An Oil Industry Example of Persona Mapping

Say hello to Charlie, Sally and Lucy. They are stakeholders in the buying process for a new technology your company represents. 

Sally is a geophysicist who spends her time looking at squiggly lines from 3D seismic and interpreting them into a cube of information about the subsurface and its many layers. Her team applies all the latest algorithms to process, filter and interpret the data into something tangible for others to understand the structure of the reservoir. 

Charlie is a geologist who has spent his career analyzing the basin in which Sally’s seismic data was derived. He has a deep understanding of the basin architecture and depositional environment, and his team includes several sedimentologists and structural geologists with expertise on the specific formations. Together they are working with Sally’s team to incorporate the seismic data into the geomodel before it is delivered to their boss, the VP of Exploration, Lucy.

This team of geoscientists needs to make a recommendation about the viability of a prospect and whether it is worthwhile to pursue under the current economic conditions. Their organization’s leasehold will be expiring soon, so their recommendation will be the difference between maintaining the acreage or releasing it to the open market.

Sally is early in her career, mid-thirties and eager to make her contribution to the organization. She cares about her team and wants everyone to succeed, but she often gets frustrated with the slow pace of the oil patch. She has been researching technology that would help integrate her workflows more seamlessly with Charlie’s geomodel, and would allow the two groups to collaborate more efficiently while also capturing the assumptions and changes to their model. Sally thinks introducing this technology will not only solve some of their immediate challenges, but will also help her secure a promotion.

Charlie is a thirty-year veteran in the oil industry and is thinking about retiring soon. He can’t quite afford to leave the healthcare benefits behind to enjoy a life of leisure, and he tends to be nervous about ‘forced early retirement’ due to the cyclical nature of the industry. Although he also believes the existing workflow is flawed in that it is quite time-consuming and he feels he has to repeat himself often, he doesn’t want to make changes to the status quo that has served him well by adopting a new technology that will take months to learn. Charlie tends to be more risk averse and thinks the current method is tried and true - after all the company has been doing it this way for the past decade.

As the VP of Exploration, Lucy needs the most accurate data at her fingertips. She knows there are differences of opinions between Sally and Charlie, but she doesn’t always have time to evaluate options and implement an appropriate solution.  Lucy needs to know if the prospect shows sufficient evidence to recommend drilling a wildcat well and further investment. She cannot afford to work with partial datasets and assumptions that cannot be properly explained or defended. Due to the downturn, her team is under tremendous time pressure to review the entire portfolio quickly, but she had to lay off several critical team members earlier in the year which will make meeting the deadline problematic. Lucy has always been an excellent leader and the company values her judgement on their holdings. If she proposes the purchase of new technology, she will need the appropriate ammunition to sell the benefits internally to gain the necessary support and funding, and she will need her whole team’s commitment to adopt the technology. She is worried that asking for funds to support the new initiative may be viewed as outlandish given the current economic environment and her reputation may be damaged in the process.

Identifying the Problems

In the above example, I’ve provided three unique profiles of people within a single organization that are all focused on resolving the same problem(s) but in different ways.

Problem 1: The Business Problem

Technology developers, product management and sometimes even the sales organization, often overlook the business problem. This usually occurs because the product is designed for users and therefore the features and functions solve an individual’s pain point. However, the reason you want to identify the business problem is that nine times out of ten, the economic buyer (he/she who holds the budget) is responsible for approving the purchase and usually their day-to-day job doesn’t take advantage of the product’s fancy gadgets or 24-hour support.

You can identify the business problem by peeling away the many layers of the buying decision and asking why the organization will benefit from the change or adoption of the new technology. What will the organization miss on account of using their existing method vs. replacing with the new product? It is typically the point at which a critical decision is made, and often times requires a financial investment or change management commitment from higher in the organization. 

In this example, there are a few business problems: 

1. The organization is in financial trouble and needs to offload less attractive positions; 
2. The time constraints to evaluate the portfolio of assets requires the team to change how it works; and 
3. Under the previous two circumstances, the current method of evaluation may cause costly errors and poor recommendations

Problem 2: The Team’s Problem(s)

By reading between the lines, you can deduce the team is not operating as efficiently as it could if all the members were using the same technology to develop their concepts and store their interpreted volumes. This impacts their ability to make a sound recommendation to Lucy.

It also seems as if there is no easy way to capture the reasons for changing the geomodel or for defending the assumptions incorporated in their assessment. This poses a risk to the organization’s ability to effectively manage uncertainty and increases the potential for expertise to get lost as employees leave the organization.

The team problems:

1. The compressed timeframe to complete the task will highlight inefficiencies in the department and the team may risk being perceived incompetent or incapable;
2. Their current method was ok during good economic conditions when they had more time and people to research and analyze the data; and
3. The team has lost expertise due to layoffs and the knowledge from those colleagues was never properly captured so they run the risk of providing recommendations on incomplete assessments.

Problem 3: The Individual’s Problem(s)

There are usually two categories of individual problems that should be considered when creating a persona map. 

1. The professional dilemma – this is characterized by a pain point(s) that keeps the individual from performing at their best in their day-to-day work environment. 
2. The emotional or psychological dilemma – these pain points are typically related to the individual’s personal goals and are largely driven by factors external from the demands of their job. They are personal motivations for endorsing or objecting to a product or service.

In this example, Lucy, Sally and Charlie each have separate and completely unique personal objectives or problems. While the new technology might be an ideal solution for tech-savvy Sally, it poses a significant threat to Charlie. Consider how each person’s personal motivations can influence the sale of the technology. What can you provide to each individual to help them overcome fears, doubt and uncertainty in order to secure the sale? How is your company uniquely equipped to support them during this time of change?

Applying Persona Mapping

By now, you can tell there are several factors to consider in this complex solution sale. The sales team will encounter objections that might be business or personally motivated, and they will need to be armed with the ammunition to overcome these objections.

Persona mapping is a method to help marketers, product managers and sales personnel understand whom to target and how to craft unique messaging that speaks to the challenges faced by the various stakeholders in the sales cycle.  As marketers, our job is to help the product management and sales teams generate the persona profiles, create the appropriate messaging, and consider the best methods for reaching those target audiences. It is also our job to brainstorm tactics that will help the sales team advance the prospect through the sales cycle – to give them the right tools at just the right time.

Using Lucy as the example, a presentation complete with appropriate cost- and time-savings examples and an ROI calculation on the benefits of adopting the technology for her to sell the idea internally to her superiors would be incredibly helpful. Charlie would benefit from some advanced access to the platform with self-help tutorials so he can quickly get acquainted with the software. Case studies or testimonials from other satisfied clients may give Sally the confidence to champion the product among her peers. Offering a webinar on how to apply the technology to a specific geology-based reservoir challenge might reassure Charlie that his team will get regular support. A well-written thought leadership article on the business challenges of portfolio evaluation during an economic downturn could help Lucy pitch the technology as the right choice for their business. Providing an example implementation workflow may give everyone the confidence that the organization will experience minimal disruption during the deployment.

Creating tactics that are tailored to a specific profile gives the impression the seller understands their clients and appreciates the unique environment in which they work. It also helps the sales team earn credibility if they can speak beyond the features and functions of the product. They will be seen (and by consequence the brand will be seen) as experts and the superior technology choice to solve their business and personal challenges.

Persona mapping is also used by Product Management to communicate with the development team. It can help the developers or engineers understand how users might interact with the product or the types of problems faced by various stakeholders. For example, Lucy might appreciate a feature that gives her a dashboard view of all the prospects in the portfolio so she can see the status on each evaluation. Understanding her role (and others) within the client organization helps the developers and engineers create a product that provides a solution to a specific pain point. It also helps them keep their focus on developing technology that is customer-centric.

The sales team not only benefits from having tactics that support the lifecycle of the sale, but they also have a reference when visiting with clients. They can identify the Sallys, Charlies and Lucys in their accounts and can then begin asking questions from each stakeholder to understand their motivations and objections. If their prospect fits one of the persona profiles, they will be better equipped to guide the conversations, demonstrations and negotiations to best satisfy the needs and dispel the concerns of the stakeholder.

Lastly, persona mapping is a great tool for creating and analyzing website traffic. By utilizing a sophisticated marketing automation and content management system, such as Sitecore, Adobe or Hubspot, for example, a marketer can begin providing content that is personalized to interests of the visitor. As a website visitor is anonymous upon first arrival, you know little about them. However based on their search behavior, how they came to the website, the path they traveled while visiting and the information they downloaded, over time you can deduce their persona. The marketing automation and content management systems utilize pattern recognition established on the input of persona profiles. When there is a match, rule-based personalization can be applied to immediately modify the content displayed so it is better suited to the interests of the visitor to keep them engaged. For example, if the anonymous visitor downloads a whitepaper about geology, spends a lot of time on the Workflows for Geologists webpage and registers for an eBook about geomodelling, we can begin changing the homepage experience for their next visit to be more geology-centric or could even have a pop-up that entices them with a webinar invitation for geologists. Persona mapping for website content personalization is the first step required to configure dynamic, pattern-based content and engagement.