Is your company’s “buyer persona” broken?
If so, you’re missing huge opportunities. Too often people go to market with a great offer, but they’re shooting in the dark with their audience. They haven’t taken the time to sit down and crystallize exactly who their ideal buyer is. And it shows in low sales numbers and a burnt out sales team.
The last thing you want is a solid offer, incredible channels of distribution, and a half-baked idea of who your buyer is.
What a Buyer Persona Really Does For Your Sales Team
We’ve studied buyer personas extensively, as pairing outstanding offers and clients with C-Level executives is what we do here at C-Level Partners. We need to know the exact market and target to a T. Otherwise we would be wasting everyone’s time. And if your product or service is half decent, which I’m sure it is, you shouldn’t waste your team’s time on dead-end leads.
But here’s what sales managers just don’t seem to get. The buyer persona is much more of a meticulous game of matchmaker than a broad brush-stroke approach. And you should never rely on the folks in marketing to provide you with their take on the ideal buyer. If you do, you’re just asking for trouble. There are other ways Sales and Marketing can work together, but that’s covered in another article.
When one of my clients isn’t clear about their buyer persona, it’s time to roll up our sleeves and get to work. Because there’s SO much power in knocking on the right doors, or calling on the right prospects. It will literally make or break your sales goals.
Today you’ll get some of that juicy information for free, all I ask is that you put it to good use. After all, it isn’t knowledge that’s power – it’s applied knowledge that’ll get you crushing your sales numbers from here on out.
The New Way of Establishing Buyer Persona for Sales Leaders
The buyer persona is square one of your sales plan. You’ve likely heard this term before but glossed over it thinking “yeah, yeah, I know who I’m targeting.” But perhaps you just think you know. So dig in with me for a minute, and I’ll give you some insight that could change the shape of your company over the following weeks, months, and years.
Have you placed your ideal buyer on a spectrum? You see, as important as knowing who they are is knowing who they are not.
So let’s review your old way. We’ve gone over these elements of the buyer persona before:
- What industry are they in?
- What is their location?
- What are their pain points?
- What are their challenges and opportunities?
Here’s a typical example: Hotel managers in metropolitan areas who have meeting space they can’t fill.
So let’s go one level deeper and introduce this concept of spectrum. We’ll put parameters on each element, which I’ll italicize below.
- Industry: Hotel manager. Manages hotel with more than 10 rooms, but less than 100 rooms.
- Location: Metropolitan area. City with at least 1 million people. Drive market / Uber from airport with meeting space.
- Pain Points: Not showing up on Google Maps. But gets great reviews.
- Challenges and Opportunities: Overwhelmed and drowned out by digital marketing of the bigger hotels – running ads that seem fruitless. Unique location has access to unique meetings facilities. Has a good looking website, but has not invested in Search Engine Optimization, has not positioned themselves for the Corporate Meetings market.
Suddenly, by adding these spectrum-parameters, your buyer persona is becoming tailored to your offer. And by reading this buyer persona you should instantly feel like you know exactly who you’re targeting. And who you’re NOT targeting.
Go a few steps further. Look at the trends and data of your current customers. See if you notice patterns. If so, chart them out. So you might be predominantly selling to male executives, who happen to enjoy golf. They are 45+ years old, married with kids, and many of them have heavy travel schedules. Good! This is data, and this is intel. Keep drilling down. What keeps them up at night? What might they have in the back seat of their cars? What cars (make, model, year, and color) are they driving?
You’re honing in on your perfect buyer. And if you can’t seem to readily get this information… simply survey your current customers. It’s really that easy.
You Have Your Buyer Persona … Now What?
With your buyer persona firmly in-hand, it’s time to get hunting. And it’s time to get ruthless to maintain and build that high-quality pipeline that you’ve worked hard to create.
As a smart sales manager, you should already hear the natural conversation topics flowing out of this fully built buyer persona. This will make Salesforce and even search tools like LinkedIn much more meaningful and effective for you.
As you prepare for that all-important meeting, make sure that you’ve gathered the more personalized intel that will help you close the sale. We actually wrote an article for that, too: How to Close More Sales with Guerilla Data
And, as you further refine your lead generation tactics using your better buyer persona, it’s my hope that you’re giving those leads to the right people. If you have a great buyer persona hashed out but your sales team keeps fumbling, it could be that bad hiring, overtraining, and not properly qualifying leads is the problem.
When you have a partner that knows how to do all this, it results in more closed deals, because you know the questions to ask, and you always show up prepared, every time. Here at C-Level Partners, we deliver qualified sales appointments on demand, so that you can focus on closing deals and dominating your space. Get in touch and we’ll put you in front of the right people, in the right role, right now.
Until next time,
Johnny-Lee Reinoso