Skeptical Steve Can't Be Automated
Personas were built for people buying running shoes. Health systems buy with committees.
Somewhere in your drive sits a persona deck. It has names (âSkeptical Steve,â maybe a âMedical Director Danaâ), some stock photos, a fake backstory, maybe a favorite podcast. And now itâs covered in digital dust: a check-the-box activity packaged into a PDF no one looks at.
That deck was never going to get used, and the reason has nothing to do with the quality of the research. The research may be good.
Personas were borrowed from B2C marketing, where you sell directly to one person who has a need, looks into the options and buys based on their personal preferences. Health tech buyers buy in committees and are responsible for making the best decision for their organization. That decision may have nothing to do with anyoneâs personal feelings or needs.
A person has feelings about the newest Nike shoe. They want the latest running technology because theyâre training for a 5K. They want it in red because redâs been their favorite color since they were five. Thatâs what personas are for.
In the last two issues, we walked through what health tech buying looks like: a 60-day to 18+ month journey (depending on your buyer), a buying committee your content reaches (mostly through one champion retelling your story on your behalf) and a kit sales and marketing build together to support that retelling. Nowhere in that scenario does an individual drive the entire purchase.
The organizationâs characteristics are the most important to determine fit: hospital size, teaching vs. community, what platform they run on, payer mix, where they are in their budget cycle. Then, inside that organization, a group buys on behalf of the org.
A typical persona with a stock photo doesnât answer the questions health tech vendors need answered: is this organization worth pursuing, and what role does this person play in making the deal succeed or fall through?
âSkepticalâ isnât a field
Have your sales or marketing team try this in your CRM: build an automation that triggers an email to Skeptical Steve when he visits your pricing page.
You canât. âSkepticalâ isnât a value or a field you can find in your system.
I cut my teeth in HubSpot and have spent years working in the system. Its ability to segment and automate depends on standardized fields: industry, employee count, job title, lifecycle stage. Every automation, list and report is built off those fields. A persona is a story that blends the characteristics of several different made-up people, and thereâs no field in your CRM for âbackstory.â
This is why no one uses your personas. The quotes, objections, and priorities in that deck canât drive a single workflow, list or report, because you canât filter on any of it.
Thatâs the first problem. The second relates to title-based personas: the same job title plays a different role at every company, and therefore a different role in different deals. A VP of IT might be your champion at one health system. At the next, your blocker. At the third, they may not care at all. An âIT Leaderâ persona has to describe all three of those people, and it describes none of them well. The title didnât tell you anything.
Three fields replace the persona
What you should build instead gets used and put into practice, and it takes less work to assemble and keep updated. There are three layers, each of them fields you can add to your CRM and take action on.
Iâll start top down:
Account traits. The firmographics that determine whether an organization is worth pursuing and how theyâll buy: size, setting, current platform, payer mix. This is your ideal customer profile (ICP), built out into fields that are actionable. When your team leverages those fields, marketing effort follows fit instead of vibes.
Job function. Different from job title. A title, as we already covered, is just that: a title that changes from organization to organization. Function is the actual work they do, how they operate inside the org, the role they play: finance, IT, clinical, operations.
Think of function in terms of the questions this person will ask. Will they ask about money? Are they concerned about risk? Are they worried about workflow disruption? Are they looking for outcomes? Then marry up your content plan to answer those questions.
Buying role. Youâll often see these labeled Champion, Decision Maker, Influencer, Evaluator, Budget Holder, Blocker or End User. No data vendor can sell you this field. Sales digs in during discovery to uncover who fits one or even more than one of these roles.
And now you have a field you can work with. It tells marketing who they need to get on their side, who needs that retelling material, and whoâs a user who just wants some education.
These three fields layer on top of one another to paint a clear picture of the buying environment.
Your account traits determine who is even worth putting into your pipeline.
Function determines what content each person gets.
Role decides what your champion kit needs to have in it for this specific deal.
Even a two-person marketing team can run that system in your CRM this quarter, because every piece of it is built in as a field, a list, or a workflow.
Keep the research, though
At this point, youâre probably thinking I hate personas and that Iâm suggesting you throw them out. I donât, and Iâm not. What I do think is that the research used to produce them can be looked at differently and repurposed.
The interviews behind a good persona project are some of the most valuable material your marketing team owns: buyers describing their problem in their own words, the objections they have, and the way they talk about your competitors or the incumbent. Those words deserve to be infused across everything you do: your messaging, your objection handling materials, your ROI brief. You donât need a fictional person to make the material useful.
And if thereâs one place where you want a deeper buyer understanding, make it your champion. Understanding how an operations leader thinks, what a mistake can do to their credibility internally and what they need to have available when they walk into their CEOâs office... that depth is important, because that champion IS your sales mechanism. Forget all the other personas. If youâre going to do that work, focus on this one and make it good.
The bottom line
Pop open your persona deck and your CRM, and give every insight in that deck one of two homes: a field it maps to, or a line of messaging it makes better. Anything that canât find either home is fluff, and you donât need it. Buyers are real people. Your data model should be built on that, too.
Where does your data model rank among your gaps? My Marketing Engine Diagnostic scores across five dimensions and shows you where to start.
Keep Reading
The Revenue Hiding in Your Pipeline â what conversion youâre already leaving on the table before you spend another dollar on leads.
You Probably Donât Have The Marketing Problem You Think You Have â the four patterns these four fixes map back to, and why founders usually misread which one theyâre in.
Selling to Health Systems Starts with Knowing the Journey, Not More Leads â Three healthcare buyers, three completely different timelines. Most stalled pipelines are a misread journey, not a lead problem.
About the Author
Heather Lodge, Fractional Chief Marketing Officer, The Hybrid CMO
Heather helps bring clarity to growing health tech and healthcare service companies that have the marketing talent but lack the strategic direction. She helps establish clear market positioning, lead focused account-based marketing programs and build the systems and teams needed to scale effectively. Heather takes the team and the budget you already have and makes them work harder. The right problems, the systems underneath, every dollar tied back to pipeline.