What are buyer personas really? And who are they? [HubHeroes EP4]

• When you develop your buyer personas with intentionality and purpose, they are the compass that points you in the right direction of what content you create. 
• Not all your buyer personas should be the decision-makers you're targeting. 
• Marketers aren't the only ones at your company who should be using buyer personas. 

That's why we knew we had to dedicate our HubHero superpowers fully in this episode to the topic of buyer personas. Because they're so dang essential, and yet they're so often completely misunderstood.

But all of that misunderstanding ends today. By the end of this episode, you'll have total clarity on how to create buyer personas for your teams (or refine them to make them more powerful, if you have them already!), and how to use them properly.

WE ALSO TALK ABOUT ... 

• Negative buyer personas – what they are, why you need them, and why they may not always be negative buyer personas forever.
• Understanding the power of the researcher persona, because while they may not be your primary decision-maker, you absolutely need to pay attention to them and feed them great content.
• Why your sales team should also care about buyer personas, because they're not just a tool for marketers! 
• If you're a B2B marketer, you'll love this one:! We also dig into the differences between ideal customer profiles and buyer personas, and how they work together. 

Are you ready to dig in? Let's do this! 

RESOURCES FOR THIS EPISODE

Some of these we talked about, others we're adding because they're only going to make the episode that much sweeter for you ... 

• Demystifying your customer buyer's journey (HubHeroes, Ep. 3)
• What makes great content? (HubHeroes, Ep. 2)
• Join The HubHeroes Podcast community!
• Wait, what the heck is The HubHeroes Podcast?!

YOUR ONE THING FROM THIS EPISODE

Honestly, I need to mention two things from this episode: I know that's cheating, but whatever. These two things matter! 

• If you've already created personas, now is the time to revisit them. Do you have negative personas? Have you overlooked researcher personas? Are you even using them to their fullest potential?
• And if you haven't created personas, your directive is simple. Make your buyer personas, and take the time to get them right. The power is in your hands! 

SHOW TRANSCRIPT

Intro: Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are you plagued by silo departments? Are your lackluster growth strategies demolishing your chances for success? Are you held captive by the evil menace, Lord Lack, lack of time, lack of strategy, and lack of the most important and powerful tool in your superhero tool belt, knowledge. Never fear hub heroes.

Get ready to don your cape and mask, move into action, and become the hub hero your organization needs. Tune in each week to join the league of extraordinary inbound heroes as we help you educate, empower, and execute. Hub heroes, it's time to unite and activate your powers. Before we begin, we need to disclose that both Devin and Max are currently employed by HubSpot at the time of this episode's recording. This podcast is in no way affiliated with or produced by HubSpot, and the thoughts and opinions expressed by Devin and Max during the show are that of their own and in no way represent those of their employer.

George B, Thomas: You know what I love about that is that you guys have your own thoughts. I love the fact that you guys have your own thoughts, and they are not the thoughts of your employer. So we're gonna move forward with your thoughts because today

Max Cohen: Heavily heavily influenced.

George B, Thomas: Heavily influenced. Maybe. Just a little bit. So but but here's the thing. Oh, so are mine.

Like, I mean, you're not gonna spend 10 years with HubSpot and Inbound and not be influenced by the things that you've read. Although, we all have some kind of outside of those realms and things that we've learned. But it's interesting. I'm excited to dive in today's conversation because we almost dipped into it last episode. I feel like I almost had grabbed the back of Max and pull him out of the pit that he was kinda sliding into.

Because this week, we're gonna talk about buyer personas like we do. You're basically at the library or at the bar or whatever place you wanna envision as we're in your ears, and you're listening in on a conversation that probably if we combine the years as decades worth of thoughts and things like that. So let's just start at the very beginning like we always do. Max and Devin, as historical trainers, as people who help humans today, when you start this conversation around buyer personas, how do you explain what the heck they are?

Devyn Bellamy: I describe buyer personas as the people that you're talking to, and not just the people that you wanna talk to, people that you don't wanna talk to. You gotta find out who it is that you're communicating to. And I won't I won't tell you why just yet. We'll save that for later. But yeah.

Buyer personas are basically the the categories of people that you're speaking to as they relate to your product offerings and purchasing.

Max Cohen: I think the definition that, like, HubSpot gave it, the fictional representation of your ideal customer. There's interesting utility in, like, making it that fictional representation, almost kinda making them, like, a little bit of a character. Because I think buyer personas or the idea of buyer personas has a lot more use out of just kind of what I harp on a lot, which is making content. My whole thing with buyer personas is that I really focused on them, and I think I really tried to get people to over simplify it. Because if I think of any of these things like the buyer personas, the inbound methodology, the buyer's journey, those are a lot of different sort of concepts, I guess, that are all supposed to kind of work together.

And oftentimes, it could get, like, very very confusing for a lot of folks. So for me, I always try to oversimplify these concepts as much as possible. So for me, when I think of a buyer persona, yeah, it's a fictional representation of your ideal customer. Sure. But, like, my question is, how could I make it so marketers could then use that to actually make a little bit of progress on their marketing efforts when they were using HubSpot?

The majority of the time that I was talking about this is when I was helping onboard folks. So we were getting the marketing hub up and going. Again, we've all kinda talked about it. It's it's really hard to get a lot of value out of that without creating content. Where does your content come from?

Comes from your buyer personas. It comes from the goals and challenges that these people had. For me, it was always just, like, trying to simplify it into, like, these are the people who you're writing content for. Anytime you're trying to create something, make sure it's something that these people are looking for, and that's the utility that it serves. We can get into more, like, specifics later.

I totally agree with you, Devin. I think that's a great explanation of it. We're in line there.

Devyn Bellamy: You just said something that you reminded me from my days in radio. We used to have a picture of it was just a stock photo of a woman and a description. And over the top, it says, at star 947, our listener is and then it would say, woman, black woman, between 3545, married, 2 children, household income over $90. And so everything we said, we had that photo right in front of the microphone. Everything we said, we're imagining that this is the person we're talking to.

And buyer personas, there was a time when we used the term target demographic. You know, that's that's what us older folks used to say. Buyer personas are are are a bit more nuanced. And not only are they more nuanced in their description of them individually, but there's more than 1 buyer persona.

Max Cohen: True. On top of that too, when it comes to creating the content, your buyer persona isn't always gonna be the one buying. Right? Why is that not? Doesn't a buyer buyer persona doesn't always mean decision maker.

Especially when you're looking at creating a buyer persona for the utility of creating content from it.

Devyn Bellamy: Hope they heard that in the cheap seats.

George B, Thomas: Yeah. Right? We might have to say it again. I'm sure it'll be said again, but give me a second because I need to take my target market, walker and set it to the side here as as as as one of the old people, in the room. I do remember that.

And here's the thing. What's funny is actually I the question I asked is how do you teach buyer personas? And, again, for another episode, I teach it completely different than what you gentlemen have said. Not that I agree. Although, there is a piece that frustrates the crap out of me.

I'll get to that. Not that I disagree with anything that you say, but when I start to teach people buyer personas in HubSpot, I literally teach it as list segmentation.

Devyn Bellamy: Mhmm. Ingrain them early.

George B, Thomas: Yeah. I so I try to keep it as simple as possible. There are humans that you can serve, and there are humans that you cannot serve. And so what we're gonna work on is we're gonna work on knowing the roles, goals, and challenges of the people that you can work with. Those are gonna be your positive personas, and I'll talk about how I actually set those up in HubSpot with people.

And then we're gonna have 1 or 2 negative personas, those people that you know that you can't help because there's some awesome, dope, magical automation that we can put into place that we don't have to waste the time of marketing and sales until those non fits that we can see that they're going in the right direction. Here's what frustrates me though is the fact, and Max, you said it. A fictional representation of the I hate that it says fictional. You didn't sound like that. The voice in my mind sounds like that.

Every time I read it or hear HubSpot Academy say it, no. I get that it can't be Jimmy. I get that. And I get that it can't be Susie. I get it.

But I wish that we wouldn't be putting people's mind in the state of fiction. Because we all live in reality. These are real human beings with real problems that we can really solve with the products and services that we have. So I get what they're trying to say, but that psychological trigger mindset of a fictional representation of a no. No.

No. No. It's just the humans you help or the humans that you don't help. And please humanize them so that you can humanize the content, so that you can humanize the sales process, because the most human business wins. I'll get off my soapbox on that one for a second, but literally, yes, I agree.

Positive personas, negative personas, drives content, drives sale, is part of ideal client profiles. Oh, don't get me started. We'll get into that in a little bit. But the fact of the matter is in HubSpot, it is the base fundamental piece that you have to have in place for list segmentation and a major part of your form strategy because you need to come up with what are second smart questions. We'll dive into that a little bit later as well.

Max Cohen: That's super interesting. And and if people, like, don't know what George is alluding to there and and George, I don't know how deep you're gonna go into it later. But, you know, inside of HubSpot and you could do this with other tools if wanted to. But inside of HubSpot, there is actually this field called persona. It's a very magical one that you can go in and you can put little descriptions on how these people would self identify as who they are when they're filling out a form.

I am an IT director. I am a, you know, individual employer. And what's cool about that is when you really kinda structure your content around these type of people that would identify as one of those personas or descriptors that you would put on a form, It's really interesting because as you see people build up enough trust in you to actually convert on your content, you can kinda start seeing, like, how these people self identify and who your content is actually resonating with. And what's sometimes more interesting is not seeing how many people identify as one of those personas you may have, but how many people don't and choose the other option. Because that also kinda tells you, hey, you might be attracting like a whole different audience with your content here.

Maybe that's a good thing, maybe that's a bad thing. Marketing's one big experiment after all. But I think the the big thing I wanna kinda point out here is that this why I'm, like, super excited to have this conversation because all 3 of us have while we kind of, like, we're in general alignment and agreement on this, we do have very, very different perspectives, I think, on how to approach and how to use buyer personas even though we're kind of at a higher level of line. So this should be an interesting conversation for everybody to listen to.

George B, Thomas: And, Max, I'm super excited that you mentioned this are others. And here's what I would say, Hub Heroes. If you're listening this right now and you think to yourself, well, I don't have an other in my persona tool in HubSpot. Yet, you've heard people say that you need to do persona research over time. Guess what?

Other is part of your persona research because I'll give you a little story. At one point when I worked for the sales line in Marcus Sheridan, we had 3 major personas. It was all about marketing. It was all about sales, and it was all about, like, event planners. However, we added this magical other to the persona tool, and all of a sudden we realized that there was a metric butt ton of agencies who were listening to the hub cast.

A metric butt ton of agencies who were downloading the stuff that we had, and so all of a sudden, we had to come up with the persona that was Adam, the agency owner or employee. It could have been Anna too. Might not my point. But we had realized, wow, there's a whole another audience for the positive, Max, that we need to start serving. And so again, action item here is if you don't have other in there, you need to have an internal conversation.

Should we add other, and what does that affect upstream, downstream, all the streams if we add that in? The other one too, I'll just throw this out real quick. If you're listening to this and you're like, oh, I would gladly join an event to see Max, George, Devin, or just George, or whoever shows up to actually talk about specifically how to use the persona tool in HubSpot, you just need to hit the hashtag hub heroes podcast and let us know that's an event you would be interested in.

Devyn Bellamy: Well, first, you can also find us on LinkedIn. We're all pretty active there. One of the things that I wanted to bring up was looking at it from a sales perspective. We've talked a lot about marketing, but personas are very helpful for salespeople too, seeing how people self identify on forms. And if you've never created a form, and we've kinda gone over your head, if you go to the forms and you see what how would you describe your role?

And you see VP and then manager and then individual contributor. What they're doing on the back end is putting you into a persona. Now the reason why that helps with sales is because well, there's 2 different things. A salesperson can do one thing. They can just cherry pick, which is horrible, where they just go through and look for the people they believe are in the decision maker category.

Don't do that. What you wanna do, you talk to everybody. Every door, every store, every floor. If they fog a mirror, pitch them if they're qualified. What you should be doing is talking to people who are in not only their buyer's journey, but in the buyer's persona, where they're at, who they are, and talk to them that way.

And speak to their problems and tailor your demo, which if you're doing a cookie cutter demo, you're doing it wrong. You should tailor your demo or your pitch or whatever you wanna call it, have that conversation with that person, and address their needs. Because if they're not a decision maker, that's okay. You can turn them into a champion, and they can get you to a decision maker. And a lot of times, they can help the decision maker make the decisions themselves.

George B, Thomas: Yeah. A whole researcher strategy is something that will take you next level, but I gotta back up. I need to rewind for a hot dang second. Did you say every store, every floor, every door?

Devyn Bellamy: Yes. I did.

Max Cohen: If they fog a window, pet you.

George B, Thomas: Man, I feel like that's t shirt worthy right now. Print it, set it, send it. Let's get it going.

Max Cohen: That's what we put on the back of the podcast shirt. Yeah.

George B, Thomas: That's

Max Cohen: all fogging windows since 2022.

Devyn Bellamy: I love it. Shout out to

George B, Thomas: Every store, every floor, every door. Yeah. It's amazing. Alright. Max, I wanna go into this direction that's been bugging me all freaking week.

All week, it's been bugging me, and I I was waiting for this moment in time to actually talk about this. You said and I and people can go back to last episode, and they can listen where you said, call it ideal client profiles, call it buyer personas. I don't care what you call

Max Cohen: it, it's the

George B, Thomas: same thing. And I brother, I died a little inside. Because here's the thing. If you're b to c and you're listening to this, I'm not gonna argue with Max. There's probably not a large differentiation of what you would consider an ideal customer, ideal client profile, a buyer persona, and the b to c side.

Now b to b worlds of difference because an ideal client profile is the company. The ideal client profile is when we start to look into target accounts and account based marketing and those types of things. Now we need an ideal client profile. It's this type of mid sized company with a 100 employees that makes $1,500,000 a year ideal client profile. Now because we talked about all of this working together, where does the conversation today fit in?

Well, the buyer persona on the b to b side, the buyer persona fits in. Now I have these 2 or 3 potential types of people that work inside of this ideal client profile that I wanna actually create content and communicate with. Because it could be the CMO, the CEO, or the janitor that may reach out because the janitor lost the short ends of straw and had to do the research. Whatever. I don't know why the janitor's on my website.

But at the end of the day, there's these 3 different type of people, humans, personas from this ideal client company. And I know I'm using different words because I want you to understand the words that I'm saying that mean what we typically say is ideal client profile and buyer persona. So it is a rubrics, a matrix that layers that we need to pay attention to, not the same thing. Okay. I got that off my chest.

I'm gonna be able to sleep tonight.

Max Cohen: True. True. And and, like, the thing is is, like, I don't disagree with you at all. You need to know what kind of business that you're selling to, or what kind of business that person works at. Because again, that's gonna heavily influence what their goals and challenges are.

Again, this is kind of where we like we're looking at this all at, like, different angles, but we're all looking at the same thing. But it's good because people need multiple angles to look at this stuff, because not everyone's gonna synthesize it the same way. Big reason why I try to hypersimplify is that I'm just trying to get people to where they have the basic tools that they need to start doing the really hard thing, which is creating content. Guess what? Your software is not difficult.

HubSpot is not super difficult to use at the end of the day. There's plenty of training you can take to figure it out. There's plenty of people like us you can listen to to learn how to use the tool. The thing that's always gonna be very difficult is creating good content. My emphasis on oversimplifying is to really just get people to a place where they get the motion of creating content.

And, like, so for me, I wasn't the person that would send someone to I would send people to, like, make my buyer persona.com, or I would send them the template. But I would also just give them a little caveat of, hey, have fun filling out as much of that stuff as you want. But the place where you should spend 90% of your time, especially if you're just getting started And this is a first pass, is the list of goals and challenges. Because, ultimately, what you as a marketer need when you create a buyer persona is you need something to go to that is going to be your north star of what is the next piece of content you create. And at a bare minimum, you need to at least understand the goals and challenges, because again, that's what people are searching for online.

You can then go ahead and then cross reference that against things like the buyer's journey and things like that. You can work on how you're messaging that and your tone and how you're speaking to people as you start to flesh out some of that other stuff that's really important that Devon was talking about when it comes to a buyer persona. But for me, my thing was always just listen. Don't over complicate it. The bare minimum that you need is the inspiration of what to actually write about and what these people are searching for.

So my shtick has always been just go to that. But again, most of the people that I've been talking to had trouble getting over that very simple hurdle at the beginning. So that's kind of why my narrative has always been around the oversimplification. These are all great examples of, like, how you can take all this stuff to the next level. That's what people are listening to this probably wanna know too.

Let's keep digging. Let's level.

George B, Thomas: Oh, they wanna they wanna take it to the next level. They wanna take it.

Devyn Bellamy: On the ideal customer at that point, that's a whole another episode because that is the first step when we're talking about ABM. An ABM is a monster in and of it self. It changes how you do sales. It changes how you do content. It changes, basically, everything within your organization when it comes to targeting, personas is is you got into list segmentation early.

And teaching list segmentation because one of the things like, we we keep talking about, the different people you're talking to. One of the things that's important is not just about if you're making, like, blog content or something for your website, social media, that's different when you're tailoring different messages to meet different people. But when you are having basically captive eyeballs in the way of emails, you need to be a bit more, I guess you could say, deliberate in your targeting and messaging when it comes to your personas. If I'm sending an email out to the Acme company, the CEO doesn't care about the same stuff that the CMO cares about. They don't care about the same things as middle management cares about, and none of them care about the same things that the janitor cares about.

If you're going to be speaking to these people and you have an opportunity to have their attention, however brief the opportunity is, you need to put forth maximum effort to make the maximum impact.

George B, Thomas: There we go. See, he's just dropping bombs. He's dropping bombs today on the mic. I'm just saying by the way, speaking of dropping bombs, I ran over to our plethora of show note ideas just to double check. Did we, at the beginning, think about account based marketing ABM?

It wasn't on the list. It's officially on the list. It will be an episode in the future where we unpack everything that Devin's mind just went. It's a monster, and we're gonna unpack that on an episode. Coming back to personas, let's maybe dive into the conversation of positive personas and negative personas because I know what I think, But I'm super curious where the 2 of you, your brains go when I actually kind of bring up this positive or negative persona scenario.

Devyn Bellamy: A hot take right now. There are the reason why the the persona field in your form is gold is because it's not just a way to identify the people you wanna talk to. It's an excellent way to identify people you don't wanna talk to. I specifically use the other field, not just for persona research, but also to filter out sales people, who are just on my site spamming me. I will go through and do a monthly purge of all the people who are just dropping canned messages in my messaging field.

They're not robots, but they might as well be because all they're doing is control c, control v, control c, control v. I'm I'm completely over it.

George B, Thomas: I'll stop it. I apologize. I'll stop doing that to you, Devin.

Devyn Bellamy: Pro tip. If you are having problems with spam on your form, and captchas aren't doing it for you, that's another way, is to find ways for people to basically self eliminate. Another example that I had with a company I used to work with, we had they had this killer content. But as we dove deeper into it, we realized that a majority of the people who were downloading the content were students. And they weren't even domestic.

They were international. And it's like, fantastic, but you're clogging up my CRM. We were able to go through and start, eliminating. And we even, at one point, just started doing domain level eliminations of people because we knew that they were essentially just students. I think I think it was Taiwan we got, lot of traction there.

To sum it all up, just like there's people you wanna talk to and you need to know who those people are and how to talk to them. There's also a lot of people who you don't wanna talk to, who could just be doing competitive research. They could be trying to sell you something. They could be unqualified, bad fit customers. They could even, I don't know, be detractors.

Who knows?

Max Cohen: I think the only thing that, like, I'd add to that is if you're just getting started with this, I would say, focus on the people that you actually wanna attract first versus, you know, taking any time away from getting your content machine off the ground. But also, I think this something to think about if you haven't already been thinking about negative buyer personas, and you're starting to find that your sales people are wasting a lot of time with bad fit customers, might be something you wanna start to kinda implement. So marketing can weed that out the beginning, maybe point them in a different direction because maybe they're not a good fit now or just in general, they're not gonna be a good fit for your business. But yeah. I mean, that could be, like, one very easy way to ensure that those folks aren't even going through the marketing process.

You're letting them off easy at the beginning, and then, like, you're making sure you're not setting those to your sales people. If it's just never gonna be a good fit judging on, like, how you're setting your personas up and and who these people actually are.

Devyn Bellamy: Real quick. I just wanted to tail on to the end of that thought. It reminded me how a lot of people have their forms set up. Stop sending every lead to your sales team. Oh.

Stop. Yes. Stop sending it so anytime someone fills out a form, it goes to your salesperson. Not everyone who raises their hand is a qualified lead. Clicking submit does not make them a sales qualified lead.

It doesn't even make them a marketing qualified lead. It makes them a hand raiser. And at that point, and you can even use automation to whittle down that list. But don't have, as much as your sales team wants you to funnel all leads directly to them. There needs to be a filter in place even if it's just using workflows and automation.

Because what you're going to do is you're going to train your sales team to have bad habits. Your sales team's gonna engage in cherry picking, and all they're gonna do is look for the hot leads instead of working the possible SQLs.

Max Cohen: Yeah. And at that point, that's not even working together. Like, you're not really working with your sales team if you're just sending them everything. You're basically just saying, these are people who filled forms out on our website. There's no work that's actually being done to build a new trust or get those people actually ready to talk to sales.

You're not setting your sales team up for success if you're just giving them everything. And while they'll say, we want every lead, they'll also say in the same breath at the end of the month, why are you sending us all these trash? Yes. So just think about that for a second before you do it. It doesn't make sense.

And, also, like, let's be honest. You sick a salesperson on someone after they download a freaking ebook about something, they're gonna be like, oh, yeah. Aggressive much, and they're not gonna want anything to do with you. So chill out.

George B, Thomas: Yeah. Somebody needs to go over to our notes and add another episode of layers of leads and things to do or not to do. And there's a whole conversation about dating and marriage and whole bunch of stuff we could get into on that, but I wanna circle circle this background. Again, pulling us out of a pit of another conversation bring us back to buyer personas, and, honestly, even to the micro of negative personas because I wanna kinda put the pieces of the puzzle out there for a second just so everybody knows. And, again, we can do a different conversation, go a lot deeper.

But I actually treat personas it's 3 layers. It's positive, it's negative, and it's other. Those are the 3 layers that I make sure that I put in place. When I use the persona field, I am making sure that I do a couple things. 1, I'm always talking about all of them in a positive way.

So even if you're a negative persona, I talk about you in a positive way. And I also change my persona field from persona to how would you best describe yourself, and all of the answers start with I'm a.

Max Cohen: Mhmm. Yep.

George B, Thomas: A this thing. Because if you think psychologically, how do you answer? Who are you? Well, I'm a so that's just a psychological trigger. Now what I wanna do is I wanna paint a little picture of how this works because the negative persona might be somebody that you know that you can't help now, but you might be able to help in the future.

Let me give you an example, a little bit of story time here for you. I was once helping a company and they were a pest control company. And they knew without doubt that they could not help somebody who lived in an apartment complex. Because if somebody in an apartment complex wanted to take care of the problem, but their neighbor to the left, right, bottom, and above did not take care of the problem. What happens?

The problem does persist. Who are they gonna get yelled at? The company who didn't do the job, but the company did do the job. So they made apartment Annie and apartment Adam a negative persona. Now here's the thing.

When you went to the form to fill out and you selected that persona, it just simply said, I'm a apartment dweller or live in an apartment complex. That's it. Yeah. That's me. Positive manner.

Now what happened afterwards was magical because they selected that. They knew sales and marketing shouldn't be bothered with them at that moment, but it sent out an email. And it sent out an email that said something like, unfortunately, we don't service apartment buildings. However, we've done some research of x y z city in x y z state, and here are 3 companies that will actually help you. By the way, if you're curious when we would be able to service you, check out our by the way, this is a pro tip, ladies and gentlemen.

Check out our who we're a good fit for page, and it had a link to it. They would literally go to the page. And so when Adam from 23 and Susie from 27 a actually meet, get married, and get a house, and they've got a reptile problem as far as, like, snakes and whatever. They know they're a good fit.

Max Cohen: To the bathroom.

George B, Thomas: Right? They're a good fit, though, because they've been educated. Now 2 things magically happen because of this little property set up in a proper way is that 1, you saved sales and marketing time so they can actually work on qualified leads, which again we'll talk about that in another episode, and you made somebody who you can't generate revenue a fan because you did the research and educated them so that in the future, they can be a customer.

Max Cohen: There's some physics here I wanna kinda hit on on why this little bit's so important. When you think about someone filling out some information on a form, especially when you're pretty new to them and you haven't really proven yourself as a trustworthy, reputable holder of their information, because giving away your information on the Internet today is still kinda scary. You gotta remember that that you can't ask for too much on a form nor nor should you. If you don't need the information, don't ask it. And, again, if it's like some early awareness stage content that maybe you're putting behind a form or something like that, you don't need to collect someone's phone number.

Because if you're collecting someone's phone number that early, you're only doing it for a salesperson to call them. It's gonna help you 0 when it comes to actually helping you make a decision on what kind of content might be helpful or valuable or educational for this person. When you ask that simple question of what best describes you, that's a pretty, like, general generic piece of information that someone's gonna be a lot more willing, I would say, to give away. Besides, like instead of, like, their phone number or the company that they work at or all this stuff that you don't need until a sales rep actually needs it to have a conversation with them. And what's beautiful about that is that it gives you some pretty good general intel on who this person is or how they self identify.

And from there, you can make pretty simple educated speculation about what type of content might be useful for them because you can say, oh, you're just an apartment owner and not a homeowner? I can make some reasonable assumptions around what your goals and challenges are. Whereas if I just had your phone number, what's that telling me? Oh, this person has a phone. Let's make content for people

Devyn Bellamy: with phones. Yeah.

George B, Thomas: Let's do that.

Max Cohen: Anyway, little rant.

Devyn Bellamy: Yeah. He, he definitely hit it right on the head. The thing is is that forms are a form of currency exchange, and the currency is information. If you are filling out a form, you're expecting something to be worth it on the other side of that form. And the more information you're asking, the more you're expecting from the other side of that form.

If I'm downloading an ebook and you have 10 fields on your form, no. Not at all. If you look at HubSpot slide in forms, I think you can't even add more than our, certain number of questions anyway. Same thing with the calendar invites. Because at that point, for every new line that you have on a form, you are lowering your conversion rates.

And so forward. Yep. Exactly. You need to be intentional with the information that you're asking, understanding that the value of whatever's on the other side of that form may not be worth what you're asking them to do.

George B, Thomas: Oh, I can't wait till the episode where we talk about conversion rate optimization and forms. I can't wait because that's gonna be the day of all days. Don't even get me started on this whole idea of conversion for sales versus collecting for conversation. I'm just gonna throw that out there real quick. We'll get to it someday when we get to that episode.

But where do you wanna head next as far as this conversation around buyer persona? There's so many directions we could go in. We could go in the fact of automation. We could go in the fact of resources. We could go where do we wanna head next to help the Hub Hero podcast listeners?

Max Cohen: And maybe this has been kind of implied since we've talked a little bit about buyer personas as a concept to help you create content and and make sure you're speaking to the right people and speaking to them in a way that they wanna be spoken to. But I think there's also this utility of this personas field in HubSpot and putting it on forms and things like that. I think if you're trying to figure out, is your content strategy having a positive impact? I think a couple data points you can look at is, hey, are are we getting more traffic from organic search? Cool.

I mean, that's kinda telling us that we're creating content that people are actually looking for. So the content strategy is starting to work a little bit. But then that second layer you get when you start actually using that persona field in HubSpot or even, like, start asking other questions on forms that can kinda help you confirm that you're attracting the right people, that also tells you another layer. Yeah. Not only are people coming to the website, but you're attracting the intended audience that you created it for because people are self identifying as these options that you're giving them.

The only other bit that I'll insert in there, and I think this is really important for buyer personas and just why I think there's still, like, a an argument to, like, gate content these days. You shouldn't just be gating content to, again, fire leads over to your sales team. Like, that's not doing anything. What you wanna be doing is you wanna be using it as an opportunity to learn more about people in small increments. So that all of your actions after in terms of whatever you wanna call it.

The automation journey you take them on or the content you continue to provide to them or the experiences you serve up on their website or whatever. Right? Or even just so you can get to know, like, who you're selling to better. Think of when you're collecting information or getting it behind forms, what can you do as a marketer to kinda learn how to better market to them after, not just get them to a salesperson as quick as possible, especially if they're not ready for that. You know, it just doesn't make sense.

Use your forms to kinda learn and again develop that buyer persona over time. And also, your buyer persona will change over time as you learn more about your customers too. Just because you're right them at the beginning, it's not set in stone. So always know that what these look like right now, they may look completely different in a year, and that's okay. Don't have to nail it to perfection at the beginning.

Devyn Bellamy: One of the things I like you said is that automation journey. There is so much you can do with automation when it comes to buyer personas. There's your database maintenance. You're basically good housekeeping with your data using personas. I'll tell you about some of the different ways that I've seen it used.

1st, you have personas. And if you serve multiple verticals, you can channel by vertical what industry they're in as well as their persona. And then you can start sending them targeted emails that are relevant to them, something that can be hyper niche as they go further and further down your content. So you can keep yourself top of mind while offering value that is very specific to them. We talked about before that everyone nerds out about something.

This is giving you an opportunity to nerd out on an almost individual level. And you can do that with automation. After looking through your database and saying, hey. We have a lot of CEOs that are working in this specific service sector. We should start getting content that they care about and curating content that they care about and pay someone 10¢ a word who is an excellent researcher, get it done.

The other things that you can do with your segmentation, because at the end of the day, it's all about segmentation with automation, is that you can send specific leads that and our pricing page. And so you have a decision maker who wants to know how much our stuff is. Yeah. I'll go ahead and send that over to the sales team instead of just keeping them in the marketing washing machine until their lead score goes up. Speaking of lead scoring, you can add buyer personas to lead scoring, plus 10 if they're a CEO, plus 20 if they're a CEO, plus 30 if they're a janitor.

You know, however you wanna get down. It's the automation aspect of it using buyer personas personas will, allow you to segment your database as the data comes in.

George B, Thomas: Okay. Okay. I gotta jump on that real quick. A couple things. And if they're apartment Adam or apartment Annie, AKA Negative Persona, Negative 500 points, right, on that lead score.

Right? If they're anyway, there's, oh, let's talk about lead scoring. We need an episode on lead scoring, but we can't do buyer personas. So, Max, you talked about you talked about a little bit of information over time. Don't get me started on queued fields.

That's 1 in HubSpot forms. But because of what Devon said and because of what you said, there is something that I have taught for years called second smart questions. And what it's all based on is the fact that you have buyer personas in place, and it literally says, how would you best describe yourself? I know if they say CMO or CEO or sales or whatever it is, there is 1, if not 2, maybe even 3 questions that I would ask differently of if it was sales or if it was a CEO or of so now you have the power in HubSpot where you can ask that second smart question based on now you know who the heck they are. You take your research of the problems that that type of person usually faces, and you address the questions that you wanna ask around that.

And all of a sudden, you not only have email automation based on persona, but you have email automation based on persona and the answers to the second smart questions that you asked them, AKA, by the way, Google dependent fields in HubSpot to pull this off. Now we're talking ninja segmentation, ninja communication. We're talking doing the things that actually make you better than your competitors.

Devyn Bellamy: This is the kind of stuff they teach in breakout sessions and inbound people. You're getting so much sauce right now.

Max Cohen: You're you're you

Devyn Bellamy: have so much sauce.

Max Cohen: There is a lot of smart stuff you can do when you kinda combine those data points of what general archetype character are you, persona, plus other bits of information, especially some of the stuff that HubSpot can collect. So, like, if we were targeting a more researcher persona and for anyone who doesn't know, like, when we say research persona, we mean someone who's actively looking and and they have goals and challenges that you create content for, but, ultimately, they would never be the decision makers of purchasing your actual product. But they're the people doing the research because they have a goal or challenge that you're potentially gonna solve for. They still gotta get their CEO or someone else to kinda sign off on something. When you start identifying these people, it's like, hey, this is the lower level person at a company that we might sell to.

Obviously, they don't have the decision making power, but we know that they've seen x amount of pages on our website, and we know that they've looked at our pricing page. So we know in their head, they're aware that we sell something. And they've been active enough with our content that they probably kinda have a good idea of what we do. They know that we sell something. Maybe that's a really good opportunity to build a workflow.

And I think, Devin, you were kinda saying this earlier. You may have said it under a different scenario. But you could say, for example, hey, we'll create some decision stage content built for these internal champions that don't have buying power, but are doing a lot of the research that we can send them that says, hey, if you're interested in what we have to sell, here's a kit that helps you pitch it to your higher ups and explain the value of it before you even have to talk to a sales rep. So if you wanna get them interested, but you don't wanna pull them into crazy sales conversations, here's a tool you can use. Just one of an infinite amount of examples you can use when you start really thinking smart about how you use that general identifier of buyer persona, that property, among all the other data that, like, you can kinda collect.

George B, Thomas: So here's the thing. We have been on here for almost over 40 minutes giving you value. I'm gonna say this. I have a list of resources. If you haven't gone to the hub heroes dotcom and signed up for the show notes.

In the show notes, we're gonna put a list of resources, building, reading, all sorts of things around personas, but I wanna end with the last few precious moments that we have to talk about buyer personas until we dip into them again in some other episode when we're not supposed to. I wanna go ahead and leave the listeners with some action items of what they should be doing. Devin, Max, when you think about HubSpot, inbound, customer experience, when they are done listening to the outro of this podcast?

Devyn Bellamy: If you don't have buyer personas, get them. If you're gonna do a world of good for in your organization. The best way to start is to ask your customers. Talk to your customers. Have questions.

There's entire trainings on how to do this that you can talk to your salespeople. And as you're drilling down on these, one of my favorite questions as salespeople is, what's the number one question that you get all the time? What are the top five questions or the top five pieces of information that you find yourself constantly giving? And then build around that. That's how you identify what the different persona's challenges are.

If you don't have them, do it. And if you do have them, then go back, research them. Look at the people who have fallen through the cracks, people who have selected other, and then just go do research on it. Look at who's filling your stuff out. See look for missed opportunities.

Look for trends. And then take that information and then do something new. And the last piece, and and it's gonna sound crazy, don't be afraid to nuke your personas. Don't be afraid to blow them up and start over again. You might have completely misidentified your areas of opportunity going into this, and that's okay.

Like Mac said, marketing is is experimentation. That's that's all it is. Sometimes experiments fail. If that's the case, if you're able to say, well, this person, I had them in this one before, but based on this criteria, they should actually be in this one. If you're using HubSpot, there are actually ways to create work flows to to do that, where it's basically logic branches where you can just go down.

If they have this criteria, go there. And if they have this criteria, go here. It's possible. But the thing is, don't let the amount of time it's going to take you to accomplish your goal stop you from achieving your goal. Don't let that fear of work get in the way of success.

George B, Thomas: Max, I'm gonna jump in here real quick because, Devin, you said something vitally important. Don't be afraid to blow up your personas. And as somebody who might be listening to this, my brain went into who they are and what they might think, and they're like, well, how do I know if I should nuke my personas? Ladies and gentlemen, if you go to your persona tool and it says CEO, CMO, or any other type of random job title, that is a job title. There is a field for that.

That is not a persona, and it is time to hit the bomb. Just so you know, Max, go ahead. Action items.

Max Cohen: My version of that is I'll talk to the people who may think they have buyer personas already. What I'll say is if you're trying to figure out, hey, should we hit the nuclear button and kind of maybe rethink these, ask yourself the question, is a buyer persona or the way that you look at it, are your buyer personas acting as a tool to help you be a better marketer right now?

Devyn Bellamy: And a better salesperson.

Max Cohen: Yep. And a better salesperson. Absolutely. And if they're not, that's a pretty good indicator that you should probably revisit them. And again, for me, the biggest piece of advice I always gave people whether they're just starting out or they want a simplified way of approaching it is go get a piece of paper, draw a line down the middle, right, goal's on your left, challenges on the right, and just go to town.

You know what your product solves for. So you should at least know some of the problems that people have, maybe even some of the problems that they might have being in the role that they are. You don't have to pay some marketing agency to go out and do a bunch of expensive research. You could do a lot of this based on educated speculation. Don't overthink it, but, you need to think about the goals and challenges that people have in those roles that they play that don't directly have to do with what you sell because their goals and challenges are much broader than that, and we talked about this in other episodes.

You don't have to pigeonhole your content into just being about what you sell. Keep an open mind, write about stuff, create content about stuff, shoot video, audio, whatever it is about stuff that's important to these people that you're trying to attract. It doesn't have to directly tie back to what you sell.

George B, Thomas: Here's my action item. First of all, do everything that you've heard in this episode if you haven't done the things that you've heard in this episode. If you're sitting here and you're like check check check and you're like, I am the master of my universe. I get to sit back on my laurels and relax. Here would be my action item for you.

One, you need to sit back and look around and say, have I taken the time to go past that and build out the persona story? 2, is that persona story visible by everybody in my marketing, sales, service, operations, rev ops, HR, CEO, c suite. I'll name all the humans all day long, except we don't have time on this podcast. Is it visual? And do they know what actions their department and they as a human need to take or interact with said persona story that they're now able to visualize.

Okay, hub heroes. We've reached the end of another episode. Will lord lack continue to loom over the community, or will we be able to defeat him in the next episode of the hub heroes podcast? Make sure you tune in and find out in the next episode. Make sure you head over to the hub heroes.com to get the latest episodes and become part of the league of heroes.

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