Buyer personas have been all the rage in the marketing world for quite some time now. Marketers have dedicated infinite hours to analyzing behavior patterns, demographics, recurring problems, and any other relevant data they can get their hands on to profile their target customers – otherwise known as buyer personas.
While most companies have some version of a buyer persona, few organizations have the in-depth insights they need to create an intelligent marketing strategy. Adele Revella, founder and CEO of Buyer Persona Institute, puts it best, “buyer personas are something that everybody thinks they need, but very few people know how to build and utilize them effectively.”
The end goal of creating a persona isn’t the persona itself – it’s using that persona to analyze and understand the buyer’s perspective on the decision-making process so you can have better communication with your customers. That’s what Revella’s company helps its clients accomplish.
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Ensure that the software that powers Buyer Persona Institute’s (BPI’s) new service would be reliable, consistent and disaster-proof.
Buyer Persona Institute (BPI) conducts specialized interviews with the companies its clients would like to win as customers. BPI analyzes the data and works to understand everything that went into the buyer decision: what triggers their investment, why they don’t buy, what makes them choose one company over another and which resources affect their decisions. Then, BPI creates a buyer persona for its client based on the information gathered.
Buyer Persona Institute then takes things a step further. BPI discovered that peer advice is one of the biggest factors in how customers decide which companies to consider as they buy – so it created a new product, Persona Peer Advice. Persona Peer Advice delivers audio clips of customer testimonials, in the customer’s own voice, that clients can then post on their website or use in other communication.
Through this new product, BPI is helping its clients produce content that buyers trust. Revella said, “it gives our clients a minimally disruptive way to rely on buyer personas for innovative and valuable marketing content.”
Buyer Persona Institute sees Persona Peer Advice as a virtuous circle – something valuable for its clients that also drives more business back to its core products. The new solution is interesting to people both inside and outside of the marketing organization. Revella said, “it’s going to be - for a lot of our big, big customers - the most visible aspect of the work we’ve done, so it’s critical that it perform perfectly.”
Buyer Persona Institute licensed the software that delivers the peer-advice audio clips from SlapFive, an emerging company that powers customer voice programs. Before the company launched the new product, it wanted to make sure that the service would be reliable, consistent and disaster-proof. BPI reached out to Iron Mountain to set up a technology escrow agreement with verification.
BPI is a small company with big clients, many of them household-name brands. BPI would be facing staggering reputational risk if the audio content supported by SlapFive malfunctioned or shut down.
Depositing the software source code with Iron Mountain, which includes all the correct deposit materials, up-to-date build instructions and third-party tools, means that BPI will be able to recreate the platform it’s product runs on in the event the software vendor shuts down, loses solvency or otherwise fails to support the product.
That’s not to say BPI doesn’t trust SlapFive, but trust doesn’t protect against the unexpected. Anything can happen – and technology escrow protects against the absolute worst-case scenario – the catastrophes no one expects.
Buyer Persona Institute isn’t a technology company, nor does it have any interest in becoming one. Regarding Verification, Revella said, “we have to assume…that we’re going to have to go find someone and just turn this [the source code] over to them cold, and I want to make darn sure that everything that they need is in that deposit.” Verification is that “darn sure.” It means that a qualified third party checked the source code and made sure that everything they would need to have the platform recreated is present and accounted for.
There are quite a few technology escrow vendors to choose from, and the process of making a source code deposit isn’t a technological marvel. So, what made Iron Mountain stand apart when it came to choosing a technology escrow vendor for Buyer Persona Institute? Revella chose Iron Mountain because “It was just a matter of trust. It was pretty clear that we could trust a company like Iron Mountain with this important responsibility.”
Iron Mountain has established an unrivaled legacy of security, protection and integrity in the software escrow industry. Placing the SlapFive source code deposit with Iron Mountain, and ensuring that the code is functional with Verification allows Buyer Persona Institute to confidently present Persona Peer Advice to its customers. BPI is confident in the new technology and anticipates success with the new product.
In the unlikely event that disaster does rear its ugly head – BPI is ready to face it. With Iron Mountain software escrow, Buyer Persona Institute is ready for anything.
NCC Group Software Resilience has acquired Iron Mountain’s Intellectual Property Management (IPM) business. For more information on the acquisition, please visit our dedicated information hub, or contact Iron Mountain IPM.
