Over the last few weeks we’ve done quite a few awesome Buyer Persona workshops so it seems past due to have a proper blog about that. So let’s dive right in!

In order to grow, every Tech B2B company needs to have a deep understanding of their ideal customer. How do we get there? By creating a buyer persona - a semi-fictional representation of your ideal buyer based on data, interviews, and some educated guesses. Buyer personas are often named something memorable and alliterative, like Infrastructure Ian, Mainframe Mark, or Sceptical Sam. This makes it easier for your team to remember them and keep them in the front of their minds.

 

In tech B2B, personas have been around for a long time, and different people have different ideas of how they should be created and used. In many cases, personas are developed by marketing teams to guide their marketing efforts. They might be a collection of demographic information and personal preferences, with the purpose of helping the marketing team create content that will resonate emotionally with a particular category of people. All of that is good, but personas have the potential to be so much more than just a marketing tool. Your personas should have just as much value for your sales and services teams as they do for your marketers.

 

Think about it this way: If your marketing team has a persona they’re marketing to, while your sales team has an ideal company profile that they use to qualify their leads, and your services team has another set of criteria they use to measure customer satisfaction, your teams are going to be disjointed, and your customers will feel it. With marketing talking to your customers in one way, and sales rebooting the conversation when they take over, and then services having a completely different set of expectations about what your customers need and want, there’s going to be a lot of frustration internally and externally. And the results will be inefficient teams and unhappy customers.

 

Let’s walk through how to create a persona that’s robust enough to unify marketing, sales, and customer service.  First, you need to define the information that should be included, and then you need to identify the best sources for that information, and then you need to roll up your sleeves and get to work. When it comes to defining the information your personas should include, you should start with your company’s purpose. If you have a concrete understanding of the problem your company is meant to solve, that will form the foundation of your buyer persona. Once you know the problem people want you to solve, you can start brainstorming the broad categories of people who have that problem. You can start by having your customer service team identify any commonalities among your most successful customers. What traits are highly correlated with success using your product?

 

Once you know that, you don’t have to look any further than the roles of the people on your customer-facing teams to figure out what information you should include in your personas. Have marketing, sales, and customer service list out the questions they need answered in order to serve each persona. For example, marketing will need to know things like how a given persona phrases their problem when they type it into Google. Marketing will also want to know where each persona goes to get help with their problem and what channels of communication they prefer to be contacted through.

 

All of this information might be extremely helpful for marketing, but none of it will help sales much at all. The questions a salesperson might ask for each persona will be things like how high of a priority is overcoming this problem? How long or short do they expect the sales process to be? Do they typically view your product’s price as being high, low, or about average?

 

In addition to these questions, your services team might have a completely different set of questions. For example, what needs to happen in order for this persona to feel satisfied after purchasing your product? What aspects of your product do they find most confusing? What are their favourite features of your product?

 

Once you have all of those questions outlined, you’ll need to identify the best way to answer each of those questions. You have three main options here: looking at historical data, performing customer interviews, and making educated guesses. Try to answer as many questions as possible using data you already have. Next, it’s time to start interviewing customers. Even if you’re able to fill in your entire persona using data, it’s important to talk to actual customers to make sure your interpretation of the data matches the real experiences of individual people.

 

 

That said, it’s necessary to understand that personas don’t replace the need to find out information about individual people. As your sales and services teams seek to build relationships with individual customers, they should remember that there will always be differences between your personas and actual people. The persona should act as a launch pad for the relationship, but once you get to know a person a bit more, rely on the data you have on that person over the information in your persona.

It’s important to keep in mind that the work of creating personas is never done. Even if you get your personas into an optimal state, people change as time goes by. A few years from now, when new communication channels have changed the way people learn about your product and new competitors have entered your market and your product has matured and your customer base has grown, your personas will need to be updated.

If you’re constantly getting feedback from your teams, your existing personas should gradually change to match the changes in the people it represents. But it could be that an entirely new category of people are now interested in your product, and you’ll need to create a brand new persona to represent them. But by using the steps we’ve already outlined, you’ll be able to create that persona and stay ahead of the curve. And that’s a big part of what it means to grow better.