Personas are true life examples of your ideal customers. They are based on real data, qualitative insights and general views about your ideal customers' demographics, job priorities and buying behaviour.
They represent the typical stakeholders who you deliver services for or who come together to make significant purchase decisions.
In truth some people think personas are a bit fluffy. And we must admit when we were first introduced to them some years ago, we did too. But having worked with personas for some time now, we’ve seen the impact they have.
The bottom line is you don’t sell to companies, you sell to people. And most B2B buying processes typically involve different people, with different challenges and priorities. If your messaging and content doesn’t address their specific needs, you’ll come across like you don’t really understand them.
In short personas allow you to get into peoples shoes so you can better communicate with them. It’s likely that you’ll have multiple personas, but bear in mind the more you have, the more complex using them can become. We’d recommend you aim for a minimum of 3 or 4 and no more than 10.
There are 3 core elements that make up a persona blueprint – we call it the ‘Persona Triangle’ and you should use this for each individual persona.
1. Get to the heart of their personal priorities
Ultimately we’re all driven by personal motivations. We want that promotion, we want to look good in front of our peers, we don’t want to lose credibility and we don’t want to get fired.
These things are always linked to significant business outcomes. Will the transformation project I’m leading be successful, will we hit our number for the year?
Your messages have to either support or get people to think differently about their priorities for them to pay any attention.
2. Map out your persona's typical buying journey
If you strip it right back, there are 3 main stages - education, consideration and decision. All of your personas will go through a similar process, but where they go at each stage will vary, as the journey is rarely if ever linear.
With a well-defined buyer’s journey you can identify the most common information needs buyers will have at each stage. This should be the cornerstone of your thought leadership and buyer enablement strategy and will give you complete clarity and focus to ensure that all the content you create serves your buyers’ information needs.
3. Change beliefs to lead your audience to your value proposition
People rarely change, because change comes with risk. So unless they believe that doing nothing will be worse than change, your efforts are likely to be in vain. The best way to get people to believe something different is to change their frames of reference. For this you’ll need to apply a mix of emotion, logic and evidence at each stage of their journey.
Here’s a very basic example – Say you help businesses define their ideal customers. Your main persona is a newly appointed sales director who’s priority is to hit their quarterly sales target. Orders are fine but margins are way too low. Emotionally this is very stressful. And she believes the problem lies with the sales team.
Following a Google search she finds your story about securing deals with higher margins. You provide a new perspective - that the low margin problem is usually because companies target the wrong customers.
You provide reasoned arguments, which sparks that epiphany moment - a change in belief that leads the sales director to look for solutions.
This has to many customer references of people with the same problem, who ended up hitting their targets thanks to your proven ideal customer framework. Why wouldn’t you get the deal?
Personas can have a massive impact on both your marketing and sales results. But you need to minimise the guesswork, because you need to be as accurate as you can to make them work. Conducting a Voice of the Customer survey can give you all the insights you need to ensure your personas are built on market reality, rather than gut feel.
Related insights
