Your buyer persona is an important part of your inbound sales strategy and aligning your product or service to meet the goals of your target audience is an important part of your strategy. Today we will be exploring what happens if you need to adjust your buyer persona.
What are the signs your buyer persona may not be the correct one?
A Buyer Persona is meant to help you understand your customers more clearly. This helps you tailor your content messaging and services to meet the needs and concerns of your target audience. However what if this target audience is not interacting or responding to your messaging or sees a need for your service? There are different sets of signs that your target audience may not be the correct one, the clearest sign is no one responds to your content whether that is messaging through email or phone outreach attempts. You may receive feedback from contacts that they don’t see a use for your service. You may find that you have multiple contacts mentioning to you that they are not interested in the service or it’s not part of their role. On its own, this would not be a sign you need to adjust your profile. Over a period of time (for example 1-2 months) you did not see much of any interest from contacts about your service which would then be a sign that you need to adjust your profile. A more interesting case is one we came across where we were proposing a Saas platform to assist with research we found contacts in a target audience focused towards educational institutions that were consistently interested in the service however we found they did not have any available budget to purchase within a reasonable time frame. Most enterprise size sales normally take between 6-18 months to close however the vertical we were exploring this time frame was consistently 18-36 months. Consider this article on how to define your Buyer Persona.
How to adjust your buyer persona and put your adjustments into action
The best way to determine how well your Buyer persona is a fit is to continue to reach out to more contacts and speak with them over a phone call, meeting, or virtual meeting. Consider this article for how to book more sales meetings. You want to ask them questions about who they see could be a better fit for the product or service you are proposing. We found that when we spoke with contacts who were interested in the service however had no budget they mentioned a specific vertical which focused more on private research industries in healthcare that would be interested. Over the course of several meetings we noticed the consistency to what contacts were communicating to us and began to rework our strategy. With this information, we adjusted our buyer persona and target audience for this market. We researched other companies in this industry to learn who the correct target within this audience would be. Once this was determined we modified our messaging and content to fit this new buyer persona and began to reach out to these targets.
Signs your adjustments are working
So you have identified that your buyer persona may not be the correct one and with feedback from contacts modified your messaging and made your adjustments you then put those adjustments into action. You now need to evaluate how these adjustments are working. For the example referenced after we put our adjustments into action and over the course of several months, we had interest from several contacts and after conducting meetings with this new target audience found they did have an available budget to make purchases within the more standard time frame of 6-18 months. We do have a paying customer in this vertical and they have been using the service going on 2 years now. At the time they became a customer it was thought that they would be an abbreviation other than a new direction to reach out to. This situation was unique since we did have many meetings and plenty of interest when reaching out to educational institutions however since this audience did not have budget it became clear more analysis was needed. Signs your adjustments are working can be as simple as contacts being more receptive to your message however as we explored this alone was not enough to make the audience viable. Interest is fine and you can learn more about your market the more you speak with contacts however if they consistently do not have budget to purchase your solution it becomes an issue of time resource management on your part.
Remember the key to adjusting your buyer persona is understanding who benefits from your product or service. If you need help with adjusting your buyer personas you can reach out to me.
