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.
By John Bernardi
