In this 3rd piece of our 5 part series, you'll find a lighthearted guide to enabling sales reps to close more deals.
Think that your business is stimulating the economy? You might want to think again. When it boils down to it, it’s the customer that makes the economy go ‘round. Customers dictate what they want to buy, when they want to buy it, and from who they’re going to buy. This is why we covered the term customer-centricity earlier; it’s the key enabler to closing more deals. And sales organizations that understand who their customers are and what makes them turn to a particular product are the ones succeeding: pitch to the wrong customers, and you will fail.
What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is a representation of your perfect consumer. It’s a combination of what your ideal buyer needs and wants, as well as her personality and lifestyle. Your buyer persona gives you focus – a name, key attributes, and a common ground based on personality.
If the goal is to close deals, the way of getting there is through reaching the right audience, with the right message, through the right channel, at the right time. And to achieve this, you need to know who your audience is, where they are, and when they are ready to buy.
How do you create a buyer persona?
While a buyer persona is not a real person, it isn’t a fiction, either. The persona is developed through analytics and insights as well as key data metrics and demographics. This is established through a collection of various sources such as social media conversations and various analytics tools. In order to succeed with customers, Marketing and Sales should be working together to establish key buyer persona characteristics.
Developing a buyer persona includes giving each persona a name in order to get you and your team thinking about them as real people. Give them a back story – age, marital status, children and housing situation to better understand their shopping habits, daily needs and desires. Identify the person’s job, their role and the company they work with. And, finally, add their goals, values and fears in order to determine unique selling points.
What then?
With all these attributes, it’s time to determine the best ways to meet the needs of each type of customer. Sales Enablement is a powerful tool that uncovers the needs of the buyer on Sales Call, and reverts back that information to marketing for further message refinement.
The purpose of identifying buyer personas is to increase customer engagement and close more deals. When Sales and Marketing are aligned, they are more inclined to uncover buyer personas, and therefore, target the right customers.
How well do you know your perfect customers? Are you using an ideal representation to craft the right messages?
