How to define your buyer persona and boost sales [+ Template]
Do you find it hard to relate to prospects? Does your sales pitch sometimes miss the mark of the golden common ground between you, the sales rep, and your potential client?
Worst of all, don’t you know how to tweak your pitch to appeal to your target audience?
Perhaps what’s lacking is not your sales pitch or knowledge of your product, but a lack of knowledge about who you’re selling your product to.
If Sun-Tzu were a salesperson, he would’ve said, “If you know the prospect and you know your product, you need not fear a hundred sales cycles”.
So let’s get you started on your journey of discovering what a buyer persona is, why it’s essential to know your buyers and how to create a buyer persona for your business.
As a result, you’ll notice a positive shift in the productivity of your sales team.
What is a buyer persona for sales?
A buyer persona, sometimes called a sales persona, is a semi-fictional outlined description of the person who best encompasses your target audience. Having a developed buyer persona provides a significant boost to the effectiveness of your sales team.
An all-encompassing buyer persona consists of information about your primary audience, such as…
- Age
- Location
- Job challenges
- Daily tasks
- Buying behaviour
- Job title and description
It allows salespeople to personalise their outreach strategies better and find pain points that could serve as triggers in conversations with prospects.
Of course, it also allows them to better plan for future calls.
Why is it essential to develop buyer personas?
Knowing its main customers and customer groups is highly beneficial to any business.
Developing a buyer persona allows you to segment your customers into groups and discover what motivates them and what pains and challenges they experience.
It also helps you find out about their purchasing habits. This is necessary to keep your product offer relevant to your customer base, leading to a higher probability that the right people find your company interesting to work with.
A fleshed-out buyer persona helps you to…
- Personalise your pitch and add points that resonate with your buyers. This helps conversations with prospects flow easily.
- Adapt your product or service based on the market needs. Knowing your customer goals and implementing the features necessary for those results is vital to success.
- Identify the most profitable buyer types for future lead generation. Knowing which customer types are most likely to bring the highest revenue to your business allows you to generate better leads, prioritise them accurately, and distribute them to the right sales reps.
- Focus your efforts on the right buyers, ensuring that your sales representatives spend their energy where it counts.
- Streamline your sales cycle, ensuring a smoother ride for your prospects and sales team.
- Create marketing campaigns that speak to your audience, leading more potential clients to seek out your business and show interest in your offer.
Steps to creating a buyer persona
So, now that you understand what a buyer persona is and why it’s a good idea to outline it for your business, you must be wondering how to create one.
Below are the steps to creating a detailed buyer persona to boost your sales…
Step 1: Discover your audience
Every business provides services to different kinds of customers. Therefore, the right place to start creating a customer persona would be to find common traits that link customers.
Whether it’s age, area of expertise or region, you need to know what type of person your offer is geared towards, and who it’s meant to appeal to.
For example, if your company specialises in building websites, your offer might be geared towards small businesses that don’t yet have their corner of the internet. Whereas if you sell software designed for a specific task, your customers will most likely be professionals in the same industry.
It is also important to note that your business could have multiple buyer personas. It is crucial to define all of them to maximise your sales potential.
Another way to discover more about your company's primary audience is to look at customers already bringing your business money.
When trying to develop sales personas, there’s no better place to look than at the customers that you already have. They’ve shown interest in your product or service already, so take a look at what they have in common with each other, such as…
- Their goals
- Their motivations
- Their geographic location
- The industry they work in
- Their job positions
- The challenges they face at work
An excellent way to identify the common factors that led your existing clients to you would be to look through their information in your CRM system. During their conversation with a sales representative, many of the points mentioned above have probably been explored in some capacity.
➡️ Learn more about CRM software and how it can help your business boost sales in our article!
Using the data from CRM will also help you better personalise your communications with prospects.
You could also chat with your customer support team; they spend significant time in contact with customers. Similarly, you could reach out to your customers and interview them to try and find those common points that you could push off of in your research into your existing client base.
The critical lesson to take away here is never to underestimate first-party data.
Step 2: Determine what pains your product alleviates
Since most customers are likely represented by the same demographic, they share the same day-to-day challenges. Your outreach strategies and sales pitch benefit from an in-depth understanding of customers' pains and how your product offers a solution.
Your product or service could automate challenging to-do tasks. In turn, this drives more interest in the customer’s company, increasing the efficiency of the prospect’s department. It’s important to know what value your solution will have for your buyer.
During this step, it’s important not to stop at surface-level challenges. Try discovering more niche, profound problems to which your company offers a solution.
Step 3: Identify triggers and objections
A trigger is either something that motivates your prospect to seek out your company.
A clear picture of what motivates your prospect to look for a solution boosts your sales pitch.
Motivational factors may vary from customer to customer, whether it be a lack of revenue or an ineffective system. It opens the door to better relationships with customers, understanding their motivations and mindsets behind their actions.
This is why it is essential to outline triggers when creating your buyer persona.
Another side of this coin that a sales rep must dig into is finding out about the widespread potential objections among your customer base.
If a customer has presented you with a particular objection, prospects within a similar industry would likely want to discuss similar points. Having a buyer persona at the ready can help your sales team tailor their pitch to focus on resolving those objections before they’ve been made.
Knowing those objections beforehand plays an exponential role in making your product more valuable, before tweaking your sales pitch to sound just right.
It’s also worth researching some common objections! 😉
Step 4: Discover your existing audience
When developing sales personas, there’s no better place to look than at the customers you already have. After all, they’ve already shown interest in your product or service, so look for what they have in common.
Look for things such as…
- Their goals
- Their motivations
- The industry they work in
- Their job positions
- The challenges they face at work
- Their geographic location
An excellent way to be able to identify the common factors that led your existing clients to you would be to have a look through the information about them in your CRM system, since during their conversation with a sales representative, a lot of the points mentioned above have probably been explored in some capacity. Using the data out of your CRM will also help you better personalise your communications with prospects.
You could also have a chat with your customer support team. After all, they spend significant time in contact with customers.
Of course, you could also reach out to your customers and interview them to try and find those common points that you could push off of in your research into your existing client base.
The critical lesson to take away here is never to underestimate first-party data.
Step 5: Bring your personas to life
After collecting all the necessary information, the next step is to give your buyer persona… well… a persona.
It might seem silly, but treating your buyer persona like a real person helps the sales team paint a picture of prospects in their head. They can refer to this picture in the future when planning their next call.
It also helps them find potential questions to ask their clients during subsequent calls, piecing together the similarities with the buyer persona you’ve created.
Start by giving your persona a name, then describe your sales persona’s “story”. What they do at work, Which troubles they face, and what motivates them daily.
Step 6: Create a buyer persona template
Now that you know who your persona is, it’s time to compile and summarise that information.
This makes it easier for you and your colleagues to refer back to the buyer persona during the planning and research phases.
Having it all in one neat, visually-appealing template also makes a page-turning read for the rest of your sales team.
Check out the example of a buyer persona template below to give you an idea of where to start with this step.
On this template, you will find the profile of Florian Roberts. He’s a small IT company owner looking for systems that efficate workflow and scale through its rapid growth.
This persona includes…
- Different communication channels that Florian prefers
- His general demographic
- The challenges he faces at work
- His product preferences to build your pitch around
- Phrases and quotes you can use to best get your message across
How to use buyer personas for increased sales
The more in-depth knowledge you hold of buyer personas, the easier it is for you to adapt your sales strategy towards them. It also makes it easier to show the value of your offer to customers.
A buyer persona isn’t a replacement for the discovery part of the sales process. Still, it helps your team show the prospect that we know who they are, what they want, and what they need.
Having a detailed buyer persona also helps during the lead generation process, allowing your lead generation team to look for leads with specific parameters.
For example, when sourcing leads through LinkedIn, you can look for leads with desired parameters by utilising the filters provided. You may look for someone with the “Business Developer” job title or leads geographically based in New York to generate relevant leads.
It’s also a good idea to use the exact wording your existing customers used during their interviews when describing their challenges. This helps build rapport faster and show your prospects that you empathise with their needs.
Adjust your tone during sales campaigns to one that speaks to prospects the most.
Knowing your audience also allows you to adapt your sales enablements to be more tailored to your customer's preferences. Fill your presentations with points that fit your buyer persona, focus on how your product solves specific challenges during your demo, or pick the proper case studies to send to customers.
With your buyer persona ready, you can now speak to the customers in their language, showing them that you genuinely care about their problems and challenges.
Now all that’s left to do is tailor your sales strategy to be a perfect fit for your customers' needs!