Buyer personas are not a new phenomenon to the B2B sales and marketing space. To understand your core prospects and customers it is important to create buyer personas. They are fictionalized and generalized representations of the contacts that make your ideal customers. Buyer personas would often include some background, demographics, goals, qualifiers, common objections, or other categories that help you identify them.
Here are a few keys to using buyer personas to support your sales and marketing efforts.
Create Buyer Personas
It is important to understand your buyers and create a persona for each major one. HubSpot has a great template for B2B sales and marketing that you can use to get started. You can create buyer personas by talking with your customers, talking with business partners, and doing market research.
How do They Make Decisions?
One of the big shifts in sales and marketing over the last 10 years is the amount of information that is available to a prospect before they ever talk to anyone at your organization. It is important to understand how your customers make decisions. Often the search starts with a search on the internet or reaching out to a friend or colleague for a recommendation.
Which Social Channels do They Use?
I recently completed instructing my third class in Marketing and Sales for Entrepreneurs at the University of Toronto. The class was made up of a mix of people with a business idea and people that have already started their business. Often, the hardest thing to get across is what marketing tactics to use. People often revert back to the channels that they like to use, versus what their personas use. This is especially true for social media. There are so many different channels today that picking the right ones are very important.
What Scripts and Process Can You Prepare for?
To support your efforts the personas can allow for the creation of scripts and tools to support your efforts. This could be incorporated into drip marketing plans or even used for sample Linkedin inMail based on the persona.
A Persona Will Not Fit All Customers and Prospects
A persona is a tool and you must remember that people are all different. The persona gives you a guide to dealing with a prospect or customer but remember, once you interact with them it is important not to box them into your perceived notions. Ask open-ended questions and don’t make assumptions when dealing with a target in a sales situation.
If you are interested in talking about how to use buyer personas to support your sales and marketing efforts please contact me. We can talk about how your organization can utilize this important tool.