Developing B2B marketing personas
Identifying the person who you’re going to market and sell to is a core part of positioning — and it’s one that a shocking number of people get horribly wrong, at least when it comes to B2B tech companies selling into software engineering departments. I’ve come across personas that look like this:
Single male, 25-35 years old, no children, lives in San Francisco, annual salary around $150,000, likes to eat out and go to the gym in his free time.
What is wrong with this?
It’s not a persona, it’s a stereotype. The person who developed this ‘persona’ simply downloaded his or her stereotypes about what a ‘developer’ looks like. Leaving aside the sexist, ageist connotations of this stereotype, it’s also absolutely useless as a marketing persona for B2B software products or open source projects, because it tells you absolutely nothing relevant to the pain points this person experiences in his or her job and what your product might help.
When I see a persona like this, I assume the person who created it read a book about marketing (that was written for consumer products), failed to apply common sense, and then came up with this persona — hopefully never to look at it again.
Just to be clear, a persona like the one above is not useless in all contexts. If you are opening up a restaurant, or launching a personal care line or have a beer brand — the above persona could be spot on. I have a child and that influences what type of restaurant I want to eat at (in normal times, of course, since I currently eat in zero restaurants). But it is absurd in any B2B context.
Let’s say the pain point you solve is that you make it possible to deploy applications on Kubernetes without any custom YAML at all. Do you really think the engineer’s feelings about writing another custom YAML script depend on whether or not he or she has children? Do you think the fact that the person lives in San Francisco matters when trying to troubleshoot a problem that worked on the local machine but broke in production?
Lastly, our B2B persona is not shelling out his or her personal dollars for a devtool. It doesn’t matter how much disposible income he or she has, it matters what budget he or she controls (and whether he or she controls any budget at all). The engineer is ultimately spending someone else’s money, though — the money spent on your tool is not coming out of salaries.
So, what matters when developing personas for B2B engineering tools?
Sex, age, marital status, children or not, location (with some exceptions), hobbies, income — these do not matter at all when developing a persona for a B2B product or an open source project.
So what does? Stuff that is relevant to the thing you’re selling. Some examples:
Type of application the person is working on (mission-critical, revenue-producing, in scope for HIPAA, requires very low latency, stateful vs stateless, etc)
The tech stack (including the cloud provider, all platforms / tools at all levels of the tech stack)
The team size
Brownfield vs greenfield applications
Level of cloud native maturity
What the actual job title is: Are we marketing to developers, platform engineers, SREs, data engineers, security teams, ML platform engineers?
Is that it? Well, there are some more psychographic things that might matter, too. For example:
A developer who hates the security team and wishes they would stop bothering her
A director of platform engineering who is feeling squeezed between the demands of the individual contributors and the VP
The key is that whatever characteristics we include in the persona development have to be relevant to both the person’s job as well as to the pain points that you solve. Because — oh yeah — you want to include those pain points as part of your persona development.
If you want to get any value out of developing marketing personas, the characterstics in the persona have to be relevant for the thing you’re selling. This is true whether you are selling B2B or B2C, but I think it’s something more B2C companies get right (and then write marketing books about), leading to B2B companies developing wildly inappropriate personas.
Developing personas comes after narrowing down the characteristics of the type of company that will get value out of your product, and both are part of the positioning process. If you need help with positioning, I can help.