Lead generation buyer personas are shorthand for the different types of individuals most likely to buy your products or services – basically fictional examples of your ideal customers, like IT Irene, Mechanic Mike, or Builder Bryan. Why are they helpful? Because having a deep understanding of who your target sales leads are will increase the chances of greater sales. It allows you to create the most suitable content to draw them in and win their trust and provides insights into the different solutions they are looking for. Developing buyer personas for lead generation might seem like an onerous task, but it doesn’t have to be if you follow a few steps. The strongest buyer personas are based on market research as well as your own internal intelligence gleaned from your interactions with clients. So let’s start there.
When it comes to lead generation, do your research
The first step in creating personas is to do some basic research so you completely understand where your B2B lead generation sales clients are coming from. That includes all of the unique industry challenges they have, like regulatory issues, currency fluctuations, export laws and other problems they typically come up against. Next, look at your own digital data to see trends. Facebook and Twitter analytics can help you discover the kinds of content customers are looking at, which in turn tells you the sorts of problems they have, and how your products and or services can solve them.
Talk to sales
Your frontline sales people will be a great source of information, so tap their knowledge to find out the types of customers and sales leads they interact with. Ask them what questions they hear consistently, and how they would characterize the types of customers they see.
Interview customers
Ideally you will speak to a customer from each industry that you serve, so you get a broad idea of what features help them the most, what caused them to look for a solution and why yours was the best. Alternatively, if you can speak to dissatisfied customers about why your product wasn’t a good fit for them, this helps clarify which personas you do serve well. This can also assist your company in improving the product or service so it becomes a better fit for more customers.
Create your buyer personas
Take all the learnings and apply them to creating buyer personas. They should include geographic and demographic information, the industry they work in and their position. Get to know their preferred way of researching and buying from a company. For instance, some buyers might enjoy doing their own deep research and then interact with a chatbot. Others might prefer a longer conversation with a live person who can walk them through their purchasing dilemma. For B2B companies, a persona should be created for every industry that you serve. Give each persona a name, find an image to represent them, and create cheatsheets for all of them with samples of the language and pitches to use for each of them. This helps ensure that everyone in the company is speaking the same language when having conversations with customers.
Buyer personas allow you to target marketing efforts to specific needs, behaviours and concerns, but it also helps to align every department in the company. If you would like to talk about buyer personas and other lead generation topics, contact us.
