Buyer Personas, Revised and Expanded, 2nd Edition

5Gain Permission and Schedule Buyer Interviews

With the buy-in to move forward and the three study design questions from the previous chapter answered, you're now ready to identify, recruit, and interview buyers. What they tell you will be fundamental to your Buyer Persona and serve as the foundation of the marketing, sales, and product decisions you make for the foreseeable future. Buyers love to talk about important buying decisions they are involved in. But to facilitate that, you first have to find them and get them to agree to talk to you. This may sound hard – even daunting – but don't be discouraged. In this chapter, we will lay out approaches you can use to do just that and the mindset you should have to make buyers want to talk to you.

Use Your Sales Database to Find Buyers to Interview

You will ideally want to create an alliance with sales as you prepare to interview your buyers. Because your interviews will focus on recent evaluators of solutions like yours, the sales organization should have a database that includes the names, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses of many of the people you will want to interview. We will soon talk about other ways to find buyers to interview, but sales is one resource that you will want to explore, especially if you plan to do your own interviews rather than outsourcing them to a third party.

We recommend that your head of marketing should initiate this request with their counterpart in sales and that you do not take your request ...