Startup CEOs who fail to define this persona can waste millions in sales dollars

Problem

"As designers and product managers we often build personas to better characterize the customer types we are selling to. There are many articles written about personas. But there is one very important persona that I don't see too many teams identify. This is the Blocker Persona for a B2B company."

"The Blocker Persona is different than the Negative or Exclusionary Persona, which describes the archetype you don't want as a customer so that you can avoid spending customer acquisition cost on them."

"If you're B2C company, the Exclusionary Persona is a person. If you're B2B company, it is an organization. The Blocker Persona however is one level deeper in the B2B context. It describes a person within an organization. The Blocker Persona blocks your sale within a larger organization. An organization that contains the Blocker Persona often becomes classified as a Negative/Exclusionary Persona, but not always."

"One example is test automation. A friend of mine who's a CEO at a Software Test Automation company created a visual and user friendly test automation solution. But his product was unintentionally stepping on the toes at customer accounts. As a result, he was unable to close a number of accounts."

"You see, his test automation product was great for companies doing software testing. But it was perceived as a threat for Test Automaters who work in those companies. It took his team 9 months of research to figure out why they could not close a number of deals that seemed like the perfect fit for the product."

"They initially identified their personas as follows:

• Development Managers — Buyer
• QA Managers — Buyer
• Developers — User
• Test Automaters — User
• Manual Testers — User"

"When in reality, their stats showed that their personas were acting more like this:

• Development Managers — Buyer
• QA Managers — Buyer
• Developers — User
• Test Automaters under the age of 35 — Blocker
• Test Automaters over the age of 35 — User
• Manual Testers — User"

"Even though the product sped up the work of Test Automaters as a whole, the group under age 35 was blocking product sale. This is because the tool was a visual 'drag and drop' rather than traditional coding. This group's aspiration is to learn to code via the Test automation role, then move into an engineering role. The 'drag and drop' tool took away this part of their role. So they were rallying against the adoption of this tool. The group of Test Automaters over 35 were more interested in doing their jobs faster, which the tool enabled. But the ones under 35 had entirely different goals. Over 9 months of failed sales attempts at these accounts could have been reduced if the Blocker Persona could be identified earlier."

Actions taken

"How do you identify the Blocker Persona? An approach that I take with clients is fully understanding the buying cycle via buyer interviews. As an unbiased third party, it can be easier to gather honest reactions to products. If you don't have a third party to help you with this, don't worry, you can still do this yourself."

"Steps to identifying the Blocker Personas:

1. Write out all the decision makers and users for your product. Collaborate with your sales and marketing teams on this. Use real examples. You should have 5–10 personas much like the list above.

2. Now we're going to do a win/loss analysis. Start with a list of your best won accounts, then make a list of your most regretful loss accounts. You should have 2–5 accounts per list.

3. For every account on the win/loss list, round up every persona at that company from the persona list. Conduct a 30 min to 1 h interview with each person about their activities during the buying process. This is different from a product usage interview where you understand how they use your product. This one is targeted at understanding the evaluation criteria they each used for your product, and how that information contributes to the buying decision.

4. Collate your results and watch the patterns emerge. Nine times out of ten you'll see a pattern. It may be a specific persona blocking your sale. If so, congratulations, you've identified the Blocker Persona. You might find multiple blocker personas, but usually there are only 1 or 2 at most. You might also uncover other effects, such as a communication gap at your customer's account that isn't your fault but that you need to fix or at least minimize if you want to close with these customers. Be open to the patterns that may emerge.

5. For bonus points, conduct #3 above with 2–3 accounts that are in evaluation phase. This can be extremely insightful as well."

Lessons learned

"With a Blocker Persona in mind, you can identify easily the stage close to sales but that blocks you and come up with counter-measures to help you reaching the final step."

Source: Startup CEOs Who Fail to Define This Persona Can Waste Millions in Sales Dollars