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The Importance of Understanding Buyer Personas (And a Free Template!)
Fun fact: 71% of companies that exceed revenue goals have documented buyer personas
Let’s say you were to separate discussions with an end user, a manager, and a VP from the same company.
Would you give them all the same elevator pitch? How about asking the same questions? Would you introduce features & benefits in the same way?
The answer is almost 100% of the time going to be resounding no.
This is because everyone has different priorities, different pain points, and different ideal solutions.
Each of these factors shape each role into their own “buyer persona” (if you’re not familiar with the term, just think of it as a general mock profile of a role you commonly sell to).
The Importance of Buyer Personas
Now, let’s be clear on why it’s worth the time and effort to actually build these profiles.
Documented buyer personas:
- Accelerate onboarding for new hires
- Promote situational awareness in sales conversations (i.e. asking the right questions)
- Ensures that delivery in sales conversations stays consistent across teams and departments
- Help sales map their stakeholders within an opportunity
- Serve as the foundation for creating & articulating sales messaging especially in an account-based sales model
Maybe these reasons are why 71% of organizations who achieve quota have documented personas.
If you feel it’s time to create or revise your personas, download our pre-built worksheet.
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Get Your Free Buyer Persona Template
1) Build Your Top 2-3 First, Then Tackle the Rest
In reality, there’s likely 10-12 buyer personas or more that could be generated for your business.
If you’re starting from scratch, it’s best to keep it simple and stick with 2-3. To start thinking through various stakeholder profiles, consider the following:
- Which executives typically sign off on your product/service?
- Which leadership roles are generally involved in sponsoring an evaluation of your offering?
- Who are the roles responsible for implementing or using your solution?
- Think about supporting characters. Which roles typically help you build your business case, amplify your value, or coach you to sell?
2) What are they Responsible for? What's a Day in their Life Look Like?
Be thinking about what an average day looks like for a given CXO you’re working to get in front of. And don’t forget to consider what a typical workday looks like for your end users! Are they more strategy-oriented? Focused on process adoption? Carrying out initiatives, or creating them?
3) What are Their Long-Term Goals? What Keeps them up at Night?
At the end of the day, organizations make purchases to solve challenges or to carry out strategic initiatives. So, acquaint yourself with where your prospects “Point A” is and what their “Point Z” is.
4) What Makes Your Offering the Ideal Solution? Can you Articulate it Based on the Persona?
With an understanding of each stakeholder profile, their day-to-day, their challenges, and their desired future outcomes, now comes the fun part. It’s time to wrap it all up and shape your delivery! Consider what your solution delivers and how it differs from your competitors. And don’t forget to follow a framework for each of your buyer personas. Here’s a story-telling style format just for you:
“In working with other [Personas/Roles], such as the [Role] at [Similar Company], I found that their big picture objective is [initiative] and found themselves struggling with [pain point] during their [day-to-day responsibilities]. To remove the roadblocks and drive towards their [objective/initiative], they evaluated a variety of vendors and ultimately selected us and implemented [your solution]. This is because of our ability to deliver [main value driver] and our unique ability to [unique differentiator]. At the end of the day, we achieved [desired outcome] by [increased/decreased key metric].”
This is just one of many possible examples of how personas help in actual practice.
Next Steps
To sum this up, we covered an important stat on buyer personas, why they’re critical to have, and how to build them for yourself.
Now, it’s time for you either map out your first sales buyer persona or add (or simply refresh) to your existing group!
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Get Your Free Buyer Persona Template
Nanda Kumar
Director of Growth
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UPDATED ON
January 16th, 2020
Zach Sergio
Co-Founder
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