Ignoring Buyer Personas is Medieval (Moneyball Marketing)

Buyer personas are chronically underappreciated and underinvested.

However, if you’re serious about developing a winning go-to-market strategy, you can’t afford to ignore the need for buyer personas.

In a world where the digital buyer's journey forces your content to do much of the heavy lifting before a prospect is open to talking with a salesperson, buyer personas -- and their first cousins: segmentation and personalization -- are super important.

The old rules no longer apply... everything's changed

For example:

• Gartner found that 83% of a typical B2B purchase decision -- researching,
  comparing their options, and evaluating pricing from different companies -- happens before a potential buyer engages with a vendor.
• McKinsey discovered that 70% to 80% of B2B decision-makers now prefer to make decisions digitally (without a human salesperson).
• In its B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, LinkedIn, in collaboration with Edelman, concluded that “thought leadership remains critical to customer engagement but breaking through the noise is harder than ever.”

Running marketing and sales without personas in today’s marketplace would be like building a baseball roster without acknowledging the importance of Sabermetrics, bat speed, exit velocity, or launch angle.

Kind of like that scene at the beginning of Moneyball where Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill are standing in the parking garage ("Baseball thinking is medieval. They are asking all the wrong questions.") 

Analogy:

Marketing and sales in today's marketplace without buyer personas is "medieval."

 A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of an ideal client based on actual research and some select, educated speculation. Buyer personas are the key to standing out in crowded markets and getting your marketing, sales, customer success, and product teams aligned -- all on the same page about developing an amazing customer experience (CX).

How do you use buyer personas? What parallels do you see between buyer personas and Moneyball-style marketing? Let me know in the comments.

And if you're serious about using personas to power game-changing go-to-market growth for your company, enroll now in our free 7-day eCourse: Go-to-Market Strategy 101 for B2B SaaS Startups and Scaleups.