Adele Revella

Adele Revella is CEO of Buyer Persona Institute, a popular keynote speaker at conferences around the globe, and author of Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight into Your Customer’s Expectations, Align your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business (Wiley), named a Top 5 Business Book by Fortune Magazine.2

Adele’s inspiration for Buyer Persona Institute emerged as she developed and led the benchmark product marketing course for Pragmatic Marketing, the global training company widely considered the leader in B2B product management workshops.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Adele’s success

Creating buyer personas that earn buyer’s trust

Result if you follow the steps in Adele’s session

Learn the buyer personas that tell you what you need to do to earn your buyer’s trust and their business

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

So you ask people. And people think that you know, I mean, classically people think of research, right? And when you think of research, you probably think of surveys.

Or maybe you think of focus groups that I mean, does everybody hates surveys? Yes. Including your buyers. And the problem with surveys is, if you do surveys people, you’re only going to get answers to the questions that you think to ask.

And so what you really need to do is you need to talk to buyers, who have been through this journey, been through this experience recently, and ask them to tell you a story about it.

And it’s really more like journalism than it is research. And if you, you know, take me back to the day, when you first decided that you need to solve this kind of a problem. Tell me what happened.

And then you really just, it’s more about listening than the questions you ask. And it’s all about prompting the buyer as they tell their story to go deeper and deeper and deeper into different parts of their story.

Okay, so I can see that you decided you needed to solve that problem. But how you must have always needed that benefit or outcome? Why didn’t you decide to solve it sooner?

And it really gets you now, we start to get into the mind of the buyer around what triggers their decision to prioritize this type of investment. Because your buyers are busy just like you are and you know, they don’t like, want to go shopping for stuff every day and so someday they wake up and say we’ve got to solve this problem. And then we can walk them really slowly.

So what did you do first to understand your options and as we walk them through that story and like, “Oh, you went online. What you saw online? Was it useful? What did you hope to find? What was hard to find out of a site you looked at? Or the content you saw doesn’t have to be out you know, just on a website? Well out of the things you found, what was most helpful to you, what wasn’t helpful?”

And it’s, you know, I’m throwing out a lot of questions. But the reality is and this is why I wrote the book because I wanted to kind of get people out of the mindset of writing down questions, which is like a survey, right?

And then asking those questions and I want to get people more into the experience of having a conversation. And, you know, if we’re going to go to a party and we’re going to meet people, we don’t know, we don’t like questions on our hand to ask at the party.

You’re right. But yet somehow when we get these buyers on the phone, or if we meet them somewhere, you know, we want to have the scripted questions. Well, forget that. That’s going to blow the whole opportunity for you to ask them ask them to tell a story.