If you have ever been unlucky enough to interact with a marketer, you may have gotten the pitch about developing buyer personas.
First – I’m sorry. Marketers can be obnoxious.
Second – I believe that developing buyer personas is a critical first step to sales success.
Ouch, right? If you avoided the pitch until now, close this page immediately to keep your streak alive. Otherwise, buckle up and prepare for value.
Why Does Developing Buyer Personas Matter?
A great question and common objection, the answer is simple: your business is built around your buyer personas.
Every organization has a core client base with similar pains, values, needs, wants, and triggers. Yes, there is diversity, but yes again, there are common themes.
If your target audience had no commonality, you could never focus, you could never specialize, and you could never get really good at anything.
Buyer personas help you focus on your ideal client.
Every business I can think of is generally subject to the Pareto principle (“the 80/20 rule”), which says, among other things, that you’ll generate roughly 80% of your revenue from about 20% of your clients, and you’ll get 80% of your complaints from 20% of your customers. So the trick is to focus on the good stuff – the 20% who qualify as ideal clients, and work to reduce the bad – the complaining group.
Every business I can think of can also benefit from developing detailed buyer personas. These buyer personas will provide the focus and direction you need when it comes time to:
- Determine which leads make the most sense to pursue aggressively
- Decide what type of marketing materials to produce and promote
- Choose which steps of the sales process should be included or excluded
- Pick the right media outlets and online platforms to engage with
- Select the right products or services to develop and continue
And that list is just the beginning. The bottom line is that buyer personas guide every single client-facing activity your organization performs.
It’s all about being helpful and focusing on your clients and their particular needs – and you build around that.
How Does Developing Buyer Personas Help My Sales Process?
By starting with the end in mind – a clear picture of the ideal client, you can works backwards through the steps that it takes to get a prospect to that point.
Having a holistic ideal of what your customers are really like, both inside and out, comes from the process of developing personas that cover goals, pains, common objections, challenges, demographic information, and personal details about a particular customer type.
You’ll probably have more than one buyer persona. Although our inbound marketing packages are customized, we sell a pretty straight-forward solution and we’ve got a number of personas.
The key is to hash out the characteristics of the ideal clients and then orient your entire marketing and sales process around that persona.
For a more granular idea of what goes into buyer personas, I have two resources for you. First – check out “What Is A Buyer Persona” from the Buyer Persona Institute. Second – get real examples and a detailed process for developing your buyer personas in this eBook, A Business Owner’s Guide to Aligning Sales & Marketing with Buyer Personas.
What Else Can I Do To Grow Sales?
Buyer personas are a critical first step, but there’s a lot more you should be doing to grow sales. This handy manual will walk you through the steps that 8 businesses have taken to grow their sales by crazy amounts on a consistent basis – it comes highly recommended.