Building A Buying Persona: Let's Give It A Go

By Bill King

Let’s have some fun and create a buying persona. A what? A buying persona — a role or character of someone in our industry who might care to buy something. You may be wondering why. Hold that thought until the end of our exercise and you’ll see.

The big question is where to start? Even trying to figure this out isn’t easy.

Think back to your last interaction with a customer or prospect and start there. Here’s an example. Gary — it’s good to give your persona a name — Gary is a wastewater treatment plant supervisor. His main concern is complying with his permit, which renews every five years. Right about now with temperatures falling, his staff needs to make some adjustments to maintain the right level of nitrification and avoid elevated ammonia levels. Beyond that, he makes sure that he has the right labor to get the scheduled tasks of the day completed.

Every so often, an alarm goes off and he investigates. It’s usually a false read or a dirty probe and easily resolved. But then occasionally, it hints at something more significant. That’s when Gary usually pulls in Tony, his senior, Level IV-certified operator. Tony has worked at the plant for the past 40 years. He’s seen it all and usually has a good idea about what’s going on. Gary is concerned about how much of a personal burden Tony’s departure is going to be when he retires in five and a half months. He’ll have to be far more hands-on with the rest of the operations team and worries about balancing the training burden with everything else he currently manages.

If Tony isn’t sure how to fix the issue or the problem seems to be more biological than mechanical, Gary usually calls in Roger, a local environmental consulting engineer and trusted advisor for his opinion. Roger can help Gary troubleshoot and come up with a couple of alternatives to think through and apply. If the problem continues or keeps reoccurring, Gary with Roger’s help, will start piloting a potential solution and write up a CAPEX proposal to purchase the equipment necessary to install a new process and get the issue resolved.

The CAPEX proposal is vetted by the utility’s board and, if approved, put out for bid to a series of vendors and contractors. Gary has his own opinions on which products he knows and trusts from years of experience using them and the relationships he’s built up with a small group of manufacturer’s reps who have been able to help troubleshoot problems and have provided great customer service in the past. But he’s not averse to trying something new and often has to compromise to accommodate the lowest bid, sacrificing superior service for price unless he can justify a unique quality in the higher-priced product. 

That’s a terribly basic, over-simplified persona for Gary who I met a couple of weeks ago. So why take the time to think through essentially what makes Gary tick? Because only by learning about Gary and his concerns, challenges, and areas of focus can you as a marketer start crafting the type of content that he will readily interact with. My hunch is that little of the content you’ve produced to date resonates with the key issues outlined above and therefore will likely get lost in the shuffle of emails and literature that Gary doesn’t have the time to read. Only by providing commercial insight of what matters to Gary will you stand a chance of winning his attention.

Image credit: "Wastewater plant," U.S. Department of Agriculture © 2015, used under an Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/