3.5 Customer personality types
As customers progress through their purchase journey they make decisions. They define the criteria for success and the processes by which they will review solutions to their business problem. Buying groups become formalised with key stakeholders, influencers and decision makers. Their roles related to providing input on the scope, requirements and expectations are solidified. And success criteria for the commercial, risk and capability objectives of the organisation are agreed. As a marketer or salesperson, your goal is to influence these decision criteria. Your goal is to weight the deck to your advantage.
Recall the rule of selling that ‘people make emotional buying decisions for logical reasons. A broad buying team usually guarantees that different voices will carry different weight, and failing to understand this can be costly. As Thomas Erikson noted in his book Surrounded by Idiots “Everything you say to a person is filtered through their frames of reference, biases, and preconceived ideas.” Now imagine a buying group with every member having a different frame of reference, biases and preconceptions. How do you communicate to them at scale?
The first goal should be to identify who you are dealing with – not just what job they have but what role they have in the purchase process. Spending your effort informing someone who has interest but no influence in a deal will lead to wasted effort and resources. In an ABM-driven engagement you may be able to identify specific named stakeholders but for scale marketing activity you may need buyer research to create generalised role definitions. If you do go down this path don’t lose sight of what you’re doing: you’re modelling your audience to meet a segmentation requirement. That’s a good thing; but if you find yourself in a world of black-and-white statements of fact about audiences that do or don’t fill a particular role, you’ve missed the point. To make things manageable, I recommend breaking your audiences down into four groups:
Influencers: business, technical or solution experts that are brought in to inform other members of the group based upon specific areas of expertise that they have
Recommenders: people that assimilate the information and provide a recommendation, but who don’t have final say on the decision. These are among the most powerful stakeholders to get on-side. You want to use their import to sell through to deciders and to turn around any detractors
Deciders: leaders that have ultimate decision-making authority on deals. Deciders may choose to listen to the inputs from recommenders and informers, or may choose to disregard it based upon other criteria. For example, a Recommender may provide the recommendation for the best solution based upon all criteria, but the Decider may disregard it for an alternative lower priced solution.
Observers: participants in the process that have no authority or influence, but who may be kept informed and so can be a good source of insight on the internal sentiment and direction.
Observers can appear to be highly knowledgeable, connected and willing to engage, but have no direct involvement in deciding on a solution. Recommenders can appear to be at the centre of a decision-making process, but may be ultimately overruled. Informers may appear to have limited influence but can have a major sway over the Recommenders and Deciders. And Deciders can appear to be the most important people in the room, but have little technical understanding to evaluate their decision against. Its important to know who you’re dealing with so you can tune your actions and temper your expectations on what help they’ll be.
It’s very easy when looking at persona cards or role descriptions to disconnect them from reality. A role description is simply a description of the function that a person fulfils. A persona may describe how a person is motivated but personas can also fall into the trap of either missing personality types from their description, or combining personality types into role descriptions. This oversimplification can create harmful generalisations like ‘the Head of HR is a dominant personality that has achieved this position by fighting hard and they like to read blogs’. These type of assumptions can be harmful to understanding the nuances of customers as individuals and should be discouraged wherever they are seen. They take effort to develop, cost to maintain and add little real value to anyone. They’re a vanity project for teams that like to create outputs without actually understanding how customers actually buy and the pressures and environment they operate within.
Instead, buyer personas should be understood in the lens for which they are intended: to support sales understanding an ideal customer’s job role or to model what an average – but not perfectly spherical – buyer type may look like. In practice, though, they are regularly misused, leading them to be created sometimes at great expense for little meaningful value. Make sure you can recognise a clear purpose within your personas. They should either be:
Individual role descriptors: These customer persona types aim to represent the specific needs, challenges, influencers and priorities of job roles. They can also include examples of specific functional language that these buyers may use. Role descriptors may put names to the individual to humanise them but should not confuse themselves with personal or personality descriptions. You do not need detail their age, a fictional biography or how the like to spend their free time. Personality descriptions can generalise individuals and produce bias and false expectations that certain roles are always of a certain age, gender or mindset. Role descriptions should be used to inform one-to-one interactions with customers based upon professional role requirements only.
Personality data firmographics. When analysed correctly personality data can be used to make statistical correlations on groups of customers. Analysis of a sample of buyer data or customer sales can be used to draw conclusions about prioritisation and focus. For example: most of our biggest deals were sold to people with XX personality type, in the age range of Y-Z who have a preference for A, B and C content types, therefore we should prioritise content development that will meet this audiences’ requirements.
Because buying groups are have diversity of roles and personalities, the most successful sales teams prioritise their efforts where they are most likely to have an impact. The Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s work on psychological types tried to define different elements of personality. Combinations of these types could then by identified within everyone to build a set of profiles against which people could identify or be identified. This work influenced other approaches like Myers-Briggs, colour profiles, DISC and similar psychometric tests. You may well be familiar with these having been required to do them as a standard part of an interview process. Identify individuals against that are able to influence others and prioritising them with sales and marketing tailored to their personality types is one method of putting focus in an area to maximise impact.
As an example of how to apply this consider the Observant and Intuitive audience types from Myers-Briggs profiles and how content could be applied. Observant individuals are highly practical, pragmatic and down-to-earth. They tend to have strong habits and focus on what is happening or has already happened. Inception needs to reinforce that there is data, evidence and factual credibility behind claims. Observant types may appear to be sceptical of unfounded terms and promises of potential benefits, but this is because they are interested in more concrete benefits. Proofs of concept can be a good way to build this confidence with these types and can be a great way of proving the case for recommended requirements. When on-board with an idea they can be highly influential because less rational types find it hard to argue with them. The idea to embed in their mind is: this solution will deliver the value we expect. Intuitive individuals by contrast are very imaginative, open-minded and curious. They prefer novelty over stability and focus on hidden meanings and future possibilities. Inception should appeal to the art of the possible and how this ties to the individual’s goals.
Intuitive types can be visionary and ambitious. The idea to embed with them is: people that buy this solution see great personal success. Content should support the idea that individuals can achieve great things and show bold ideas within the requirements that are built for a project. If you can identify one of these as more significant than the other within your audience then you can focus your efforts behind the bigger demographic. If you are unable to then once a customer has self-identified by perhaps showing a preference for one type of content over another you can nurture them with more of the same rather than diluting your engagement with irrelevant (to them) assets.
DISC theory is a method of identifying predictable actions and personality traits within human behaviour. These traits are grouped into four ‘colour’ profiles.
It is unusual for a person to fall into only one of these brackets as most people span multiple categories, but it can be useful to generalise to the extremes of these four categories. If you find that your audience aligns most heavily towards Red and Blue, you may find content drives more influence on pipeline when it focuses on how individuals become heroes in their organisation for their leadership with your solutions (Red) or how specific value was delivered and how that value was calculated (Blue). The ideas that we wish to embed within the minds of the buyers are importantly different between the personality types and, while these benefits may all have relevance to the purchase, buyers will adjust perceptions based upon the relative merits of what is shared with them. Persona firmographics inform how to prioritise for scale. Persona role descriptions illustrate the priorities of individuals.
This has been a lightning fly through a topic that entire books are written on and I’m not attempting to give you anything other than the salient details. Here’s the question you need to ask yourself if you’re questioning the relevance or applicability of this: if you’re writing content and you don’t know who you’re writing it for, are you writing it for anyone? You may not be able to target some of these persona traits in your marketing, but when your customers and prospects engage with it how do you want them to respond? Do you want them to see you as someone who can support their drive for value now? Or as a partner that is slow but methodical? Or that is inclusive and likes to spend time consulting and getting to know you? Building content with an idea of who you are writing it for will give you much greater focus. Great ideas and great performance come from focus. Strategy is about deciding focus.
Getting to this focus will need to be driven by testing. You may feel your audience is too large to focus on only a subset and you may be right, but only data will truly tell you if this is the case. Experiment – build four pieces of content or creative, one aligned to each persona colour and see which performs best. Then try removing some from scope and see if you notice an impact. If there’s no detrimental effect from targeting your best performing persona content to your full audience you’ve improved your effectiveness and if you can truly see no impact between any of your messaging then it’s likely your messaging and creative is still very generic. The objective should be to get to a better degree of focus. Yes, if your audience is very broad you may want to consider building discrete assets for all of them, but for most organisations a subset of persona types may be good enough. Bad strategies say ‘and’ and good strategies decides ‘ors’, and recognising you may need greater focus is the start of that journey.