#10.聽 I鈥檓 under a lot of pressure to address high-priority initiatives and don鈥檛 want to hear about other problems that you think I should take on. I just don’t have the bandwidth.

#9. 聽 Your website has all the same useless information as your competitor’s does. So no, I didn鈥檛 spend much time there.

#8.聽聽 I鈥檝e done my research and know about many of the things that I must have to succeed. I want to know whether you can deliver on those before I go any further.

#7.聽聽 Yes, I have a budget and the authority to buy, but I鈥檓 not going to tell you that. I鈥檒l decide when I鈥檓 ready to talk to a sales person.

#6.聽聽 I鈥檓 seeing a lot of obvious stuff about value, but nothing that speaks to the way we plan to measure the success of this initiative.

#5.聽聽 I can鈥檛 make this decision without persuading other stakeholders. I need to see something that helps me handle their concerns and priorities too.

#4.聽聽 I will lose my job if I choose the wrong solution. I need to be convinced that you can address my specific concerns about this decision.

#3.聽聽 I鈥檓 testing your company to see if you fully understand my needs in this area and will be responsive if I do buy from you.

#2.聽聽 We won鈥檛 choose the least expensive solution; we鈥檒l select the one that is the best match for our needs.

And the #1 thing I want you to know: 聽 This decision is actually not about price or features. We鈥檒l go with the company that we believe we can trust.

Have you heard these before? It’s easy to see why companies that best address these buyer concerns have a major competitive advantage in this buyer-driven market.

Marketers are learning that they can listen to their buyers, and we mean REALLY listen, to gain the insights that drive the content those buyers want and need. They’re discovering that this level of listening can’t be done through a survey or social media, that marketers need to have a unique kind of conversation with recent buyers, probing beyond the obvious answers until they know precisely how, when and why buyers choose the solutions they market.

These marketers are building buyer personas that focus on the Five Rings of Insight about the buying decision, avoiding the simple demographic profiles that can result in too many personas or not enough useful information about them.

Do your buyer personas reveal the insights you need to address these top 10 concerns? I love to hear from marketers who have truly insightful buyer personas.

If your buyer personas are missing some of this critical information, take a minute to check out the 色花堂 Masterclass, the prerecorded training that shows you how you can become your company鈥檚 buyer expert. Or contact us to learn how you can schedule a private workshop for your team of four or more marketers.

The post Top 10 Things the B2B 色花堂 is Saying About Your (Content) Marketing appeared first on 色花堂 Institute.

When marketers start with the objective to understand how buyers make the decision they want to influence, they鈥檙e building about half as many personas and uncovering insights that tell them exactly what they can (and cannot) do to impact those buyers鈥� decisions.

I think I understand the origin of the confusion. Companies have always segmented their markets by demographics (company size, industry, geography), so it鈥檚 natural to expect that personas simply extend that model to focus on the buyers in those segments.

Consider which of these data points would help you understand what you can do to persuade buyers to choose the solutions you market:

Demographics are a Dangerous Distraction
Countless blog posts and ebooks perpetuate the demographic approach to buyer personas. One marketer told me about a buyer persona training where they were advised to begin by choosing a name and a photo to represent their buyer. Other marketers are telling me about six-figure investments in buyer personas that contained endless demographic details but nothing they could really use.

I鈥檓 determined to correct these misperceptions.

Until recently, 色花堂 Institute has primarily trained marketers whose companies scheduled one of our customized workshops for their teams. Today, we鈥檙e announcing that the 色花堂 Masterclass is available on demand to any marketer, in two parts:

• Five pre-recorded modules for viewing on our website at your convenience (total viewing time is 2 hours)
• A 90-minute live interactive session that includes coaching and mock interviews

I look forward to hearing from those of you who want to become the buyer expert marketers that stakeholders trust for persuasive marketing strategies.

The post Building B2B 色花堂s? Focus on the Buying Decision … then the Person appeared first on 色花堂 Institute.

A: What color did you choose?

B: How did you choose the color?

C:There are great apartments for rent right now. Have you thought about moving?

Answers vary on this selection (more on that later). But it’s clear that the question needs to follow the woman鈥檚 lead, that we would never script our conversation in advance of the social interaction. Imagine the confused, annoyed or bored response from this woman if we asked 鈥渟o what do you think about that new play that just opened?鈥�

Most people are perplexed when I ask them to conduct unscripted buyer persona interviews. These are the same people who will happily show up in any social situation, listen for threads of topics that others find engaging, and guide the conversation to mutually relevant topics.

Why not take this same approach with buyer interviews?

While it is definitely more taxing to develop questions in real time, the pressure to do so keeps us listening intently. And each time we base a question on a point that the buyer has recently made, our rapport with the other person builds. The buyer might even tell me, a perfect stranger, something he hasn鈥檛 told anyone else.

Pre-defined questions can only address topics that we found interesting before we started listening to the buyer. Worse yet, we are unlikely to learn anything new, having missed the opportunity to probe deeply on an interesting point..

This approach is especially critical for win/loss interviews. We need to get buyers talking at length about their decision criteria and process. We aren’t going to discover any actionable insights by writing down the buyer鈥檚 short answer — that we lost the deal on price and features, or won it because our sales rep is such a great guy. We need much deeper insights into how and why the company made this decision.

For instance, if the buyer told us that one of the triggers for this decision was that our solution was easiest to use, we might follow up by asking the buyer to describe what, specifically, they found to be easy. Or we might ask what level of user would find it easy to use, and what training they expected that user to need. Another line of questioning might reveal details about how they assessed the solution’s ease-of-use.

Returning to your interaction at the party, if you selected question A (what color will she paint her apartment), you have just learned that your new acquaintance likes light yellow, which might be interesting if you are selecting colors of paint to carry in your store, or what colors to feature in a marketing campaign for paint.

Question B (how did she choose the color?) is a great follow-up question, or likely your best first question, as this should trigger a story about the way this person thinks and makes decisions. This question will probably get you the answer to the color too.

Question C (did you know there are some great apartments for rent?) is changing the subject, a terrible technique when you need to build rapport, and one of the major reasons that interviews should never be scripted.

Unless you鈥檙e marketing home improvement products, you shouldn’t care about anyone鈥檚 choice of paint 鈥� buyer鈥檚 decision processes vary dramatically based on the products, services and solutions they’re considering.聽 But we want to have an agenda, perhaps three-to-five topics that we hope to explore, and not a structured questionnaire, if we want buyers to tell us what really persuades them to make decisions about our category of solutions.

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