So, your marketing team has formed a buyer persona that's really thorough and specific. After delving into stats and demographic information on current buyers/leads and using their understanding of your company’s product or service, marketing has formed these fictitious customers that detail the ideal candidates for your products or services. Everything from age and job position to how these customers find answers to their problems are detailed in these personas. The marketing department has done an excellent job, and there’s no need to change or alter anything about them, right? I mean, how could we possibly get more specific information?
Let’s go right ahead and send out an email blast to all of our contacts who fit this example of:
Buyer Persona - Manager Mike
Mike is a branch manager of a major recruiting firm with over ten locations nationwide. He directly employs and manages between 20 and 40 people, and his branch generates an income of more than $200,000 a year in a suburban community. Mike is between 40 and 55 years of age and has a degree in human resources and a minor in business management. The company has recently become dissatisfied with their computer system’s software performance. Mike spends a lot of time on his LinkedIn account.
With this persona, your marketing team has no issue converting Manager Mike into a possible lead after he sees a LinkedIn advertisment they set up, but now the responsibility falls to your company’s sales team to convert him from a lead to a customer.
But the most effective buyer personas will help the sales team understand what they need to say or how they need to act in order to close the lead and convert them to a buyer. Looking at the persona created by your marketing team, can you judge how you should speak to Manager Mike? Can you tell if he’s even the type of person who would appreciate a phone call? Or would he rather receive all contact through email? What are his pain points and what will it take for your product to truly impress him?
After looking back over the current buyer persona created by your marketing team, you realize that although it may be highly functional for creating leads, it’s really not suited for converting leads to customers. And while the buyer persona will help the sales team know who they're talking to, the truth is that your marketing team really doesn’t have access to all of the information needed to create a fully-completed persona. Sure, the data is all there, but where is the information that gives Manager Mike a personality?
Seeing that your current buyer persona is incomplete, though not inaccurate, your sales team goes in and adds the information that they have found to the Manager Mike persona:
Manager Mike
Mike is a branch manager of a major recruiting firm with over ten locations nationwide. He directly employs and manages between 20 and 40 people, and his branch generates an income of more than $200,000 a year in a suburban community. Mike is between 40 and 55 years of age and has a degree in human resources and a minor in business management. The company relies heavily on organization and recently has become dissatisfied with their current software. Mike relies heavily on reviews before he purchases a product or service and is frequently on his LinkedIn account. Although Mike would like a more capable software for his company, he doesn’t want to have to train his entire staff on a new system. Mike has always been friendly with sales representatives, but prefers sales representatives who are very direct in their sales pitch and doesn’t waste time with small talk.
The sales team gathers this new information using several different techniques including interviewing current customers, and surveying past, previous, and potential customers. After placing the new information into the current personas developed by the marketing team, the sales team is now better prepared to speak with leads that fit with Manager Mike.
With this information, the sales representative knows that contacting the potential client via phone call is the preferable mode of contact for Manager Mike. Also, the representative can frame their questions to maximize the potential of a sale using the information in the persona. Questions that the sales rep could ask Manager Mike may be:
- Do you and your company value and rely upon specific organizational standards?
- Do you have limited time to train your staff on new software?
- Are you dissatisfied with the current software your company is using?
- Have you heard of (company name)? If not, I can send you the links to our LinkedIn,Facebook, and company website as well as a link to our reviews page on Yelp.
The great thing about buyer personas is that they are never considered “complete.” It’s a constantly evolving entity, much like a person’s constantly evolving life-cycle. A persona transforms from new born to child to young adult and into adult hood. And the sales team plays an important role in growing this persona, and discovering when, perhaps, it may come time to develop a new persona based on a change in the most relevant customer’s pain points, needs, etc.
The marketing team alone does not have the information necessary to develop a fully-functional buyer persona that can be used, without change, by the whole department. Much like a person is influenced by many different channels in life, a Buyer Persona is influenced and optimized by different channels within a company, and the sales team has the primary role in gathering information that cannot be gathered through analytics and demographic research.
Interested in learning more about buyer personas and their link to marketing and sales? Call us at 412-942-0222 or fill out the form on our Contact Us page.
