Podcast

Jim Kraus

#363: How to Use Storytelling to Create Authentic Buyer Personas

You know that the deeper you understand, empathize with, and appreciate your prospects and what they want and need, the greater success you’ll have converting them into life-long customers.

But you’re not a mind reader.

So how do you take the guesswork out of truly connecting with your buyers from their point of view?

You use storytelling methods to truly embrace the stories your prospects are telling themselves about you, your offering, and even your competitors.

Known as a creative, result-oriented market insights professional, Jim Kraus shows you how to use storytelling to truly understand what your prospective customer believes and values and what motivates them to buy your product or service. As President of the Buyer Persona Institute (BPI), Jim is currently focused on enhancing the value its core buyer persona business delivers to clients.

He has three decades of experience managing high-performing market research teams on the supplier and client side including IBM, Prudential, and Guardian Life. In that time, he’s worked on hundreds of studies that directly inform marketing, sales, and product strategy with a particular focus on understanding buyer attitudes and behaviors in markets involving more complex purchase decisions.

Jim is a Chartered Life Underwriter (CLU) and holds an MBA from Rutgers University. Outside of work, he enjoys reading, golfing, traveling and spending time with his wife, daughters, and two dogs (also female!).

Join us as you’ll learn why stories communicate critical information in a far more authentic, digestible, and insightful way than a repetitive Q-and-A approach ever could, how to conduct story-based interviews with buyers to understand how they really think and feel and what motivates them to take certain actions, and how organizations can use insights from buyers to tell stories about their own brand and solutions that create real connection and trust with prospective customers.

Discussed in this episode:

The biggest disadvantage Marketers have when it comes to increasing awareness of their brand and solutions
Why you need to start focusing on the buying decision that will inform every marketing and sales decision you make
How to conduct in-depth, exploratory interviews that will help you better understand the buyer’s story in their own words
The 5 Rings of Buying framework and how you can use it to leverage a narrative approach to ensure key aspects of the buyer’s story are captured and communicated effectively
The biggest mistakes you may be making when it comes to creating your authentic buyer personas
Ways to get your interviewees to open up and share their stories with you so you can get the insight you’re looking for
Jim gives his best tips on the probing questions you should be asking to reveal the cause-and-effect moments in a story that leads to real insight about how someone thinks, feels and acts