Why Getting Buyers to Open Up Should Be Marketing’s Job, Not Sales

Marketing strategist and buyer persona expert Adele Revella explains why an initiative owned by your marketing department may be the single biggest thing you can do to improve the effectiveness of your sales team.

Most companies agree that buyer insights are key to successfully targeting, engaging, and retaining relationships with the right customers. But not all of them are willing and able to dig past the layers of generic knowledge and broad assumptions that can get in the way of truly actionable insights. The Buyer Persona Institute‘s Adele Revella, author of The Buyer Persona Manifesto, recently sat down with OpenView (listen to the full conversation here) to share her tips for mining key information about the ‘how’, ‘when’, and ‘why’ of your customers’ buying process that is being ignored.

“If I ask a company, ‘Why do your customers choose you?’ People will give me a two or three-word answer,” says Revella. “They’ll say, ‘We’re the market leader,’ or ‘They like us because our solutions are easy to use.’ That’s not an in-depth insight. The depth is about getting beyond those really simple, almost jargony answers, and getting to what’s really important to buyers.”

To truly understand where their buyers are coming from, Revella believes companies need to learn more about the many decisions they make while on the path to purchase. Only then can they zero in on the most effective value proposition that resonates and propels them through the buying journey.

Why Buyers Are More Likely to Open Up to Marketers

So how can your company gather the type of information you need to gain better customer insights? One of the first steps is establishing who owns the initiative. Revella points out that while sales will be the ultimate beneficiary of your research, the responsibility for collecting information should really rest with marketing.

“Buyers will be hesitant to disclose this information to anyone who is directly involved in the sales cycle” she explains. “You really want this to be marketing or someone else who was never in front of the particular buyer they’re interviewing. That way the buyer will be more comfortable speaking honestly and openly knowing they aren’t being sold to.”

How Marketers Can Turn Buyer Insights into Actionable Materials for Sales

During their conversations with buyers, Revella encourages marketers to focus on obtaining data around what she refers to as the “5 Rings of Buying Insight,” which can help you better determine how, when, and why buyers choose your solution. Essentially, this data can allow marketers to then provide sales with the following information:

• The key decision makers who salespeople should contact
• The key things those decision makers are going to love
• The process those buyers must go through to make a purchase
• The objections salespeople can expect to face
• How buyers view and compare your solution with the competition

In addition to using this data to inform and drive strategic decisions, marketing departments can also utilize this information for targeted content creation. From blog posts and emails to white papers and webinars, marketing can begin to prepare focused, effective messaging before sales even steps into the picture.

How Much Buyer Insights Research Should Marketing Be Conducting?

Collecting all this customer information is a substantial undertaking, but the potential benefits are huge. In order to obtain enough data while avoiding the risk of becoming overwhelmed, Revella suggests that marketers conduct 30-minute phone calls with eight initial buyers to start. From there, they can continue to reach out to one or two additional customers each month.

Revella stresses how important it is for marketers to understand obtaining buyer insights is not a one-and-done project. It is crucial to reach out and obtain new data regularly. That way, “marketers can readily identify when something is happening in the marketplace that’s changing the way your buyers think, and provide the rest of the organization with a clear, up-to-date, customer-eye view of your company’s place in relation to your competitors.”

While obtaining relevant data can require time and commitment up front, Revella points out the end result is a “modest investment for insights that can really change how you think as a marketer or how you think as a company.”

Do you agree that marketing generally has more success than sales in obtaining buyer insights?