It should come as no surprise to anyone who regularly reads my blog; I think that product marketing starts with personas. In this post, we will take my previous post on what is in a message map, and expand it to discuss how to build your messaging starting with the buyer. We will determine which buyer challenges to start with through this blog entry.
Start with the Buyer
I recently wrote about the importance of personas in product marketing (here, here and here), and I think it’s vital as part of the messaging process. You need to create unique messaging for each buyer or persona that you do. Pick your buyers, and then make sure you have created your persona for that buyer.
Brainstorm Time
When I worked at Oracle, I learned some brainstorming techniques that I find very helpful. They work best in a group; I suggest 3-5 people. I would have at least one product marketing person, maybe someone in pre-sales, perhaps a product manager, maybe your boss! The sky’s the limit in terms of who you pick, although try to keep it under 7, make sure they know the buyer, the market, or the product. You should budget at least an hour for the brainstorming session. I would keep it under 3 hours, as I think people get distracted. Don’t forget to take breaks.
What you need to brainstorm
- A room where you can be noisy and not distracted
- Three colors of post-it notes
- A box of sharpies
- A good attitude
Next is the Buyer Challenges
The first thing you want to do is list out all of the challenges you have in your personas on stickies. Then validate this list with your group of attendees, add or remove as necessary. Of course, if you add, make sure to go back and update your persona document.
Put the stickies on an easel or the wall, and have everyone talk about the challenge as you do it. Make sure that everyone is on the same page about the problem and why it matters. After all of the challenges are listed, you need to pick the top five. If you don’t have five challenges, that is ok, use the ones you do have listed.
How do you pick the top five?
In a previous messaging brainstorming I did, we had 20 challenges for that buyer. How did we narrow it down to five? Well, first eliminate any problem that has nothing to do with your product, service, or solution!
If consensus on the top five is not easy to come by, which is a genuine possibility, I like to use the dollar method. Every person is allocated $100. Then they get to assign the dollars to what they think are the most critical challenges. You sum up the dollars and then pick the highest amounts.
Example:
I will walk through an example of how this would work in the real world, take a fictional finance product, and brainstorm session.
Persona: Director of Finance, boutique consulting firm
Solution: Complete Finance for Consulting.
Buyer Challenges
- Inability to forecast revenue
- No ability to determine which clients will pay on time
- Account owners changing payment terms without notice to finance until submitting the invoice
- Manual processes to have invoices approved by account owners
- Clients dispute charges on the invoice, slowing cash collection
- Professionals fail to submit their time entry on time, slowing billing
- Consultants are sloppy in submitting their time entry, with a large number of errors, slowing invoice generation
- Professionals submit time entry on paper and have an admin enter it, slowing invoice generation
- Staff retention is challenging
Individuals attending
- Pam, PMM
- Jim, Product Manager
- Michael, VP, Sales
- Dwight, Assistant to the VP of Sales
Matrix with dollar voting
| Buyer Challenge | Pam | Jim | Michael | Dwight | Total |
| Inability to forecast revenue | $25 | $20 | $30 | $5 | $80 |
| No ability to determine which clients will pay on time | $5 | $10 | $0 | $50 | $65 |
| Account owners changing payment terms without notice to finance until submitting the invoice | $5 | $5 | $0 | $25 | $35 |
| Manual processes to have invoices approved by account owners | $40 | $20 | $10 | $0 | $70 |
| Clients dispute charges on the invoice, slowing cash collection | $25 | $10 | $35 | $5 | $75 |
| Professionals fail to submit their time entry on time, slowing billing | $0 | $35 | $25 | $0 | $60 |
| Professionals are sloppy in submitting their time entry, with large number of errors, slowing invoice generation | $0 | $0 | $0 | $10 | $10 |
| Professionals submit time entry on paper, and have an admin enter it, slowing invoice generation | $0 | $0 | $0 | $5 | $5 |
| Staff retention is challenging (Eliminated as has nothing to do with solution) |
Use the five buyer challenges with the highest amounts, listed below:
- Inability to forecast revenue
- No ability to determine which clients will pay on time
- Manual processes to have invoices approved by account owners
- Clients dispute charges on the invoice, slowing cash collection
- Professionals fail to submit their time entry on time, slowing billing
We have covered how to create buyer challenges here, and in the next post, we will highlight how to identify which value statements to use.