Lessons - How to Identify Your Buyer Persona | Sarah McIntyre, VP of Marketing at BoardPro

Hi, it's Scott here. On these lessons, episodes of my podcast, I'll be selecting my favorite lessons from various guests and episodes of Success Story. Today you're going to hear from Sarah McIntyre, founder of Bright Inbound, a multi-year award-winning, marketing and HubSpot agency. She has over 15 years in B2B IT marketing. She has over 20 years experience marketing in both big corporate teams as well as startups. She has exceptional experience in content marketing, tactical campaign execution. She works with some of the largest organizations in the world. Today she's going to talk about buyer persona, how to find your buyer persona, why it's so important, how to speak to your customers, create feedback loops that get the information that you need from people that have bought your product, as well as people that haven't bought your product, so you can target better and convert more. Firstly, we will do an internal workshop with all the people in the organization who actually have an interaction with customers, so it can be customer support, salespeople, senior execs as well, so everyone in the room will do that workshop to get all the information out of their heads about who it is that they think they deal with. Do a survey, so like we just heard a survey, like you do a really short survey, send it to the database and then do deep dive interviews, both with internal stakeholders and with your customers and lost customers too if you can, so deals that you didn't win, they get incredible amount of information from people from the accounts that you didn't win. If they're willing to go that far, I haven't had many clients actually want to go that next step, but I think that's a critical learning phase for the organizations to understand why they didn't, why you went down the path with them in a sales process and then they didn't choose you, was it because of the product, was it the pricing, was it why, what was it, did the budget disappear, what were the reasons for not achieving that sale? Do you have a strategy to get people to be more responding to surveys so that you can collect that data more effectively? I did. Very short. No, because I would assume that some of them, sometimes it's hard to collect that data and that's why, or I guess if you're not even trying, that's the first issue, but I think over collecting, I was looking at an employee feedback survey earlier today and it was something like 20 to 30 questions and I think that that's a misconception that that's actually effective and then it just, it's just like information overload for the, for the person receiving and it's just, they just don't want to, they shut off, right? Yeah, no, exactly, I keep it really short, those surveys are really only five questions. Yeah. And I have a template for that five question survey and mainly to, and the, the point of the survey piece is also to try and get the people who are super responders. So I also do question, ask questions that are text only questions and not, not drop downs because then that's also validating assumptions because if you're pre, you know, pre-giving them the answers, it might be good for making pretty graphs, but it's not actually good for any kind of qualitative understanding and what I'm looking for is people who, who are really committed and who really, who write a lot, essentially, give you lots of information, yeah, yeah, yeah. I love the information, it means that there's, there's some, there's some interest there, you know, there's some, there's some passion there. So they're actually really interesting people to talk to because they're, there's some, yeah, some underlying thing that they want to get at. So it could be, it could be good or it could be bad, but at the end of the day, the information is what you need to actually build these out. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. It's anything is, anything feedback is, is good information to get and to send it back into, into your organisation. And the thing I love about marketing owning this, this function, it also shouldn't just be a one-off function. I think you should do this, this quarterly, if you can, is that then marketing becomes the voice of the customer and the advocate for the customer inside the organisation as well. So it's not, it's not just sales lead, it's also marketing lead. So, so marketers can elevate themselves a little bit as well in the, in the food chain. Sometimes I find marketers can be, you know, you're just the people blowing up balloons on the trade stand. It's down over there. So we don't want to, we don't want to be, to be doing that, we want to, you know, that be actively advocating for customers and advocating for the right thing, for the sales people doing the right thing, for the company to do as we, as we grow, we're all on the same team to increase revenue and grow companies.