Introduction: 0:05

Welcome to the Small Business Marketing Huddle. Our show is all about taking action. We equip you with the marketing knowledge and confidence you need to make real progress. So let's huddle up and listen in to the latest episode with your host, Lily Richmond.

Lily Richmond: 0:40

This is your first time visiting. In today's episode, I'm going to talk about decision making and how more than one person could actually be involved in the decision to purchase your product or service, and why it's really important for you to understand that. In marketing land, we like to use a lot of jargon, and buy a rolls is no exception, and it's a term that gets bandied around quite a bit If you sell products or services to other businesses, for example, but it is equally important to understand if you sell to consumers as well. So today we're going to unpick what buyer rolls are, why you need to understand them and how you can really use this information to tailor your marketing approach so that you can get more sales, because if your marketing is talking to the wrong person or ignoring an important influencer, then you are really leaving sales on the table that somebody else will very happily hoover up Now. I don't want you to be that person, so let's get straight into the topic of buyer rolls. Essentially, they are the various people who play a role in the decision to purchase a product or service from you, and there are six different buyer rolls. They are the initiator, an influencer, a gatekeeper, a decider, a purchaser and a user. Now, don't worry, I'm going to explain all of these, so don't get too worried if you haven't memorized already what they all are. Now, depending on what your business sells, some of these rolls might be performed by the same person, but it's handy for you to just think about these six rolls to work out which ones are relevant to your specific business situation. And we're going to use a really super simple example to illustrate the point. So let's pretend that your business hires out and maintains indoor plants for businesses in your town.

Lily Richmond: 3:12

Let's start with the person who is the initiator. So this is the person who comes up with the idea that something needs to be purchased. So in our example, the office manager in a local business might raise in a I don't know a team meeting that it would be nice if the office was more visually appealing and healthy and that having some plants could help do that. So in that case, they have initiated the idea for the purchase in their team meeting. They are the initiator. Now, of course, this only applies if there is an initiator. Sometimes there isn't, because someone isn't shopping for whatever it is that you sell in your business. So, for your role as a business owner often is about generating demand for a product or service, so there might not be an initiator at all.

Lily Richmond: 4:02

The next role is the influencer, and there could be more than one of these. An influencer is someone whose perspective or opinion is important or valued in the decision-making for your product. They influence the decision. So, using our example of the local business looking for plants for its office, other people in the team who are based in that office regularly, they might be influencers about whether they think it's a good idea that they have plants there. Or maybe a connection within the office manager's business network and coffee group has hired a company in the past for indoor plant maintenance and their opinion and experiences are valued to the office manager, making them an influencer. So influencers can come in all shapes and sizes, and this is a broader term than the idea that you might think of when you think of influencers and influencer marketing, because those are personalities who promote products and services specifically, but we all have influences in our lives.

Lily Richmond: 5:09

The third role is the gatekeeper, and a gatekeeper is someone or something that controls the flow of information or access to the decision-makers and influencers. So how would this work in our plant hire example? Well, if you think about it, google could be a gatekeeper, because they hold and they display review information about your plant business. But it could actually be a person. So a gatekeeper could be the office receptionist. Who's that first point of contact? Typically, a gatekeeper is someone that sits between you and your business and the influencer or the decision-maker. Let's take our plant business example and imagine that you were proactively contacting businesses locally, trying to convince them to add plants to their office. Now, oftentimes you would be stopped at the receptionist or the office administrator. But actually you know that you need to get to that office manager or the business owner, as they have the influence and or the power to make the decision to buy. So your email that you've sent is getting stuck at the office receptionist and it's likely to get buried. They often do, Because that receptionist either plays an active role in shielding the decision-makers from cold calls or they might just sit on that information and they might delete your email. So that's what a gatekeeper is, and it is really key to understand if you have gatekeepers in your purchasing decision process, because they can really make or break whether you get sales through the door or not.

Lily Richmond: 6:48

Now onto the fourth role. This is the decider. This one's pretty simple it's the person who makes that final decision to purchase. So let's use our example again. Let's say it's the business owner who makes the final decision about whether the office is going to pay to have a plant, a higher-age and maintenance company work with them. So the office manager has presented the idea, they've gone and looked at some preferred companies and the costs for each of the businesses that are around locally and it's that business owner who's gonna make that final decision to give the sign-off for that spend.

Lily Richmond: 7:21

Now the fifth role is the purchaser. This is the person who is going to make contact with your indoor plant hire and maintenance business and purchase from you and in this instance, let's say it's the administration assistant in the company. It's not the owner of the company that's actually purchasing, putting the card details in or making the call, getting a quote. It's the office administrator. And then the final role is the user, and this is the person who benefits from the product or service, but they might not have actually played a role in influencing, deciding or purchasing. In this case the users are people who work in the office, but it could also be clients who come to visit and use your meeting rooms or sit in a reception area waiting for their appointment. They're users too, so the user doesn't always have to be the person who buys the product. So I've rattled through those six roles. Let's just quickly go over them again. They're the initiator, the influencer, gatekeeper, decider, purchaser and user.

Lily Richmond: 8:23

So why is it valuable for you to understand these roles? Well, it helps you be more targeted and more effective in your marketing, and if you've listened to any of my earlier episodes already, you'll realize that I am super hot on targeted and effective marketing, right? So how does it help you? There's three key things, really, that can impact your marketing approach how decision gets made to purchase your product or service, who's involved in that decision to purchase and at what stages, because your marketing might need to engage more than one user or more than the purchaser. There might be an influencer or a decision maker that you aren't even taking into account today. It also helps you identify where those barriers might be, or information sources that you need to be part of because they are the gatekeepers, like, for example, an accredited industry database. If your business has some form of accreditation, then you might want to be on that accredited industry database as an example. So it's a really good way for you to understand what those information sources are that you need to be part of and where potential barriers are in the buying process for your product or service. So let me give you a real life experience from my career that shows how important it is for you to understand buyer roles and how it influences the marketing that you do.

Lily Richmond: 9:47

So I used to market credit card brands for a number of years and back in the day when sending direct mail was a thing yes, it wasn't actually that long ago that direct mail was still being sent out but we used to send out promotional campaigns for double reward points or something like that, if you spent over the weekend on your credit card and we used to use clear plastic sleeves so that the person who picked the mail up through the letterbox could actually see what the offer was. Now, in this day and age, we probably wouldn't send out plastic sleeves, but that's another topic for another day. So why would we send out those clear plastic mailers? So you could see what the promotion was. Well, quite often the person who had the credit card account had a supplementary card holder, and often that would be a husband and wife or partners, so one of them would be the main card holder and then there'd be a supplementary card holder. Of course, the account holder would have to be sent that mailing. It would be addressed to them, but ultimately we knew that there'd be a big influence on purchasing decisions was actually the other party in the relationship, and so it was a really good way for us to be able to communicate out to some influences about promotions that were happening, even though we weren't writing to them directly. So that shows you how you can tailor your marketing if you really understand who the various people are in the decision to purchase your product.

Lily Richmond: 11:19

Okay, and next up, I'm gonna talk about how you can apply this concept in your business and the actions that you can take. Right, so now we understand the different buyer roles, but I wanna point out here that it's really important that you keep it simple and remember that you really need to adapt these ideas to your business. You might not have all of these roles involved in the buying process. It might be just one person who initiates, decides, purchases and uses right, so don't over complicate it if your product or service is really simple, but it's a really good exercise if you go through and say, right, well, does that role exist in the decision to purchase my product or service? You know, what I'm trying to teach you here is how you apply these concepts in your business. It's not just a one size fits all formula. And another thing to consider is whether you sell business to business or whether you're selling business to consumer. Okay, business to business organizations when they are selling, often there are more people involved in the decision making process. That's why I use the example of a plant high-region maintenance company selling to another business. So if you're a business to consumer and it's just one person or two people that are involved, that's all cool, okay.

Lily Richmond: 12:47

So what are the actions that you can take right now to implement this in your business? Okay, down to the actions. Here are three things that you can take away to gain clarity on who the real decision makers are for your product or service and really supercharge the effectiveness of your marketing. So, number one what I want you to do is get a piece of paper and write out each role, and I've actually created a worksheet for this, which I'll talk about at the end. But if you're not gonna download my worksheet, get a piece of paper and write out each role. And just a reminder number one is the initiator, number two is the influencer, number three is the gatekeeper, number four is the decider, number five is the purchaser and number six is the user.

Lily Richmond: 13:36

The second action is I want you to walk through each of those roles for your business and jot down next to them, if there is someone in that role, who they might be, what they might look like, what are they interested in. Build up a bit of a picture about those people and what's important to them. Once you've done that number three, there are three questions that I want you to answer. The first is who do I need to consider in my marketing? So once you've brainstormed each of those six roles and whether they apply to your business, now you know who you need to consider, so write that down.

Lily Richmond: 14:12

The second question is how do I reach these people? What are they interested in? Where do they hang out? What sort of media do they consume? Who are their influencers? Build up a bit of a picture of them. So think about how you're going to reach them.

Lily Richmond: 14:26

And then the third question is what messages resonate with those people, what's important to them, what's their problem that they're trying to solve or what's the objection that they might have to your product or service. And if you've listened to episode one, you already know how to create engaging messages based on understanding your customer's problem or need. Now, if you haven't listened to episode one, have a listen after this episode and you'll get a great set of actions and tips on how you can message more effectively based on your customer's problem. Now you can go away and you can tailor your marketing and make sure you're engaging the right people in it. And, as I've mentioned, I've actually created a worksheet for this, because I appreciate that it's a bit jargon filled and there's a few steps to this process. So either visit the episode description for the link or head to my website at marketingondemandco, and then it's slash buyer rolls B-U-Y-E-R-R-O-L-E-S buyer roles or one word. So that's it. You should have everything you need now to define your buyer roles and make sure that you are targeting the right people with your marketing.

Lily Richmond: 15:44

Okay, that's the end of the episode. Thank you so much for being part of the huddle today. I really hope you enjoyed it. Now don't forget to hit subscribe, because next time we're going to talk all about purpose and how getting clear on what yours is will make your marketing less icky and salesy and much more meaningful and engaging. And this is going to be a cracker of an episode to start the new year, so you don't want to miss it. And as a quick reminder, visit the episode description to get access to my worksheet to help you work out your buyer roles and how to market to those people. Thank you so much for listening and I will catch you in the next episode of the Small Business Marketing Huddle. Now for the legal jargon. This podcast is for information and education purposes only. We make no business performance claims or guarantees in the information shared. The podcast content is general in nature and does not constitute advice for your unique business situation.