Customer Buyer Personas

Building Better Business Strategies

Creating customer buyer personas is one of the most overlooked aspects of determining your marketing and sales strategy. Some think this step is a waste of time, but if the process is data-driven, it can change your entire business strategy.

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What Is A Buyer Persona

A customer buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. By creating detailed buyer personas, businesses can make more informed decisions about their marketing strategies, product offerings, and overall customer approach, ultimately leading to more effective targeting and increased customer satisfaction.

Buyer Personas Operational Aspects

There are numerous aspects you should include in your buyer personas that will assist your marketing, business development, sales, customer success, and product development teams in operating and moving forward in their respective roles.

Marketing Operations

Building out buyer personas will assist marketing in understanding who the ideal customer profile is for advertising targeting, understanding natural language, pain points, and what content gaps there are in the buyer's journey they need to address to create a great experience for prospects to engage with as they interact with your brand and platform.

Business Development Operations

Understanding buyer personas assists the business development teams in making great first impressions. Before these conversations, most of the engagements a prospect had were with written content, recorded video, and other non-interactive mediums.

At this stage, business development teams need to understand the different types of potential buyers they are engaging with and what pain points and means of value they should focus on.

The way you would talk about your platform with a user is entirely different than how you would conversate with an enterprise-level individual, if they should be the ones to even host that conversation in the first place, maybe you skip a layer in executives and pass directly to a sales executive.

Sales Executives Operations

Creating buyer persona profiles allows your sales team to understand the different ways people are engaging with your platform. Most sales teams seem to work with a single deck, regardless of whom they are presenting to, and then wonder why there are so many disconnects and misunderstandings.

Just like marketing personalizes the journey before sales, having multiple decks and solution scenarios depending on the pain points a prospect has leaned towards can make all the difference between a successful deal and one that falls short.

Customer Success Operations

Giving your customer success teams a battle card of whom they are typically working with, the pain points you are solving for and the value you promised on sales calls can allow them to set up new customers for success by using natural language, create onboarding paths for people to gain the success that was promised, and enjoy the full experience of your platform.

Having all these operations in place will ensure a lower churn rate which will drive larger lifetime value amounts and revenue for your SaaS organization.

Product Development Operations

Keeping these buyer persona profiles as a living and breathing document that is updated regularly by all teams will allow your product development teams to understand where the gaps in the platform or additional functionality needs to be developed to fill a gap in the value proposition or address new problems that prospects and customers are sharing their opinion on, all these items can be added to the product roadmap.

Building Your Buyer Personas

While you are building out these buyer persona profiles, there are frameworks you can use to get yourself started to understand titles, functions, networks to engage on, common objections, industries/verticals, and many other demographical aspects, but outside these aspects, these personas should be built for your platform specifically.

What areas of the buyer's journey matter the most to your business? Is it the ways you strike up the first conversation with a prospect, how they funnel through the buyer's journey, the way you convert a lead into a paying customer, or the way you ensure and guarantee value during the onboarding process?

Understanding and sharing any details for the different groups of buyers you engage with will help you to continue to better the experience for future buyers and reduce the days to close as you make this path clearer and easier to follow.

HubSpot Persona Builder

If you still have no idea where to even start, HubSpot has a great persona builder that can get you started and then innovate beyond as it brings up additional questions or ideas of aspects to focus on.

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