Sales and Marketing gain greater insight into buyers from analyses of data collected by their marketing automation, conversational intelligence, and CRM systems and from the sales funnel’s shorthand portrayal of the stages of the buyer’s journey. The buying process, though, is never linear, one step neatly filing after the other.

Additionally, many companies that sell to enterprises have launched Account-Based Marketing (ABM) programs to build relationships with buying organizations’ multiple influencers and decision makers.

To deepen Buyer personas are composites of actual buyers that bring the abstract nature of potential customers into sharper focus and serve as handy reference tools for marketers and sellers. Marketers usually begin developing personas by creating profiles that cover attributes like demographics, education, organizational role and job responsibilities.

To these profiles, they add a picture (often a stock photo) and invent a name, first and last, to breathe life into their characters. The objective is to paint portraits of your buyers that you’ll think of as real, flesh-and-blood people instead of generic buyers. If it helps, think of them as your new imaginary friends. The exercise of developing personas allows you to a walk a mile in your buyers’ shoes.

While helpful, such profiles don’t reveal enough. Buyers may purchase a product or service to achieve a clear business goal, such as saving $1,500,000 per quarter by reducing distribution inefficiencies. But they also make purchases based on something messier and altogether human: emotion. If Paul buys the right warehouse robotics solution, maybe she’ll leapfrog smarmy Bob to land the new VP position or perhaps save her job when the next recession hits.

The best way to gain a deeper understanding of buyers’ motivations is to talk with buyers — not your paying customers.

People who may be thinking about buying from you, those you think should be buying from you and those who bought from competitors. Some sales reps can be very protective of their contacts, so leverage the newfound cred you’ve gained by aligning Sales and Marketing. If you’re leading the persona charge, get together with your sales reps and agree on a process for interviewing buyers that won’t ruffle your reps’ feathers.

Acing the Interview: What Should I Ask?

What information do you look for to flesh out your character profile into a bona fide buyer persona? Adelle Revella, a consultant who has elevated persona development to a science, recommends you focus on reporting on what she calls “The Five Rings of Insight”:

Priority initiatives
Ask what three to five objectives the person is trying to accomplish by buying. Is this person the decision maker? Or is this person an influencer who is conducting the research on behalf of the decision maker?
Success factors
Does the buyer triumph by saving the company $1M annually? And does the win also involve an emotional reason, like saving systems maintenance time so the buyer makes it to her son’s basketball game for once?
Perceived barriers
Be brave and dig deeper: Has the buyer had an awesome or awful experience with your company? Does her VP not like working with vendors based in Germany?
Buying process
Ask the buyer to detail her steps and whom she works with at each stage of her buying process. While funnels and models are useful, real-world narratives make for invaluable intel.
Decision criteria
Unpack vague pronouncements such as “The product must be easy to use.” Easy to use by whom? When? Where? How often?

In your interviews with buyers, ask open-ended questions, which will set the table for them to give you detailed and often surprising answers. Armed with the results, you can transform your profile into a true persona, a more realistic picture of a buyer’s purchase process — from his or her perspective. Pure gold.

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