How to Know Your Audience... Buyer Personas 101
So who do you sell to and why? I’ve asked this question to every company I speak to… I’m also not surprised when I get one of the following responses:
Blank stare then a pause followed by some rambling about customers
Everyone is a perfect fit and we are going to boil the ocean
We sell into Finance and are going to move into Higher Ed next
Ok, deep breath....
So you need to establish this AND you need to know how to do it. Getting this clarity not only helps define your ideal customer but it also focuses all your marketing, product efforts and sales enablement. The first step is to do some analysis in your CRM on who your ”Champion” is on deals. You can also cross reference the win rate against those titles. You should get a clear picture from here.
If you don’t have a database that is very deep in historical context then just use your most recent pipeline. You’ll have to make some assumptions but you can always pivot as you get more info over time.
Then, I like to define the role. What do they do? Here is an example:
From there I want to assign a BANT rating of 1-5 on the level of importance of certain job functions and how it relates to the sales decision. This will help my lead qualifiers to understand what questions to ask. Here is an example:
What are the goals of this person and/or role? I want to make sure I know what the core drivers are for this person. I also likely perform some customer interviews to make sure my bullet points here are up to date as well as learn about another critical element…
What keeps them up at night? More specifically what challenges do they face and what is the impact. I also want to tie this back to product features I have in my pitches to provide more impact to this buyer.
Bonus point as well if you want to line out potential objections they will have. I definitely would take this from my loss/win analysis from my pipeline. If you haven’t done so then you are doing yourself a huge disservice.
From a marketing standpoint I want to define where they research solutions. The goal here is to define DemandGen programs that will help drive traffic to our persona. The simple thought process here is to flood the pipeline with buyers that are more likely to buy. Obviously this results in more revenue which everyone loves.
Lastly, I want to have an idea what are the key metrics they care about. If they are in a board meeting going through their narrative then what slides are they showing? What KPIs are they tracking on a daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly basis? How does my solution help with that?
Now put it all together and look what you have:
Once it’s all in one place then the information becomes INCREDIBLY COMPELLING. You can very clearly see who you are selling to and why… also your future investors will love this. Being able to document this and clearly articulate who your Buyer Persona is invaluable.
A secondary benefit is by providing clarity across all functions you only make each employee, team and department more efficient. Now I will admit that you might be able to get away with this for a bit. But at some point investors will want to see this defined.
If they are going to fork over $10s of millions or $100s of millions to you they want to know that YOU know this. If you go in there and say we sell to Finance! Or the ENTIRE world can use us or let me just make some sh*t up on the fly! None of these will play out well and the investor pool is a small world. They all talk and know who is selling snake oil rather than a vision.
Remember, they are looking for 1) who do you sell to 2) why do you sell to them and 3) why do you win. If you follow this simple process to get your buyer persona then you are ahead of the pack.
