What are your tips for Buyer Persona development?

We use a problem expert approach to developing buying persona profiles. We start by identifying what aspects of the solution are attractive to this type of buyer. While a user is going to focus on ease of use and certain functionality, an infrastructure person is going to be interested in management of the solution and ease of upgrade, a manager would care about service and support, and so on. From there, we reverse engineer the problem set. For every capability the target persona should care about, we identify the problem or challenge they should have that makes that capability attractive. This provides the framework for an effective discovery dialog with buyers in each category. From there we identify how they would measure the outcome of satisfying those challenges to build the foundation for value proposition development. Finally, we identify a business issue that would be impeded by each challenge to build a list of strategic issues this buyer type would potentially resonate with. At the end of this process, you should have a very succinct set of questions you can ask that will fit most buyers with an 80% accuracy while developing credibility for asking “great questions”. We’ve used this process with start-ups to get their product rolling out the door, and with Fortune 100 companies, in one case building a $14B attach rate business.

From personal experience, the fundamental key to developing buyer persona's is primary (feet on the street) research.

While you can establish and ground the basics in generally available demographic research (gender, age, income range, locality, purchase range, etc.), there is no way to really get deep into the discovery, evaluation, acquisition and consumption specifics without talking directly to your target audience(s).

Develop a set of very specific questions regarding the behaviors / emotions / beliefs / etc. you want to learn about and then ask these questions. Intersperse these questions with multiple, open ended "so what do you think" style pauses so that your persona development can capture the emotion underlying the answers.

The real keys to your personas will be the underlying emotions and beliefs as opposed to the "black and white" answers of a questionnaire ... so be prepared to pay attention to / for these cues.

I like Kevin's answer - expecially because I agree with it! Our approach is fairly similar. We build the Buyer Persona "backwards" by relating it to the Ideal Customer Profile. We feel strongly that the whole 360- degree process (client identification, acquisition and retention) should be firmly aligned with this Profile.

In our methodology, we use a disciplined three-step analytical approach to defining the Ideal Customer. It starts with identifying the value-added characteristics of the brand; then articulating the "value-sought" of current customers (i.e. their strategic reasons for buying), and finally comparing "value-added" to "value-sought" of a stratiscally valid number of current and past customers.

The end result is a benchmark that can be used for qualifying/account selection as well as the whole rangne of messaging and Buyer Persona design.

We'll typically take the analytical research to both marketing and sales executive teams to hash through it and if need be, conduct additional qualitative research to validate top-of-mind observations. The final step resembles what Kevini speak about - identifying the aspects and messaging that appeal to the buyer.

You're getting some good input here. I'd like to add that the fastest and most effective way to interview buyers is to conduct in-depth win/loss interviews. No survey works here -- you need to ask open ended questions about the factors that triggered the buyer's search for this type of solution and the process they followed to identify potential providers and reduce the list to a single choice.

After all, people who just chose to buy this category of solution are your buyers, by definition, and now you have their names and contact info. With the proper interviewing skills, a marketer can get the buyer to disclose their precise criteria for selection and how each of the companies on the short list stacked up against those criteria. Plus you'll find out which buyer personas were most influential to the outcome, who voted for or against you, and why.

Conduct enough of these interviews and you'll have a foundation for what I call a Product Persona Connection, which is a critical but overlooked aspect of the Buyer Persona.

My perspective is from a Practical Implementation standpoint, a Sales perspective.

Practically, ‘Buyer Personas’ are not “real customers”.
They are mannequin models, which have some of the shape and characteristics of people, but are essentially static, for shop window display. When dressing a Display Model of ideal proportions its easy to make the garments look good. You can pin the back, shorten the sleeve or double the cuff, you can even control the lighting.

In Sales we have to deal with real people,
each an individual, unique. They normally don’t have the body shape of mannequins, they are as they are, and one size never fits all.

My advice is: Keep it Real.
· Use as many real ‘Customers’ both won and lost as possible,
look, in detail, at some of the outliers.

· Remember that the Buyer Persona doesn’t really ‘exist’,
be prepared to continually modify and adapt.

· Where Buyer and Users are different,
make sure you have a ‘real’ User Persona as well

Don’t confuse the Market you want to be in,
with the Product/Market you are really in!

The purpose of Buyer Personas is to SELL more
and that’s the measure, not elegance.