It might be episode 13, but we've got plenty of luck with us today on Beers with Max as we welcome in veteran consultant, researcher, and author Adele Revella. Adele is best known as the founder of the Buyer Persona Institute, an organization dedicated to making sure that marketers become experts in understanding how, when, and why people make purchases.
She joins us to talk about giving away what you know, one critical part of buyer personas that gets neglected, and why understanding buyers is more important than ever before. Click play on the recording to commence the flow of knowledge (and beer), and check out some of my favorite moments of the session below:
Why Adele gave away all her secrets (9:22)
By sharing every bit of information she had about buyer personas when she wrote her book on the subject in 2015, Adele separated herself from lots of business authors who just use a select set of case studies to illustrate a process or example. Even though some people thought she was a few fries short of a full order for this approach, Adele tells us that she gave away her process because she truly believed in its value. She wanted everyone to reap the benefits of an in-depth understanding of their buyers.
The "cheat" for buyer personas (12:05)
Adele draws a contrast between two different types of product and service development. One method involves creatively reverse-engineering your process, packaging what you do in a unique way, and adjusting it on the fly based on what works and what doesn't. The other way involves simply asking your prospects what is important to them in your offering, and using their answers as a guide for developing your product. I'm sure you can guess which one Adele prefers...
Adele's warning for the future of marketing (26:42)
Here Adele makes a valuable point about why it's so important to understand personas. As more and more content is being pushed out online as rapidly as possible, marketers that don't understand what their buyers are looking for run the risk of dragging down the entire industry. If buyers skip irrelevant content and instead choose to go to their friends and colleagues, reviews online, and sales reps at potential vendors, where does that leave us marketers? A scary question...
We like sales people?!?! (27:59)
This is one common misconception that I enjoy debunking whenever I can. To understand today's B2B buyers, you have to know this: it's not that millennials are too unfocused to get a buying question answered by marketing content, it's that we've seen the huge rise in the production of blog posts, white papers, and landing pages that are designed to sell a product, not provide info. That's why, believe it or not, most millennials prefer to talk to a salesperson!
Hope you enjoyed this episode. If so, stick around, because we've got some killer guests serving up knowledge in the next few weeks. And if you want to join our virtual marketers' happy hour, click the button below to come have a beer with us.
Until next time!
