Buyer Personas Book Summary - Buyer Personas Book explained in key points

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Buyer Personas summary

Name: Buyer Personas
Rating: 3.9 (44 reviews)
Author: Adele Revella

Adele Revella

How to Gain Insight into Your Customer’s Expectations, Align Your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business

3.9 (44 ratings)

17 mins

Table of Contents

Buyer Personas
summarized in 8 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 8

What’s in it for me? Learn everything you need to know about your customers.

Do you run a blog or an app? Or maybe you work for a marketing company or in sales? If you work in any of these fields (or countless others), the success or failure of your undertakings depends on how well you connect with customers.

If your messages chime with people, you will gather sales, shares and subscriptions; if you create a message that no one cares about, however, you’ll fail. If only there was a way of finding out exactly what customers want.

Well, there is! These blinks show you how to create a buyer persona, a complete story about your customer, what they want and need, and what they think about when buying. In short, you’ll never miss out on customers again.

In these blinks, you’ll discover

why a company deliberately made their pocket calculators heavier;
why the best customer interviews require little or no preparation; and
what the Five Rings of Buying Insight are.

Knowing your customer helps you provide them with what they’ll buy.

Imagine you’re selling sofas – big, expensive, cumbersome sofas. Now imagine you’ve taken your product around to tiny, high-rise rental apartments in the inner city. How many do you think you’ll sell? Probably none.

Not knowing your customers’ wants and needs is a recipe for disaster. So when you enter a new market, it’s important to conduct in-depth research to understand your customers.

If you don’t do your homework, your prized products may end up gathering dust instead of bringing in revenue. Surprisingly, this is exactly what happened to Apple when they launched the 3G iPhone in the Japanese market.

In 2007, Japanese consumers bought 5 million mobile phones. The following year, when Apple introduced their 3G phones, they sold only 200,000 units – a mere four percent of the Japanese market share – and sold mostly to established Apple users. So what caused this massive failure?

Japanese consumers were used to shooting videos and watching TV programs on their phones, and iPhone 3G didn’t even have a video camera! Apple failed to realize that buyers in the Japanese market had different needs than those in the US and Europe, and suffered for it.

To learn about your customers’ needs, you have to ask them directly. Unlike Apple, the Turkish-appliance company Beko conducted interviews with prospective customers before launching their dryer in the Chinese market.

As a result of these interviews, Beko’s marketing team learned that a large portion of Chinese consumers believe that “there is a spiritual component when garments are exposed to the sun.”

So Beko designed their dryers for the Chinese market by making it possible to stop the drying cycle halfway through, allowing customers to dry their garments in the sun. Their diligence was rewarded; Beko dryers are selling very well!

Buyer personas help you truly know your customer.

Next time you’re at the supermarket, look around and see if you can identify what the patrons are using to evaluate products. Different customers have different criteria. For example, when selecting eggs, some customers will search for organic eggs, while others just want the cheapest ones they can find.

If you are an egg producer, you need to understand why different customers behave the way they do, in order to fulfill their needs and create product messaging that resonates with them.

Skeptical stakeholders can easily be convinced to implement buyer personas.

People often prefer the known to the unknown. And usually, they don’t like to venture outside their comfort zone. It’s no surprise, then, that you’re likely to run into resistance from stakeholders when you want to try new things in the marketing department. This is equally true when it comes to building buyer personas for your product.

Internal stakeholders, such as management and shareholders, each have their own reasons for rejecting buyer personas. Some think the project will be a cumbersome time sink, and that the resources invested in identifying the personas will never be recouped.

Use an internal or external database to reach your target customers.

Once you’ve gotten the internal stakeholder onboard, you need to actually create the buyer personas. This work begins with setting up interviews with potential customers. But how should you reach out to them?

First, you need to find your customers, and that will require the help of your sales team.

Unearthing helpful answers requires your asking good questions and listening well.

The key to learning the most from interviewees is to spend more time listening and less time speaking. Ask your question, and then get out of the way.

In a buyer persona interview, the only question you need to prepare for and think about beforehand is the very first question you ask. Ultimately, your first question will be about the first time the interviewee realized that he faced a problem that required him to seek out a new solution.

Analyze your buyers’ insights to discover their needs and how to accommodate them.

There is an old Egyptian saying that goes like this: “Do you know so and so? Yes. Did you hobnob with him? No. Well, then you don’t know him.” The same applies to your buyers. You can’t presume to know them if you never talk to them.

To understand buyers’ behavior, you have to talk to them and uncover the Five Rings of Buying Insights. Doing this will tell you everything you need to know about your buyers’ decisions.

Organize your interview data in order to develop actionable insights.

So, after gathering the data, what’s next? Now comes the careful analysis. Remember: you aren’t just looking for data that confirms what you already believe. Rather, you want to stay as objective as possible in order to discover what the customer truly needs.

So where do you start?

Create a message that tells the buyer what they want to hear.

“We have the best solution.” “We’re the cheapest.” “ Our solution will save you money.” Do these kinds of messages inspire you to buy? It’s more than likely that these are the kinds of messages that you completely ignore. This is because the messages don’t speak to you and your unique concerns.

With the results of your interviews, you are now equipped to address your buyers’ unique, primary concerns.

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What is Buyer Personas about?

It’s hard to sell to people that you don’t know. Buyer Personas (2015) gives you the tools you need to truly understand your customers – their motivations, their quirks, their reservations – so that you can fine-tune your messaging to become a maximally effective seller.

Best quote from Buyer Personas

As much as we may like to think of ourselves as open-minded, most peoples initial response to a new idea in resistance.

—Adele Revella

Who should read Buyer Personas?

Marketing executives
Company leaders who are looking for a product market
Anyone who wants to be a better communicator

About the Author

Adele Revella is the CEO and founder of Buyer Persona Institute, and a leading authority on buyer personas. In addition to running the Institute, she is also a marketing and business leadership speaker, consultant, blogger and workshop facilitator.

[Adele Revella: Buyer Personas] copyright [2015], John Wiley & Sons [Inc. or Ltd. as applicable] Used by permission of John Wiley & Sons [Inc. or Ltd. as applicable] and shall not be made available to any unauthorized third parties.

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