Often, I feel like I’m shouting into a void. Complex B2B buying and selling is about people connecting with people! It’s about human beings interacting with other human beings to accomplish shared goals. Business is, largely, about how we most effectively leverage our human resources (along with others) to most effectively and effectively accomplish our goals.
But all our behaviors tend to be pushing in the opposite direction, we driven to remove “people” from the equation. I suspect part of that is the messiness of humans interacting with each other.
Certainly, there are a number of buying/selling interactions that can be totally automated. I no longer write checks, I don’t even go online to pay my bills. They are handled automatically. I, sometimes, scan the bills for accuracy, but the process is automated. I count on regular deliveries of my favorite coffee, wine and a few other things. In all of these, I was initially involved in the buying process, but the ongoing monthly transactions are managed automatically.
But when we get into complex B2B buying/selling, it’s fundamentally about people interacting in meaningful ways with people. While we may leverage digital and other tools and sources of information to help in the process, they only free the time for people to connect with people in meaningful ways.
We’ve created some useful tools to help us more effectively manage that connection process. But too often, we use these as surrogates for actually connecting.
Personas are a fantastic start to understanding our customers. They help us understand the roles, key issues people in these roles face, key performance issues for these people. They help us understand their roles within an organization and other roles/personas that influence them.
They help accelerate our ability to identify the right people in the organization and connect with them. But personas are an abstraction, a theoretical model, they aren’t the person. While personas inform us of what the person might be interested in, until we connect with the individual in meaningful ways, we can’t understand what they are trying to achieve and how we might help them.
We don’t establish trust with personas, we don’t understand the goals, dreams, aspirations of personas. We don’t understand the fears and concerns of personas. We do this with human beings.
The more effectively we connect with these human beings, the more effectively they can, in turn connect with us. And it is through this connection that we understand and create value together.
In our outreach and attempts to engage people, not personas, we leverage techniques like “personalization.”
But just because you’ve said, “Hi David A,, how are things going at EXCELLENC.com,” doesn’t mean you have connected with me. It only means you thought you were using my name and my company. Even if you had used the correct personalization, just because you know my name and my company doesn’t mean we have connected. It just means you have communicated with me. It doesn’t mean I have any desire for responding or getting into a conversation.
Connection is about engagement. It’s about finding a shared interest, in which we are both willing to invest some time in developing.
The easiest way for us to connect is to think about what the people we are targeting might be interested in, and how we engage them in interesting ways.
But too often, we fail to do this, we engage them focused on the things we are interested in, without having any understanding of whether they care, whether they want to talk about it, or whether they want to talk to us about it.
Our purpose is to find the intersection of our shared interests. Are we interested in similar things and wanting to engage in conversations of shared interests? As sellers, we too often expect our customers to figure that out, then reach out to us. But that’s long, slow, and too many opportunities are missed.
ICPs, Personas, and Personalization help us narrow the aperture, helping us identify those who might have shared interests with us. Even if they may not know that. But we don’t establish that shared interest until we actually connect person to person. And we encourage the connection and ongoing conversations by focusing first on what they are interested in.
There’s a high probability this will lead to our shared interests, because of the sharpness of our targeting. But we have to start with where they are at, using that to explore where they might want to go and how we can help them.
Sometimes, these are great conversations, but no connection or shared interests. We might suggest someone that can help them, we might wish them luck and Godspeed. But as they move on, they may discover that shared interested, reaching out, “Dave, remember that discussion….” Or we might see something that has happened in their industry, company, or with them personally, reaching out, “Remember that discussion we had, does it make sense to talk further?”
Connecting with others takes time–not necessarily weeks, months, years–but it takes time. It’s seldom a single outreach or interaction, but a series of interactions. But they are always people connecting with others having shared interests.
We seem to have lost the people in our processes.
Whether it’s prospects, customers, partners, or the people within our organizations.
People are not abstractions. They are human beings. Wouldn’t it be novel if we started engaging them in that manner?
Afterword: A way to start bridging the Persona-Human Being gap is through the Brock Questionert. Feel free to download.
100% spot on. Re-
humanize selling!