow tchotchkes upside down, standing them on their heads in recognition of our inability to move anything at all.

Marketing needs to understand the entire buying journey

Fortunately, very few marketers have led marketing efforts that end this badly.

Yet marketers often build demand with buyers who are a bad match for their company鈥檚 solutions. The consequences are devastating, first for the salespeople who must engage in prolonged battles for opportunities that will probably never close.

Worse yet are the customers who choose you to deliver a solution that doesn鈥檛 meet their needs. While you may avoid a deadly lawsuit, their problems will consume your company鈥檚 resources, and you can be sure that every one of their peers will know about the debacle.

Two of our recent buying decision studies revealed this issue. When we interviewed buyers about the early stages of their journeys, buyers described the benefits our clients are promoting. Their companies are perceived as market leaders in their respective domains, and the marketing teams are generating a high volume of leads with the right job titles in market segments they hope to win.

The bad news only emerges when we study the later stages of buyer鈥檚 journey, at the critical point when prospective customers investigate the functionality delivered by different providers. Buyers who didn鈥檛 like the answers about features or capabilities chose the status quo or a competitor.

Prove your benefits with features that matter to buyers

An adage dating back to the 1960鈥檚 tells marketers that 鈥渃ustomers buy holes, not drills.鈥� Sixty years later, most marketers still believe that buyers want to hear benefits, not features.

Times have changed, and today鈥檚 educated buyers don鈥檛 believe our marketing promises. They are not impressed when we assure them that our drills create the best holes.

Buyers also don鈥檛 believe us when we say that our solutions will increase customer satisfaction, decrease costs, or grow their business.

Buyers want to hear about benefits, but that鈥檚 just the starting point for detailed questions that clarify our ability to deliver that benefit.听 Our carefully crafted headlines about ease of use might get the buyer鈥檚 attention, but only when we are ready to explain what we can do to make this easy for someone like them.

Here鈥檚 a verbatim quote from a buyer we recently interviewed:

鈥淲e want a provider who can say, 鈥榃e know that each customer or each node in the network might have a different kind of interface. As long as you can provide a data file that is updated at some interval, we’ll be able to translate that file into something that can be read into our cloud database and relay it back to you.鈥� It鈥檚听the provider proving that they are able to get the IT infrastructure working and reliable, and that they will manage that on the cloud side versus us managing it on the local database. That’s what really gives me the comfort that we want to move forward with them.鈥�

Qualified buyers ask the questions that align with your answers

Today鈥檚 educated buyers want to understand the unique features of your drill before they will trust that it is the best way to create the holes they envision.

This means that your company must 鈥�

• Understand the buyer鈥檚 questions and be prepared to deliver a concise, consistent, and satisfying answer
• Segment the market with insight into the capabilities their buyers expect, targeting those buyers who will see a close fit for their needs
• Be skilled at identifying opportunities that they should not pursue

To achieve these goals, it鈥檚 not enough for drill manufacturers to profile the professional carpenter vs the homeowner buyer persona, you need to know how well your product fits the needs of these buyers.

If buyers have different questions or evaluate different capabilities, that alone requires you to identify and clarify separate personas. Sales and marketing needs to know that the professional carpenter has different questions about drills than the homeowner, for example. This will actually result in fewer buyer personas that will be 100% actionable, because they are purpose-built to show your teams how to be useful to those prospective customers.

Gain insight into your product-market fit

It鈥檚 been close to two decades since I led that ecommerce company鈥檚 marketing team, but I can still recall our customer鈥檚 quavering voice when he told us he had been fired, and that it was entirely our fault. I was horrified and vowed to do everything I could to change the thinking about what it means to know your buyer.

The easiest place to start is by spending quality time with your product manager –they鈥檒l be happy to give you a primer on what your solution can and cannot do. Then commit to understanding your buyer鈥檚 questions, at every step in their journey, before you define your buyer personas or marketing strategy.

If you want to know how to conduct interviews with your buyers, read my 色花堂s book or attend our online 色花堂 Masterclass. Or contact us, we would be happy to interview buyers and reveal everything you need to know about their buying decisions.

The post Customers Buy Drills, Not Holes – How to prove your benefits with a focus on features appeared first on 色花堂 Institute.

We are shocked to hear anyone say that buyer personas are fictional. Why would anyone rely on fiction for important decisions?

And although simple approaches are always appealing, please be clear that there is no ROI when you download buyer persona templates from the Internet听and fill in the blanks. Templates only organize your existing perceptions, or even more dangerously, your company鈥檚 assumptions and wishful thinking.

The ROI on buyer personas is impressive and measurable 鈥� when they convey the whole truth about what your prospective customers need to know and experience before they make a buying decision, and when you commit to giving your buyer personas what they want.

Understand your customers鈥� needs throughout their buying journey
Motivated by the goal to build empathy for their customers, companies can spend significant sums on buyer profiles that depict their persona鈥檚 personality, professional goals, business problems, or 鈥渁 day in the life鈥� of a person in that role.

This 鈥減eople profile鈥� approach to buyer personas usually works well when the customer鈥檚 buying journey is short and uncomplicated.

But for B2B companies or complex B2C decisions, people profiles should be the cover sheet for a buyer persona describing your buyer鈥檚 questions, concerns and decision criteria when they are evaluating the purchase you want them to prioritize. These buyers probably haven鈥檛 purchased anything like yours for years and a lot has changed. Already coping with a full plate of responsibilities, this buyer is confronted with an evaluation that will require a significant effort over weeks, months, or even years. Most critically, this persona knows that their choice of providers will have long-term consequences for them, their teams and their company.

A recent study by Salesforce underlines the ROI of knowing your buyer鈥檚 decision mindset, with 81% of B2B buyers choosing the company that provides the best buying experience, 45% stating that most companies don鈥檛 meet their needs during their evaluation, and 50% who stopped buying from a current provider because a competitor provided a better buying experience.

When your teams understand your customer鈥檚 needs at every step in their buying journey, you can be the provider who makes it easy for buyers to choose you.

Buyers reveal what they want at each step in their journey
Your customer knowledge probably originates with your executives and salespeople, plus interactions with your most referenceable customers.

If this is you, please notice that you are working in an echo chamber. Your best customers achieved that status because they perceive a close match between your story and their needs. These personas will do nothing to inform your actions to win a market full of prospects.

Data acquired from your salespeople is even more concerning. First, your reps are exposed to only a small part of your customer鈥檚 overall journey. Worse yet, prospects over emphasize cost with your salespeople to help them negotiate the best possible price. The simple truth is that B2B buyers almost never choose the lowest cost solution and that your reps鈥� knowledge is biased by their goal to close the deal.

To achieve an ROI on your buyer persona initiative, you need to invest in one-on-one interviews with people who have recently considered the product, service or solution you want them to prioritize.听 This isn鈥檛 traditional research involving surveys or focus groups. A skilled interviewer needs to think like a journalist, working without a script and walking each buyer very slowly through every step in their actual journey. The most critical skill is asking follow-up questions to probe on every response, which is where you鈥檒l gain deep insights into the buyer鈥檚 motivations, objections and decision criteria.

If you are entering a new market or have an entirely new solution, you will need interviews with people who have recently spent money to solve the same problem. Insight into those customer鈥檚 decisions will clarify the attitudes and processes you will need to interrupt so you can be heard.

No more fiction! Mine the buyer鈥檚 true stories for patterns
色花堂s must be built from real buyer interviews to ensure their authenticity and objectivity. Ideal customer profiles can be too one-sided, personas must aggregate the true experiences related by people who compared all of their options and chose you, your competitors, or the status quo.

To build an authentic buyer persona that easily conveys the emotional and practical aspects of your persona鈥檚 buying decision, the interview transcripts need to be mined for verbatim quotes and analyzed for patterns in each of the following categories:

Priority Initiative: What triggers your persona’s decision to make this type of investment their top priority?

Success Factors: How does your persona describe the results they need to achieve by making this investment?

Perceived Barriers: What prevents buyers from moving forward with this purchase and why they might prefer another provider

Decision Criteria: Questions your personas ask about each provider’s company and solution as they compare their options

Buyer鈥檚 Journey: Which personas and resources factor into the buyer’s choices at each step in their journey

When companies are confused about how many buyer personas they need, it鈥檚 because they are thinking about 鈥減eople profiles鈥� with attributes such as job title, company size, industry/vertical market or geography. Teams struggle to take action on so many people profiles and may even produce a negative ROI, investing in activities that do nothing to improve the customer鈥檚 buying experience.

Any confusion around the number of buyer personas disappears when they are defined by their buying experiences. An analysis of the buyer interviews makes it easy to see if certain types of buyers need specialized information before they can commit to this type of purchase.听 Patterns will emerge in the form of distinct persona questions, barriers or priorities.

You will want more than one buyer persona only when they clarify the need for your team to invest in unique efforts to engage those audiences.

Buyer personas are an agent of change
To see a measurable ROI on buyer personas, it鈥檚 not enough to build great insights and publish your results. Your teams must have the confidence to change the way they engage with those buyers.

You have solved the first barrier to ensuring confidence in your personas when you avoid fiction and invest in real buyer interviews. Now you can credibly state that these personas reflect the attitudes and journeys of real buyers who have recently considered buying a solution like yours. These are the people you wanted to have in your pipeline and would have wanted as customers.

Specificity is the next barrier to your team鈥檚 confidence in making changes. Fortunately, you aren鈥檛 asking anyone to empathize with the buyer鈥檚 persona and imagine how they might adjust their actions. The patterns across all five categories of buying insights will explain where your approach to buyer engagement deserves continued investment and more critically, what you need to do and say to fill the gaps in the customer鈥檚 buying experience.

The final hurdle for activating your buyer personas is your team鈥檚 motivation to change. Before this pandemic and economic crisis, we encouraged marketers to implement personas when their company wasn鈥檛 satisfied that their current approach would achieve a specific goal. Some were focused on an upcoming launch, a shift in the type of buyers who were making decisions, or market segments where the company was experiencing significant competitive threats.

It鈥檚 likely that many of your stakeholders now lack confidence that most of your business-as-usual strategies will work. Thus, this may be your ideal moment to implement a buyer persona initiative, just don鈥檛 forget to consider your team鈥檚 willingness to engage in next steps once the personas are complete. You will need to ensure that someone among your internal stakeholders is ready to make the changes that will improve your customer鈥檚 buying experience.

What needs to change when you activate personas for high ROI
It鈥檚 rare to find a time when your company will be prepared to make widespread changes across sales, marketing and product efforts. So we generally recommend that persona activation begin with small steps to prove the results that can be achieved, and then you can use that success to extend the momentum to benefit as many parts of the customer鈥檚 buying experience as possible.

Briefly, here are a few places where you can quickly prove a measurable return on your investment in buyer personas.

Messaging: The fastest route to ROI on buyer personas is often achieved by adjusting your marketing messages and sales enablement tools. For example, you will likely learn that your prospective customer鈥檚 goals are a good match for your existing benefits messaging. But few companies have developed the messages and tools to explain how and why they are best qualified to deliver those benefits.

Sales enablement: Across 81% of our studies, buyers say that they eliminate providers from consideration when their salespeople don鈥檛 understand their needs or answer their questions. Through the verbatim quotes and decision criteria insights in your buyer persona, you will hear the questions your buyers are asking and even the answers they are seeking. This is an opportunity to upgrade your sales playbooks and content to prepare for your salespeople to be helpful to buyers.听 Your salespeople will also quickly identify the buyers who will never choose you, so they can stop wasting time on deals they can鈥檛 win.

Digital channels: You may see that you have the right content but it is too hard for buyers to find 鈥� it is either buried on your website, or maybe your buyers rarely visit your website. If another channel is a preferred resource for your buyers, you can adjust accordingly.

Events: Reviewing your plans for an upcoming virtual event, you will want to see if your speakers are prepared to address the most critical issues your research has uncovered, and if the invitations to the event are optimized by focusing on your buyer鈥檚 most urgent needs.

Product Roadmap: You may be surprised to learn that product teams can also be a source of ROI on buyer personas, revealing the subset of capabilities that are crucial to the customer鈥檚 choice of providers. Even the best customer experience teams can miss these details, especially when the capability is extremely valuable for the economic buyer but relatively less important to users.

The more you invest in buyer personas, the greater the ROI
The ROI on buyer personas begins when your teams can 鈥渨alk in the persona鈥檚 shoes鈥� during their crucial journey to evaluate the investment you want them to prioritize. Then your teams must make it easy for those personas to find the knowledge and experiences that earn their trust, and their business.

When you make this investment, you will improve metrics across every part of marketing, including demand generation, lead nurturing and conversion rates. Sales teams will see faster close times and improve their ability to forecast sales results. Product teams will understand how their roadmap affects buying decisions.

We鈥檝e emphasized these aspects of ROI because they are measurable and will help you to justify the investments we鈥檝e discussed.

We would be remiss to end this discussion, however, without also acknowledging the cultural impact when you use authentic buyer personas to bring diverse stakeholders together for a unique conversation. Many clients tell us that they cannot recall another time when product, sales and marketing leadership have met to objectively review the intersection between the prospective customer鈥檚 needs and their own strategies. For the first time, everyone can see how their diverse efforts must work together to impress future customers, and which changes will measurably impact their company鈥檚 growth.

To speak to a buyer persona expert or download our free resources, visit us at .

The post For Breakthrough Results, Demand Authentic B2B 色花堂s appeared first on 色花堂 Institute.

The close of 2019 and dawning of 2020 marks several important events, in addition of course to the holidays. Tis the season to be insightful, as the business world launches its annual rite of strategic marketing planning. Deck the boardrooms with white boards and sticky notes! Gotta get that new marketing plan in place and blasted out to the team to start the New Year with a bang.

And everyone will rally behind this brilliantly conceived plan, leveraging its insights and directives as catalysts for driving sales and profits to new heights. Right?

Wrong. According to Wyatt Wells, professor at Auburn University and author of the forthcoming book, 鈥淧ermanent Revolution: Reflections on Capitalism,鈥� strategic planning as it is practiced in most US businesses is a fraud, basically a PR endeavor telling staff what they already know. That is why most of your staff will embrace the document that is the product of months of work, smile, and chuck it into the trash when they return to their offices. In a in the Wall Street Journal, Wyatt maintains that companies use these plans to 鈥榚nhance consumers鈥� experience鈥� – as though believing that competitors want to aggravate customers and staff!

Doomed to fail
Here鈥檚 the dirty little secret about these ambitious strategic marketing plans. Even the planners holed up for weeks and months creating them detest the process, probably because they foresee their eventual fate in circular files everywhere. By and large they鈥檙e doomed from the outset for one simple reason: Either they start and end with solely company-focused goals (鈥渓et鈥檚 boost market share 25%鈥�). Or the customer and the customer experience are secondary, if addressed at all.

This approach is lethal, in the negative sense. Consider this data harvested by of 8,000 buyers in 16 countries. Think your buyers are interested primarily in the capabilities of your products and services? Think again, because a whopping 84% of buyers polled said their buying experience outweighs the importance of capabilities, speeds and feeds, even price. And most buyers – 51% – told Salesforce that vendors don鈥檛 understand their needs and expectations.

What are buyers really saying?
These findings closely mirror direct quotes we get from thousands of buyer interviews with C-suite executives, no doubt frustrated by sales and marketing efforts driven by misguided strategic plans. 鈥淚 hate when vendors don鈥檛 take us seriously. They just put together a cut and paste of what they think is right. That鈥檚 not a good thing. If you鈥檙e just throwing crap on the wall, we can see through it and we鈥檙e not going to take you seriously.鈥�

Buyers are smart enough to know that many of these grandiose plans vendors hatch really have the process bass-ackwards. Consider this observation from another of our C-suite interviews. 鈥淭hey weren鈥檛 interested in fitting their solutions to our needs. They wanted us to accommodate them, and we wanted to be accommodated if we鈥檙e the ones spending large sums of money.鈥�

I didn鈥檛 have to search too long or hard to find these quotes from the in depth interviews we conduct. Vendors clearly out of touch with buyers鈥� most pressing needs chronically frustrate buyers who are anxious to avoid making the wrong buying decision.

Here鈥檚 the format for a successful marketing plan — Start with buyer interviews to understand what buyers want. Then prioritize sales and marketing efforts that make it easier for buyers to learn how you address each of their questions and concerns.

Sounds easy, right? It could be, if you first employed the proper listening techniques to know from the outset whether there is a suitable match between a buyer鈥檚 needs and your company鈥檚 capabilities.

Dare to think differently
Start by thinking out of that accursed box known as the strategic marketing plan, and instead into developing a 2.0 buyer persona for the people who are evaluating solutions like yours. That鈥檚 what I told a packed room at the Dreamforce 2019 conference in November. If you design your sales and marketing plans with insights into what buyers want to know and experience during their engagement with you, your plan is defensible. The next time someone has a 鈥渂etter鈥� idea, you can confidently state that the plan is focused on tactics and strategies that resonate with your buyers.

The only consistently reliable way to understand the important details about your buyer鈥檚 evaluation and buying experience is to conduct in depth interviews with real buyers who actually made a recent purchase. Most won鈥檛 be your customers, but rather buyers who chose competitors. Remember, the market is filled with buyers who either don鈥檛 need or didn鈥檛 choose you. You need to know why.

Go deeply into the heads of real buyers
In depth interviews conducted by highly skilled interviewers yield vital insights of the risks buyers perceive in making a big purchase. Moreover, these interviews reveal how certain vendors allay these risks and persuade buyers to choose them.

These interviews also unmask the sources buyers tap into in making high-risk buying decisions. Here鈥檚 a tip: maybe a third rely heavily on Google searches. Most turn to their peers. Wouldn鈥檛 you like to know what information they sought from these peers? How useful would that information be in developing sales and marketing strategies that鈥檚 actually aligned with what the buyer wants to know and experience?

Perhaps most importantly, these interviews will show exactly why certain vendors were excluded from the final buying decision. Many if not most sales people believe the chief criterion is price. In fact, that rarely shows up in the top three! So if your strategy is selling on price, you鈥檙e leaving money on the table and selling your value short.

Now ask yourself, have you ever read any such insights from a strategic marketing plan? This is information that is an essential window into the real needs of markets full of buyers, who together will respond favorably to a unified strategy allied with their specific needs.

Only through buyer interviews will your sales and marketing teams know where and for whom your solutions fit, and for whom it does not. Armed with the right buyer persona information, sales and marketing can align to deliver the buying experience that earns your buyers鈥� trust, and their business.

The post 2020 Success: Build Marketing Around The Buyers’ Needs, Not Yours appeared first on 色花堂 Institute.

What is the pain that shoves your buyers off the fence, and gets them looking for a solution like yours?

If you can鈥檛 name it, you are in good company. While most marketers are feverishly producing content to meet buyers at all stages of their journey, the one area where they miss the mark almost every time is right at the starting line.

When a new prospect enters the market, you have an opportunity to be the first to deliver the content they will trust and get your solution into consideration. This is easier said than done, but I鈥檓 going to show you how to get there.

The Most Difficult Content to Create for the Buyer鈥檚 Journey

Marketing influencers love to talk about the importance of 鈥渒nowing your persona鈥檚 pains鈥� and crafting just the right content to reach buyers at each stage of their decision-making process. What they don鈥檛 understand (or greatly oversimplify) is the difficulty of being relevant to buyers at the beginning of their journey.

When marketers create content about pain points, they are usually blasting out content about each of the challenges their products address and praying one of them resonates with a prospect.

Unfortunately, buyers treat all of those messages as white noise 鈥� a low hiss that recedes into the background of the matters that they have already prioritized.

What if you knew which pains cause your buyers to seek change — to stop everything and pay attention?

At the moment when buyers decide to look at their options, a precious opportunity awaits you. But only if you can deliver content that resonates so deeply with the buyer that they have the confidence to put your brand on their list of potential providers.

Finding Priority Initiative Insights

First, you need to understand why real buyers begin their evaluation of providers in your market, and the only way to get this insight is through unscripted interviews with people who have recently evaluated a solution like yours.

A thorough exploration of your buyer鈥檚 decision-making process will reveal two key insights: the Success Factors your buyers are trying to achieve, and the Priority Initiatives that push them into the market in the first place.

Success Factors are the inverse of the pain points your buyers feel, explaining what buyers want to achieve once they purchase a solution like yours. Through verbatim quotes from buyers, you will know how to describe the outcomes that matter to your buyers. Instead of copying your competitor’s message that the solution is 鈥渓ightweight and easy to use,鈥� you鈥檒l know how buyers evaluate this attribute and why it鈥檚 important. Your buyer interviews will tell you everything you need to know about how to make your benefits so specific that they educate and resonate with your buyers.

The Priority Initiative is distinct because it is the starting gun that causes buyers to decide that now is the time to change. Unlike typical pain points, these are the circumstances or goals that your buyers can no longer ignore or move to the bottom of their to-do list.

Through an analysis of multiple interviews, you will see why buyers in your market live with pain for months or even years before committing to change. The Priority Initiative insights show you the moment when your buyers throw up their hands and shout, 鈥淭hat鈥檚 it! I鈥檓 done with this!鈥�

Finding the Priority Initiative insights is the first step toward producing the right content to reach buyers as they begin their journey. Next, you need to make sure this content is useful for your buyers, and that requires thought leadership.

The Necessity of Thought Leadership

When you know your buyer鈥檚 Priority Initiative, you know why and when buyers are ready to explore a solution like yours.

Now your job is to position your company鈥檚 knowledge of the problem as superior to your competitors鈥�. This is the time to invest in high quality thought leadership.

Do you know the thought leaders in your industry? A thought leader is someone who understands your buyer鈥檚 problem so well, they can describe it in a way no one in your audience has ever before considered. And by hearing their problem from this new perspective, your buyers will automatically see you as the experts who can deliver the solution.

In order to build thought leadership content, you will need to find a subject matter expert who qualifies as a thought leader on the Priority Initiatives you uncovered in your interviews.

Your brand needs to immerse itself in those problems and speak about them with such amazing clarity that buyers say, 鈥淚 hadn鈥檛 seen my situation that way, but now that I do, I realize that there is a clear path to success and must make this a priority鈥�.

You are going to need a helping hand with this task. Surprisingly, expertise on your product can actually be a deterrent to success, as it is easy to fall into the trap of describing your buyer鈥檚 circumstances through the lens of your own solution.

More often than not, you will need to look outside your organization to find the right subject matter expert for this job, but it is well worth it. You will want to do some networking or Google terms related to your Priority Initiative insights to see who is already writing thought-provoking pieces. Then educate them about your approach just enough that they see the connection. You鈥檒l have achieved two goals in one 鈥� creating thought leadership content that resonates with your buyers and building a relationship with someone who will now include this new perspective in their own work.

When buyers start looking for a solution, their mental state is fraught with uncertainty and risk. Their jobs or careers may be on the line if they make the wrong choice. To establish trust at that moment, you need a firm grasp on the situation that triggered their search. Then you need to create the unique content that allows your buyers to see the problem from a whole new vantage point. It鈥檚 not easy, but it is the only way to ensure your role as a trusted guide for the next steps in your buyer鈥檚 journey.

The post Why Marketers Struggle to Reach Buyers Early in their Journey appeared first on 色花堂 Institute.