WHO ARE YOU SELLING TO?
Create clear Buyer Personas to summarize who you sell to, what they care about, and how you can win with them.
(1) Buyer Personas help summarize the people we interact with - what they care about, and how we can best position ourselves to help.
(2) Personas help us better connect, influence and build relationships with our customers - personas are the key to being able to “code switch” between different ways of talking about our product.
(3) Great Buyer Personas start with pain - What ruins each person’s day on the buying team? How can our product help? Why is that better than what they’re doing today?
Want to read our Buyer Personas white paper?
Click here to download it.
WHAT ARE BUYER PERSONAS?
Buyer Personas are just cheat sheets about people. More specifically, the people that we’re most likely to encounter during the buying process. A persona helps summarize the types of buyers we interact with, what they care about, and how we can help.
Personas help us better connect, influence, and build relationships with our customers. As Cory Bray and Hilmon Sorey say in their Sales Enablement Playbook, “Knowing the buyer inside and out is much more important than knowing the product inside and out… and its harder.” When we know what our customers care about, it helps us tailor our messaging, sales pitch, and content to hit directly on what resonates with them. Good personas help you cut through the noise and land your point with each and every person you encounter on your client’s “buying team.”
HOW CAN YOU START TO BUILD BUYER PERSONAS?
Here’s a simple workshop agenda for how to clarify who you sell to, what they care about, and how you can win with everyone involved.
Here’s a simple workshop agenda we use to help our teams build and refresh their Ideal Customer Profile.
MAKE A LIST OF THE PEOPLE INVOLVED IN THE BUYING PROCESS. Gather a few members of your Sales and Marketing team and brainstorm “who you typically encounter” during a prospect’s buying process. You’ll probably capture a few different titles - focus on bucketing these into the 3-4 most important people at the Individual Contributor, Manager, and Executive Levels.
SUMMARIZE THEIR “DAY IN THE LIFE.” What do these people do all day? What are they responsible for? Capturing their day-to-day responsibilities is a first step to ensuring everyone on the team knows what they care about and where they have ownership.
DRILL DOWN ON THEIR PAIN POINTS. This is where breakouts can help - assign a small group to each persona, and ask them to capture the “ruin your day” pain points that this buyer encounters. What negative emotions do they experience at work? What causes that?
SUMMARIZE “HOW WE WIN.” Map each persona’s pain-points to specific features and benefits of our product that they will care about. You want a list of 1-2 specific things you would highlight for that persona. This important exercise is how you ensure your message resonates with each person involved in the buying process.
COME TOGETHER, SHARE THE RESULTS, AND GIVE EACH OTHER FEEDBACK. Each small group reads out their persona matrix, and the rest of the group gives them feedback. What’s missing? What’s not clear? Capture any tweaks needed. Then summarize it and put it in a place where everyone can find it.
Here’s what you need to run your own Buyer Persona Workshop.
The Pre-Read Email
Send your participants our Buyer Persona Whitepaper - it will make sure people understand what a persona is, why they matter, and what to expect in the workshop
The Agenda
Typically, 2-3 hours is all it takes to build out an initial list of buyer personas and start capturing their (i) day in the life, (ii) list of pain points, and (iii) “how we win” product features
The Worksheet
This is the worksheet we use to capture our thinking on the personas during the workshop - feel free to make a copy!
This is an example Buyer Persona Document from one of our persona workshops - you can download it below!