A proper demonstration is vital for a successful sales process, and the demo itself can be a make-or-break moment. #Demoboost offers a unique solution, enabling long-lasting effects that elevate your prospects' product experience right from the initial conversation. Say goodbye to tedious, one-off demos - with Demoboost, you can set up free trials and discover a more practical approach to winning over your prospects.
A study by HubSpot found that only 35% of businesses have created buyer personas, and of those that have, only 20% feel that their personas are accurate. Well, a mystery? Or an inadequate understanding of the buying process? Or a need for explicit adoption of the concept in the ongoing effort? Indeed, there are many reasons, but the biggest is the habit of not reading and following the data.
So what is the buyer persona? It is a detailed profile encompassing the potential customers' demographic, psychographic, and behavioral characteristics, providing insights into their preferences, needs, pain points, and motivations. Buying personas helps businesses better understand their audience, tailor marketing strategies, and create products or services that resonate with specific customer segments, ultimately improving customer engagement and driving sales.
This is broadly considered to be a marketing "work." However, I disagree with that point of view. This "work" must be understood and implemented across the sales process. Ask yourself. Is suddenly the buying persona changing throughout the sales and renewal process? That could be less often than it doesn't. That is a sufficiently supportive argument to validate that's the way it should work. Because of the time that sellers and customer success is spending with their buyers or customer, they should be at the forefront of adopting this approach and studying the data. In this symbiotic relationship with sales, marketing creates ground messaging and materials to ask questions and get questions that lead to meetings with sellers.
My daughter loves baking. I sometimes help her during the fun activity (accentuating the word "Help"). I see many similarities with the process we discuss here. Each layer represents the stacked run in parallel efforts at different levels across the three GTM functions: marketing, sales, and renewal. Each layer sometimes has a slightly or entirely different set of ingredients to provide the best possible customer experience throughout the buying process. Ultimately, you want the cake to taste great for your buyer. Would you buy or recommend it to anyone if it wasn't?
The customer experience should motivate the companies to design tactical steps between these three teams to make the sales process work. In the meantime, many struggles, spending their budget overinvesting in their GTM engine that more bodies can't fix. Sales leaders create multiple titles jobs that often duplicate the effort or underutilize these resources. Try to specialize their teams or individuals while not having a solid indication that they follow a scaling process. Any venture stage one or two company must establish the critical synergy fundamentals before scaling their geography or expanding its sales teams. Buying persona is among a few others that must be verified several times before expanding offering synergies helping to save cost and increase your Revenue Per Employee.
Before we dive into the details of how to fix it, we should spend some time behind these human "errors" We should spend some time on the misconceptions around the personas.
The "Sales Know Better" we are living in a sales-centric world. That's a fact. We are selling our leadership at school, college, and work. Before you reach retirement age, you will likely think about how to sell your idea to your boss, peers, and even your wife or husband. The second reason is more prosaic. Suppose a sales sale company can thrive. It often puts sales leaders in place of power to call the shots on how the sales practice or process will look like.
"Marketing's Data is not good" Yes, we are surrounded by data, and multiple sources and databases provide plenty of information. Sometimes the data must be fixed or completed, which is good enough. Teams are looking for a holy grail of data source that makes this perfect, constantly updated, and 100% on target to every letter in the persona definition.
"I've done this in my previous company." Many sellers, marketers, and renewal team members mention this often. They over-index on their experience. They trust their experience more than data relating to another product, often different or adjacent markets of what their experience tells them, and missing the critical blind spots while on the highway.
"This never works as described" Sellers return to prove that something is not bulletproof enough. The critical failure behind it is that sellers must study the buyer's persona, thinking, and decision-making process. Often sellers (together with marketers) need help to assess how high on the list is the problem their product can solve. Sounds obvious, but that's the case.
"What if the prospect or customer says that …" The personas document doesn't include objection handling. The conversations go sideways or off-topic or simply are industry-based practices. Plus we have
"When should I bring this up in the conversation?" providing the right collateral depending on the customer journey is often mistakenly utilized, pushing away prospects instead of educating or changing their perspective on the solution to their issue. The companies overwhelm their prospect.
"We are in sales, and they are in marketing" is a typical sillo game that leaves GTM teams unable to leverage synergies. I've seen companies spending large amounts of their budget on Marketing, rarely aligning with the sales teams and vice versa. These situations are screaming for attention.
Conclusion: Buying Persona has a different shape and impact in companies depending on their size and industry. That's a fact. That's also a reason each time this exercise needs to be done and redone thoroughly by the sales and marketing leader together. Ultimately, these two leaders are destined to work towards the same goals that help to win their organization. The third component, the Renewal teams, should be remembered in this exercise. However, that approach takes a toll when the company starts facing a higher churn and desperately seeks an explanation for its poor performance. Making this mistake early without immediate corrective action can cost you dearly. Getting out of the churn spiral might be more complicated than you think, dragging your profitability into the abyss and giving you little choice but severely cutting your cost envelope (not fun, for sure).
Here are some other tactical recommendations for those who are interested in getting their process better:
Incorporate your Buying Persona exercise in your annual planning. There is no reason why you shouldn't make revisions to the definition. Markets and organizations can change over 6 or 12 months. Why would you leave that on the table, assuming your profit and loss won't be impacted? Do you feel more confident that your revenue target gets achieved without buying persona exercise? That's what I thought.
Define your ICP first. Buying Persona is often representing or purchasing on behalf of their organizations. You must define the ICP before including or collecting data behind their individuals or roles within these organizations. Since every industry or market follows different conditions, their functions, behaviors, and responsibilities might differ. It's essential to play well to their preferences.
Align the activities related to the specific persona with your sales process. Steps in the stages of your sales must include expectations around the buying persona goals, objectives, and ability to consume the right collateral. You can't just send anything. Your materials or meetings must be well thought out from the contact perspective so that your buyer is walked through the well-designed disciplined thinking that builds their perception about the solution and their role objectives. Think about it as an evolution of your relationship with your newly met acquaintance. You are not sharing with them all the details about your private life. That's how most of us operate at work.
Assemble your data sources into one model. Gather customer surveys, market research from think tanks, website analytics, social media data, and customer interviews. These all should be ranked, dissected, and synthesized before decisions are made and changes operationalized, trickling down into daily operations.
Structure your data mix categories between demographics, buying behavior, psychographics, pain points, and role in the buying committee. Often you will end up with several roles that must be identified in this exercise. Each of them will have a different percentage behind these categories.
Review and adjust regularly. You don't have to wait for another planning exercise to make a few tweaks here and there. It is not an exact science-like exercise; therefore, once you set up your machine, your conclusions and adjustments will become a more straightforward call.
Finally, you must be specific enough. It can only be done at a low level; otherwise, your teams will abandon this quickly. The trick is to have enough details so each seller can figure out several ways to make conversations appealing. The more information we know about this persona, the more angles you get as a seller to enter the conversation. Getting someone's attention is more challenging than ever; therefore, you can't afford to do this work scratching the surface. That may be the secret to why not many organizations follow these principles.
Comments