A 4-Step Guide to Creating Effective Buyer Personas
Recently, there have been more educated buyers and a larger variety of stakeholders in sales meetings. In order to effectively sell to each individual buyer, sales teams need to align with marketing to develop buyer personas. A buyer persona is an in-depth description of a fictional person who represents your real-life target audience.
The question is, how do you develop buyer personas? What are the steps you need to take to ensure each buyer persona and their associated messaging are accurate and effective? Let’s uncover the 4 essential steps to creating buyer personas to:
- Maximize the effectiveness of your sales reps
- Drive revenue through increased win rates
- Increase buyer engagement
Step 1: Do your research
First, start with the information you currently have. Take a look at your contact database to uncover trends in how certain leads and customers find you, engage with your content, and interact with your brand. A great way to capture specific contact data is to use form fields in a submission form. For instance, you can require leads to input their company size, location, and other telltale information that will help you decipher what types of people are your top leads.
Plus, speak with the entire sales team to understand which type of leads they’re speaking with the most. Is there any commonality between them? What generalizations can be made about the types of prospects the sales team finds the most lucrative? Take these subsets or groups of people and interview them to discover why they like your product and how they see themselves using it. From here, you have a solid foundation to begin building your buyer personas.
Step 2: Fill in your buyer persona's basic demographic information
Now that you know the use case for your buyers, it’s important to uncover demographic information. Demographic information is data including a buyer’s age, location, job title, gender, income, education, etc. By honing in on these data points, sales teams are enabled to personalize the sales process.
For example, say one of your buyer personas is a c-suite executive at a company with the size of 500 employees, with an income of at least $1M. With this information backing up your sales tactics, you’ll be able to better understand and serve up relevant sales content to your buyers.
Step 3: Uncover your buyer’s motivations and needs
Okay, so we have a bit of background on the buyer persona’s demographics. Now it’s time to discover the buyer’s motivations and needs. Start by determining their pain points. Ask yourself and your sales team, these questions:
- What is keeping your buyer up at night?
- What is inhibiting them from performing their daily tasks?
- Who do they aspire to be?
- What are their personal/professional goals?
- What challenges do they face?
The next and most important step is to tie the answers to these questions to a message that tells people how your company positively impacts their daily lives. For example, say a persona’s primary pain point is having disorganized sales content that is time-consuming to comb through. Your messaging to these buyers could be something like, “With [Company Name], you’ll have 24/7 easy access to updated and relevant sales content, all in one place whether you’re on the go or at the office.”
Step 4: Prep your sales team to effectively manage conversations with the persona
Just as it’s important for marketing to come up with the messaging for each buyer persona, it’s equally important to prepare your sales team to lead meaningful conversations with each buyer persona.
Here’s a great way to leverage your interviews (as mentioned above) with current and potential buyers. Start by taking quotes from your buyers about what it is that they desire from your company (and companies like yours). From these quotes, excerpt snippets of copy to leverage the voice of the customer (VOC). VOC is defined by Qualtrics as “a term that describes your customer’s feedback about their experiences with and expectations for your products or services. It focuses on customer needs, expectations, understandings, and product improvement.”
Next, create a list of potential objections to your product that a buyer might raise. Then, develop smart ways to address those objections during sales interactions to mitigate any potential concern from the buyer.
Final thoughts
Developing buyer personas is essential to sales success. But first sales and marketing teams must work together to develop each persona. Once both teams are in alignment, magic happens. Add the right sales enablement platform into the mix and positive business outcomes like higher close rates and greater revenue occur.
Take Prezentor’s sales enablement platform for a test drive — request a demo.