The team at Pragmatic Marketing has just updated their 15-year-old marketing framework – a “market-driven model for managing and marketing technology products.” This is a big deal, as they’ve trained 60,000+ people under their previous model. The hyperlink above takes you to the page where they explain what’s new or different.
The revised framework looks like this:
What’s Changed
The new framework is now more business-oriented and strategic — the key changes from my POV. There’s more emphasis on buyers and their decision making processes.
In the strategy area of the framework:
- They’ve broadened the market planning activities to go beyond opportunity sizing to market definition and “frame of reference” setting.
- They’ve identified the need for product planners to define routes to market and the distribution strategy – based on an understanding of how customers want to buy and the sorts of pre- and post-sale services they expect.
Also new to the framework is the need to research and understand both the buying process and the buyer personas – not just user personas. For considered-purchase products, in which multiple people or business functions may play a role in purchase decisions, this change in the framework is critical. It’s particularly relevant for B2B marketers.
Even with B2B clients, I’ve often see way too much focus on user personas, to the exclusion of buyer personas. This can have unintended consequences for sales enablement, causing those programs to miss the mark and fail to orient salespeople as needed. Motivations, needs and wants for buyers can differ from users so failing to understand the needs of that buying ecosystem can be fatal for big-price-tag products and services.
I now wonder how much of the myopic focus on user personas in product-centric organizations has resulted from the lack of emphasis on buying processes and buyer personas within the earlier version of the framework. Was this an unintended consequence of Pragmatic’s previous framework? Their framework has been enormously influential among the current generation of product managers and product marketers, so it’s possible that practitioners may have been blind to this earlier omission.
In any case this is a good change on Pragmatic’s part, one I hope ripples quickly through the global tech marketing community. Better alignment between buyers and sellers will be good for business.
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We introduced the concept of buyer and user personas in 2000 to address this conundrum: product-centric organizations focus on the user; sales-centric ones focus on the buyer. To succeed we need to satisfy both. In recent years we have seen a heightened focus on the SELLING process instead of the persona’s BUYING process which is why we introduced the new box on the framework, moving Sales Process down into the readiness area.
Our framework reflects the best practices in the industry, not just how most companies do marketing but how the best companies do it. Discover problems, solve them, tell people, and focus on HELPING PEOPLE BUY.
Thanks for sharing.
Steve