Buyer Personas: An Overview for B2B Businesses
- Jitender Lakhani (JL)
- October 9, 2021
- Category: Buyers and Customers
A buyer persona is a fictionalized version of a target consumer based on market research. Buyer personas illustrate who your ideal consumers are, how they spend their days, the issues they face, and the decisions they make.
Multiple buyer personas are typical in businesses; for example, if the end user of your product needs clearance from others before completing a purchase, each person participating in that decision is a separate persona. They’ll evaluate your goods using different criteria, and you’ll require diverse tactics to meet their needs.
- “Sales are contingent upon the attitude of the salesman, not the attitude of the prospect.” – William Clement Stone
Why are buyer personas important?
Buyer personas ensure that all operations related to acquiring and serving clients are matched to the specific needs of the target buyer. That may appear to be a no-brainer, but it isn’t as straightforward as it appears. If you pay close attention to how businesses present themselves, you’ll discover that many of them begin by discussing what they do, rather than what the consumer requires.
As a result, they are at conflict with how people make decisions. People generally gravitate toward businesses they know and trust when purchasing a product or service. And the best approach to earn someone’s trust is to demonstrate true empathy and concern for them — in this case, your consumers.
Gaining trust as a company demands a subtle but significant adjustment in how you present yourself. Only once you’ve demonstrated that you understand your potential clients by solving their pain, or needs, will they be interested in learning more about what you have to offer. Developing buyer personas and using them to manage your organization can help you stay focused on your consumers’ demands.
Using buyer personas:
The process of creating a buyer persona is instructive in and of itself. To create a persona, you must first ask yourself detailed questions about your potential customers, and this exercise will help you notice aspects you didn’t notice previously.
You can then compare your responses to those of your coworkers, revealing any differences in your viewpoints and encouraging dialogues to resolve them.
One of the first advantages of a buyer persona is that it aids in customer insight and cross-departmental coordination. This will ensure that everyone in your company, including marketing, sales, product development, and customer service, has the same vision of your ideal customer.
The advantages of buyer personas:
Your personas can then be used to direct the course of your work. Consider the following example:
- Buyer personas can be used in the formulation of product roadmaps. Personas will assist them in identifying and prioritizing adjustments to your offering based on the most pressing needs of your customers.
- Buyer personas can be used in marketing to create effective tactics. Personas are crucial when developing content marketing campaigns, for example. They assist in focusing keyword research efforts and serve as a guide for writing text. They can also assist in determining and prioritizing promotional initiatives.
- Buyer personas can also assist your sales team in establishing relationships with new clients. Your sales team will be a lot more productive if they understand what the prospect is going through and are prepared to solve their worries.
- Finally, personas can be used by customer service teams to better assist their clients. Your support crew will be able to exhibit greater empathy if they are trained on the problems your customers are trying to solve with your product and the frustration they experience when things don’t work out. When dealing with an irate customer, a little compassion can go a long way.
Creating your own buyer persona:
Buyer personas should be based on both internal and external research, and some firms will need to construct many personas to reflect different sorts of clients, as previously said. However, you don’t have to accomplish everything at once; it’s fine to start simple and allow your identities to grow over time.
Choose one target client and design a persona based on what you already know, then devise a strategy for improving it with additional research. Create a list of questions that you can use to interview members of your team as a starting point.
While no one-size-fits-all list of questions exists, here are a few frequent ones to get you started.
You’ll be ready to build your first persona after you’ve completed your study. Again, there is no one-size-fits-all solution, but attempt to create a one-page paper or presentation for each persona. You’ll be able to quickly pull it up on your screen or print it out to use as a reference.
After you’ve created your initial persona, chat to customers and/or get them to fill out surveys to improve it.
Buyer personas should not be static documents, but they also do not have to be time-consuming. They can change as you learn more about your consumers, so be patient and incorporate new information as you go.
In order to align your buying and selling process, working alongside buyers throughout the buying process can help you develop trust and build stronger, longer-lasting relationships with your clients. You can only become a successful salesperson when you become an expert in your customers’ businesses, function as problem-solver and think more about your customers’ needs and challenges throughout the buying process. This would create a sales organization truly focused on the customer and retain better growth results.