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Posted on: January 25, 2021
Reading Time: 8 minutes
Category: B2B marketing
Developing a set of B2B buyer personas can help to focus your marketing teams efforts and refine your selling process.
In this article, we’ll outline why you should create them, what to include, and how to go about building them.
Table of contents
A buyer persona is a representation of a segment within your target market. Created using customer data and market research, they help marketing teams sell to specific customer segments.
B2B buyer personas will include many of the same elements as a B2C persona, but additional items focus on the job role as well as the person.
A buyer persona is just one concept in a whole array of marketing disciplines concerned with segmenting and targeting different sections of a market. Related terms include business persona, customer description, ideal customer profile (ICP), customer segmentation, market segmentation, and market mapping.
For more reasons to embrace buyer personas, read our post on the benefits of market segmentation.
The first step of creating a buyer persona is deciding which elements to include. This will depend on the data you have available, and specifics to your industry and product or service.
We’ll cover the most common sections below and suggest some additional options you may want to consider.
The first section covers the basics: who is this person? Remember this is a B2B persona though, so it’s probably not relevant that they like walks on the beach.
Basic elements to include:
To help flesh out the mental image of the customer profile, it can useful to include:
Finally, you need to know how and where to reach them:
How each persona impacts decisions will affect your messaging.
This is all about identifying some of the levers you can pull. What matters to them?
What are the main things they need to achieve to be a success in their role? This could be responsibilities such as generating leads, reducing churn, or upskilling the team.
How is success in the role measured? This could be items such as revenue generated, sales, leads, reduced customer churn.
What are the challenges that stop them from realising the goals you identified in the previous section? Are current suppliers meeting their needs?
It can also be useful to identify barriers and fears this segment has. Is this segment resistant to your solution in some way?
Finally, considering all of the above, how does your product or service help them to overcome their challenges and achieve their goals? Try to be specific.
Many business buyer personas are fleshed out with further details, helping to build a more detailed picture.
So how do you begin to create these profiles? Think about where you can find out about your customers, and start digging.
Research should be a mix of quantitative and qualitative, but the best starting point is quantitative. Good personas depend on good data, so don’t be afraid to ignore weak data.
The first place to look is your CRM, although what you’ll find and how helpful it will be depends on your CRM management.
If you have optimised your sales pipeline your reps should be asking relevant questions already. If they update the CRM as they pitch, you’ll have a much better starting point.
Look at the data on prospects in your pipeline, as well as your clients. This way you can see if the prospects you are marketing to align with the clients you sign.
If you using email prospecting as one of your lead generation channels, you’ll have an instant advantage. Having identified your ideal customers at the start, prospecting data is enriched with job titles, job seniority, company size, industry, and so on.
Not only that, but these people have definitely seen your messaging – you’ve contacted them directly – so the performance of your campaigns will be revealing. Investigate leads and sales by company size, industry, and job titles to start revealing cohorts.
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Google Analytics can provide useful information. Look at performance indicators (sessions, bounce rates, conversions) through the lens of different demographics to see how different demographics act on your site.
In-market segments can reveal topics your audience is interested in. If your personas fit into age brackets, looking at in-market segments by age can help flesh out the interests of different groups.
Looking at your social media followers can help to reveal a more detailed picture of the demographics of your audience. Social media allows you to dig deeper, seeing what their wider interests are.
Join groups and engage social listening platforms to find common questions and pain points for different segments.
After building your buyer personas, engage in one to one interviews with existing customers to check and refine each group.
Qualitative research is the best way to understand the challenges and decision influences. You can do this by asking client services to arrange interviews, or by speaking to the sales and SDR teams.
So we’ve covered what should be included and where to look for the data, but how do you initially start to form customer profiles?
I can illustrate an example approach with some of the basic data available to businesses who use prospecting: job titles, job seniority, company size, and industry.
Initially, you’re searching for differences in performance. As company size data splits nicely into nine different groups, it’s a good place to start.
Within the companies you target, who are you more successful with? Pull out three or four groups to examine further.
Next, we want to examine the same dataset from a different angle. For example, we might want to see which job titles at larger companies are leading to sales.
However, SoPro prospected to around 32,000 unique job titles in 2020. There are too many variables to be useful. So if we group them into seniority, we can reduce it to five or six levels.
Crossing the five or six job groups with the eight company sizes, some potential buyer profiles should arise.
Personas become useless if there are too many, so aim to have six at a maximum. At this point, they will be a rough sketch.
If your data has too many variables you end up creating too many personas. Many products are targeted at specific industries, but if your solution works for everyone, you have around 150 different industries to choose from.
Using client interviews, insights from customer-facing teams and social media analysis, fill in the other elements of your buyer persona.
You also can research specific clients that match certain personas.
Once you’ve made your personas, test them. Analyse your client base and assess whether the majority of customers can fit into the groups you have defined.
If you’re lacking in design expertise, there are tools that will produce a good looking profile in minutes.
Simple to use and flexible, interactive web tool from Hubspot.
Not as nicely designed as the Hubspot tool, but it is fully customisable.
As an adobe acrobat document, this template is less customisable than the others.
Once you know who you are targeting, we can build a market map of your total addressable market, for free. Map your market here.
James Mills
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