As designers and product managers, we often build personas to better characterize the customer types we are selling to. There are many articles written about personas for Startup CEOs. But there is one very important persona that I don’t see too many teams identify. This is the Blocker Persona for a B2B company.
The Blocker Persona is different than the Negative or Exclusionary Persona, which describes the archetype you don’t want as a customer so that you can avoid spending marketing and selling to them. If you’re a B2C company, this archetype describes a person. If you’re a B2B company, this archetype often describes organizations. The Blocker Persona describes a person, not an organization. It is one level deeper than the Negative or Exclusionary Persona and is especially relevant to B2B companies. The Blocker Persona blocks your sale within a larger organization. An organization that contains the Blocker Persona often becomes classified as a Negative/Exclusionary Persona, but not always.
How does a Blocker Persona work in practice?
You come in to close the sale, but you’re blocked… again.
For every technology product created, some human’s job is being simplified, modified, improved, and possibly made obsolete.
One example is test automation. A friend of mine who’s a CEO at a Software Test Automation company created a visual and user-friendly test automation solution. But his product was unintentionally stepping on the toes at customer accounts. As a result, he was unable to close a number of accounts. You see, his test automation product was great for companies doing software testing. But it was perceived as a threat for Test Automaters who work in those companies. It took his team 9 months of research to figure out why they could not close a number of deals that seemed like the perfect fit for the product. They initially identified their personas as follows:
Development Managers — Buyer
QA Managers — Buyer
Developers — User
Test Automaters — User
Manual Testers — User
When in reality, their stats showed that their personas were acting more like this:
Development Managers — Buyer
QA Managers — Buyer
Developers — User
Test Automaters under the age of 35 — Blocker
Test Automaters over the age of 35 — User
Manual Testers — User
Even though the product sped up the work of Test Automaters as a whole, the group under age 35 was blocking product sales. This is because the tool was a visual “drag and drop” rather than traditional coding. This group’s aspiration is to learn to code via the Test automation role, then move into an engineering role. The “drag and drop” tool took away this part of their role. So they were rallying against the adoption of this tool. The group of Test Automaters over 35 were more interested in doing their jobs faster, which the tool enabled. But the ones under 35 had entirely different goals. Over 9 months of failed sales attempts at these accounts could have been reduced if the Blocker Persona could be identified earlier.
Identifying the Blocker Persona is key to unblocking product sales
How do you identify the Blocker Persona?
An approach that I take with clients is fully understanding the buying cycle via buyer interviews. As an unbiased third party, it can be easier to gather honest reactions to products. If you don’t have a third party to help you with this, don’t worry, you can still do this yourself.
5 Steps to identifying the Blocker Personas
Write out all the decision-makers and users for your product. Collaborate with your sales and marketing teams on this. Use real examples. You should have 5–10 personas much like the list above.
Now we’re going to do a win/loss analysis. Start with a list of your best won accounts, then make a list of your most regretful loss accounts. You should have 2–5 accounts per list.
For every account on the win/loss list, round up every persona at that company from the persona list. Conduct a 30 min to 1 h interview with each person about their activities during the buying process. This is different from a product usage interview where you understand how they use your product. This one is targeted at understanding the evaluation criteria they each used for your product, and how that information contributes to the buying decision.
Collate your results and watch the patterns emerge. Nine times out of ten you’ll see a pattern. It may be a specific persona blocking your sale. If so, congratulations, you’ve identified the Blocker Persona. You might find multiple blocker personas, but usually, there are only 1 or 2 at most. You might also uncover other effects, such as a communication gap at your customer’s account that isn’t your fault but that you need to fix or at least minimize if you want to close with these customers. Be open to the patterns that may emerge.
For bonus points, conduct #3 above with 2–3 accounts that are in the evaluation phase. This can be extremely insightful as well.
How does your company identify Blocker Personas? Please share with me in the comments!
As a mother and an entrepreneur, my mind fills with worry. This is a story about a structured story technique I use to manage worry.
It didn’t used to worry like this.
I remember that in my 20s I was much more carefree.
Healthcare is on the precipice of transformative change. While Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been making headway for some time now, a particularly promising subfield - Generative AI, also known as Large Language Models (LLMs), such as OpenAI's GPT-3 or its latest GPT-4, is beginning to leave a profound mark with deep implications for Healthcare. Product Management teams operating in healthcare can leverage these technologies to advance the industry.Healthcare product management is a subset of product management. And as such, there are general principles that guide useful application of Generative AI. Here we will review those first. Then hone in on healthcare more specifically.
How do you build Habits that Stick?
Aristotle once said, “We are the sum of our actions, and therefore our habits make all the difference.”
I want to build habits that stick.
I want to meditate more, exercise more and eat better.
So I downloaded a meditation app, joined a gym and cleared my fridge.
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