Are Your Messages Aimed at You or your Target Market?
How Well Do You Understand Your B2B Buyers?
When my clients and I discuss ideas for marketing programs, campaigns and messaging, they often say “I don’t think I would go for that”, or “that doesn’t sound appealing to me”, or “if I were the buyer, this is what I’d want”.
Do you see a problem here? Is it possible that buyers might want what doesn’t appeal to you or that they don’t love what you love? Are your decisions based on your personal perceptions rather than the reality of your target audience? If so, you won’t achieve your goals relative to the product/service that you've designed, the campaign you've launched, the channels you’ve selected, or the price points you've set.
Classify Accounts Through Unique B2B Persona Profiles
The goal is to meaningfully differentiate each persona. Instead of categorizing by geography, industry and size, the real differentiation is determined by a persona’s growth mode, relationship attitudes, purchase criteria, decision-making processes and usage rates.
A descriptive name and graphic will help you to visualize each persona. Examples based on an account’s response mode include Gary Growth, Terry Trouble, Evan Even Keel, and Ellen Euphoric. Here’s how I apply this in my business. Examples based on an individual’s buying role include Eloise Economic Buyer, Ursula User Buyer, Terry Technical Buyer and Charlie Coach. Develop the right persona profiles for your business. Collect facts by interviewing focus groups and contacts within and outside your CRM database. Study surveys, sales analyses, campaign results, lead source reports, and email and social media stats. Start with three or four persona profiles that classify 80% of your accounts and prospects. Create a pie chart that displays the number of accounts by persona and another that displays revenue dollars by persona. If the “other” category is too large, develop more personas.
Marketing and Sales People Benefit from Personas
Armed with a unique value proposition tailored to each persona, marketers will be more effective in generating, nurturing and converting leads to sales-ready status. Personas will help them to discover information sources used by their target audiences and how to describe a solution to each persona. They will be equipped to objectively tailor content, messages and campaigns for each persona.
While assisting accounts in addressing opportunities and problems, sales people will anticipate the most common objections that a persona will raise during the sales process. They will be ready to tailor their opportunity management and account management techniques based on the traits of the respective persona as they manage more opportunities to closed-won results.
