Buyer Personas, Revised and Expanded, 2nd Edition

PART IVAligning Your Strategies to Win More Business

Now that you understand the attributes of useful Buyer Personas and the methodology to discover Buying Insights, we want to be sure you have a clear plan to use your insights to guide your marketing decisions. Your Buyer Personas are a marketing tool – a means and not an end. We hear from marketers every day who are responding to a directive to build Buyer Personas, but they can't tell us how they will be used.

Harold Geneen, the twentieth century business executive who The New York Times compared to General George S. Patton, Alexander the Great, and Napoleon, reflected on strategy with these words: “You read a book from beginning to end. You run a business the opposite way. You start with the end, and then you do everything you must to reach it.”

We built the Buyer Persona methodology because we knew precisely what the end result needed to be. Our vision didn't begin with the goal to invent a new research methodology or to understand buyers. Instead, we realized that marketers of high-consideration products needed the insight and confidence to build strategies that would help buyers choose their solution. So, we invented a methodology that would provide it.

In this final part of the book, we'll show you different ways to use your Buyer Persona to make decisions and execute strategies that will help you to win more business. Chapter 10 includes a step-by-step approach to using Buyer Persona insights to develop compelling ...