Who are your customers? It’s a simple question, and one which every salesperson and marketer should be able to answer without any hesitation. However, it isn’t always as easy as it seems.
At the highest level, B2B salespeople and marketers can answer this question by describing the types of companies that fall into their target markets. But this is where the issue lies, because even though B2B organisations ultimately win accounts, their customers are the ones they need to attract, regularly please, and build trust and loyalty.
What are Buyer Personas?
Buyer personas are essentially profiles of the different types of customers you have. These personas help you to group all of the people you want to target into different categories to better understand factors such as who they are and what they’re interested in. B2B buyer personas typically outline things like:
- Job title and level
- Role in the decision-making process (e.g. influencer vs. decision maker)
- Day-to-day responsibilities and pain points
- Professional goals
- Ideal solutions to be more effective at work
- Typical sources for staying informed, including specific publications and/or channels
- Demographic information, including educational attainment
By helping to identify and understand customers, B2B buyer personas deliver significant benefits to salespeople and marketers.
Creating Buyer Personas
The first step in defining your persona is to investigate your existing CRM data. Digital technology now creates a unified vision of sales, marketing, and service teams, and offers customer insights and behavioural tips to help you deliver relevant messages on demand.
Sugar Market – Helping marketers define accurate Buyer Personas
Marketing Automation tools have become a necessity for all established companies. In the past, marketing interactions were limited to emails. Today, the need for tools that exceed the capabilities of simple email automation systems is keener than ever. Advanced marketing automation systems such as Sugar Market enable companies to better outline buyer personas and accurately segment their audience.
Sugar Market helps you keep your sales team aligned with and aware of all marketing initiatives by integrating marketing responses into your CRM, boosting the likelihood of lead conversion. The tool also helps you nurture marketing leads into sales-ready leads through accurate segmentation and nurturing campaigns. Sugar Market’s drip campaigns allow you to set up dynamic branching options as soon as one of your leads shows interest in adjacent products or services. Based on the data gathered by marketing automation systems, companies have the opportunity to define a more accurate buyer persona and market products and services with more relevance.
SugarPredict – Refining your ideal Buyer Persona
SugarPredict can help your company define a more accurate buyer persona. The engine allows you to gather customer insights from your internal CRM and external sources and processes them to predict which leads are more likely to convert. The tool considers other internal scenarios where the lead conversion was successful; based on these, it predicts what leads are more likely to convert in the future.
Although defining an accurate buyer persona involves a tremendous amount of work for your business marketing, modern-day tools and systems can simplify the process to make defining it easier. Marketing automation, paired with predictive analytics, has been proven to facilitate the process of defining an accurate buyer persona.
When correctly targeted, buyer personas enable sales and marketing teams to focus on these specific types of customers. By developing insights into buyer personas, and sharing them, your company will clearly understand what is most likely to resonate with prospects. Effective marketing to buyer personas drives advocacy, leads, and opportunities — ultimately increasing your ROI.
If you would like to learn more about SugarCRM please contact us.
