What is a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is a representation of your target customers, created to inform your sales, marketing, and customer success strategies. It serves as a detailed profile of the individuals you interact with during the sales process and helps guide interactions throughout the customer journey. Consider a buyer persona as a blend of characteristics that define your typical customer.
What a Buyer Persona Is Not
Although I am passionate about creative writing, developing buyer personas is not an opportunity to display your character creation abilities. Regrettably, I have encountered numerous subpar B2B buyer personas that begin with phrases similar to the following:
Eric William
Occupation: Software Engineer
Manager: Senior Product Manager
Age: 33
Personal Life: Married with Two children, resides in a single-family home in Georgia, an affluent area in Atlanta
Interests: Reading fiction books, doing yoga, traveling, listening to podcasts
Unfortunately, too often buyer personas begin by focusing on these (amusing but mostly unimportant) details before finally getting to what truly matters.
I’m not saying that you can’t add some flair to your personas by using creative names and images. However, avoid getting too caught up in unimportant details. Does it matter if Erica Engineer prefers tailored suits or casual Old Navy t-shirts? Only if you’re selling clothing. And if “Erica” turns out to be an “Eric”? Still not significant.
What is important are her priorities, purchasing behavior, and the extent of her decision-making authority in business. What tools does she use? What trade publications does she read? What are her main challenges at work?
As Adele Revella from the Content Marketing Institute explains:
“The biggest mistake marketers make is profiling their buyers instead of their buying decisions. Ultimately, marketing aims to influence buying behavior, so the primary focus of personas should be understanding the attitudes, decision-making criteria, and actions that lead buyers to view one option as better than another.”
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Why Buyer Personas Matter for B2B Account-Based Marketing
Recently, David Dodd published an article that posed a thought-provoking question: Has Account-Based Marketing rendered Buyer Personas redundant?
In the contemporary era of B2B marketing and sales, the emphasis is shifted from leads to accounts. Companies strive to identify their ideal customer profiles to find accounts that align with their business goals, and then concentrate on building relationships with those accounts instead of just generating leads.
Therefore, if leads are no longer the main focus, does the significance of buyer personas still hold?
The straightforward answer is, yes. According to David:
According to David, buyer personas are still crucial for efficient ABM. Every buyer at the target accounts will bring their unique perspectives to the buying process, and it remains vital to have marketing messages and content that cater to those individual perspectives. Although it is possible to gather more information about our actual buyers now, big data alone cannot consistently provide insights into the goals, objectives, and motivations of each individual buyer.
In fact, ABM makes understanding buyer personas even more critical. With the Flip My Funnel model for account-based marketing, we must expand our reach to engage each decision-maker at target accounts. We can no longer rely on the assumption of selling to a single individual. Instead, we’re selling to a group of three to fifteen people, and it’s our responsibility to market to all of them.
Buyer Personas Worksheet for Account-Based Marketing
The following worksheet will aid you in identifying buyer personas for account-based marketing. It’s essential to keep in mind that most B2B purchases are made by a group of buyers, so this worksheet should be completed for each persona.
The page you’re viewing is just one of three that have been created to assist in the identification process. You can download the complete, fillable PDF version of the three-page worksheet by clicking the link.
A crucial point to note: do not fill this worksheet based solely on intuition or anecdotes. To create comprehensive and accurate B2B buyer personas, it’s necessary to carry out extensive research. SnapApp has provided some useful tips for researching your buyer personas, such as
- Optimizing forms to obtain more information from prospects and customers
- Using social listening to gather information about buyers
- Conducting interviews.
Here is the “Identifying Buyer Personas” worksheet.
Next Step: Define Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
Well done on defining your buyer personas! But the task is not over yet, you still need to determine your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). An ICP is a characterization of the ideal company that would be the perfect match for your product, rather than just the individual buyer or end-user. To further assist you in this process, you can download the “Blueprint to Account-Based Marketing” which offers various useful worksheets, including one to help you define your ICP.
