Buyer personas: Why you need more personal focus in B2B sales
Buyer personas: Why you need more personal focus in B2B sales
Target group identification is the be-all and end-all in B2B sales. Because only those who understand their potential customers can tailor their marketing to their interests. Knowledge of customer groups also helps to qualify new leads. If you know the decision-making processes, you can adapt the sales process accordingly. There is no other way in value-based selling! How else could you show interested people the individual benefits of your products and services right from the start?
B2B target group identification consists of two approaches: One is the ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) and the other is buyer personas. Both are used to describe target groups and yet have clear differences. Buyer personas, isn't that just something for B2C sales? Read this article to find out why you should align your B2B sales activities with buyer personas.
ICP and buyer personas: target group identification in B2B sales
Without target group identification, there can be no targeted measures in marketing and sales. If you cannot identify your target group, marketing campaigns will come to nothing. Your sales team will approach leads on the phone with irrelevant messages. With such a poor start, it becomes difficult to schedule a discovery call. To optimize their efficiency, successful B2B sales organizations rely on the combination of ICP and buyer personas for target group identification.
In B2B sales, you usually sell complex products that require a lot of explanation. Not every contact is driven by exactly the same challenges and motivations. If you want to close a deal with your offer, you need to be able to justify the added value in each individual case. At the same time, you support the customer's decision-making process. Because in consultative selling, you don't just sell, you also advise. This means that your messages must not only take into account individual problems and motivations. It is also crucial that you deliver the right message at the right time.
Keyword customer intelligence: companies in the B2B business have recognized the need to provide all customers with an individual customer journey. To do this, they collect data in the CRM system or with additional systems for marketing automation. They also use external information from surveys or online tools to create added value for the interested person with each individual touchpoint. This not only applies to sales: for maximum impact, the marketing messages must also be tailored to the level of information and characteristics of the lead. Are your B2B leads expensive or is the target group limited? This makes it all the more important that your team makes the most of every single contact.
Ideal Customer Profile
The Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is an ideal image of the people who can be most valuable to your company. Analyze the most attractive business relationships and find commonalities. These will show you which market is best suited to your products. To create an ICP, you can use data from the CRM system. Expand this information with findings from interviews and surveys so that the target group itself has its say. An ICP typically characterizes the B2B target group using these categories:
- Company size, industry, goals
- Budget and profit
- Location (if this plays a role for the product)
- Biggest challenges and pain points
- Frequent objections during the sales process
- Description of the purchasing process and the roles that make the final purchasing decision
You can also observe other patterns in the sales process. For example, ask yourself which features provide the most convincing arguments for this customer group in a product demo. Where and at what stage of the procurement process do these companies enter your sales process?
Buyer Persona
With the ICP, you have already gathered a lot of important information about your ideal customer group. So you could stop researching at this point and finally start selling? Of course you can! Old hands in sales certainly do this. The problem is that they ignore the fact that B2B sales is also about solving people's problems.
Are you cold calling the manager of a specialist department whose accounting tasks you can simplify with your software? Then he or she may have a completely different view of problems and potential than the person who ultimately makes the decision and approves the budget for your product. Of course, you also need to approach this person in the sales process. But first of all, you will only make progress if you can deliver convincing added value. To ensure that your entire team benefits from the knowledge you have, include the most effective pitch in the cold calling conversation guide.
In the B2B environment, purchasing decisions are made in a buying center. Each person who is part of this buying center has their own motivations, goals and problems. To stay with our example: Your relevant buying center may consist of roughly these people:
- Software users
- Management of the specialist department
- IT management
- Software purchasing
- People from senior management who make the final decisions
Whether with inbound content or in sales: you need to provide the decisive buyer personas with individually relevant information so that they make a strong decision to buy your offer. An example: You can arouse the interest of the division manager by simplifying processes and reducing the time required by his team. The person in charge of the budget, on the other hand, will want to see a clearly positive ROI in order to replace the existing solution, even though there is no absolute need for action. Without working with buyer personas, you won't get anywhere. Think of the product demo in which you meet these buyer personas at the same time.
Buyer personas: theory and practice diverge
So how do you get your buyer personas? The classic way is via workshops with participants from marketing, sales and other specialist areas with a high level of customer proximity. In addition, customer interviews or surveys also provide valuable input. Important: In the B2B sector, it is not about the socio-demographic description of people. You want to understand the purchasing decision process. Discuss these points in particular in the workshop:
The role
What is the persona's job description?
The goal
What does the persona need?
The expectations
What benefits does the persona hope to gain from your product?
The obstacle
What obstacles stand in the way of fulfilling the needs?
Gut feeling is out of place
The data basis is thin and research is not exactly one of the hobbyhorses of proven sales employees? That doesn't matter, because the marketing team is having a good day. The buyer persona with the need for a new software solution is growing significantly. Now he or she is no longer just looking for a new accounting software solution that simplifies processes without requiring a lot of training. He or she also drives a mid-range SUV, has a dog and spends his or her weekends hiking. What does all this have to do with his business decision-making behavior? Nothing - and yet many companies use similarly irrelevant buyer personas. It's tempting to let your imagination and gut feeling run wild. The result is these common problems:
- The buyer persona is defined too specifically to be useful in practice
- Conjecture and fantasy falsify the description of the buyer persona
- Too many buyer personas make the application unnecessarily complicated
Create data-driven buyer personas
Buyer personas are only worth the effort if they are also useful in practice. You already set the course when creating them. A good buyer persona is characterized by these features:
It represents a substantial group of interested parties
The description focuses on the most important needs and expectations
Goals and values of the persona explain their actions
A data-driven approach to creating the buyer persona can ensure significantly better results. At the same time, it can reduce the time required by employees. The most important advantage: data-driven buyer personas are based on real data and not on fantasy and conjecture. This objectivity also gives the buyer persona greater internal acceptance.
The input for creating data-driven personas comes from the conversation documentation in the CRM system. At what point in the sales process do certain objections arise? How do people interact with your website in parallel to direct contact? Online analysis tools can further enrich the information base.
Another advantage of data-driven buyer personas is that they follow the dynamic development of the audience. For example, buyer personas can automatically adapt to changing habits. Data can describe the behavior of people very well. However, they provide little insight into the background. This is why even data-driven buyer personas cannot be created entirely without surveys or the experiences of your frontline employees. It is crucial that you constantly put this input to the test.
Optimize the definition of your buyer personas now
Whether on the phone or in person on site: If you use buyer personas in sales, you will not just see an anonymous company representative in front of you. Instead, the individual motives and motivations of your contact person become visible. This allows you to address your contacts specifically on the points that are decisive for them. Those who master this skill throughout the entire sales process can set themselves apart from the competition.
However, this only works on one condition: Buyer personas must be anchored throughout the organization. Buyer personas can only develop their potential if marketing and sales align their activities accordingly. Buyer personas represent a generalization based on an intersection of similar characteristics. This is why you should always remain attentive in direct contact with your leads. After all, not all behaviours or needs can be standardized.
