How to build a strong B2B buyer persona

I’ve been fortunate to work with customers from nearly all industry segments and have exposure to multiple people within all levels of the organization. Prior to joining the sales team at Leadfeeder, I was an Account Manager with LinkedIn Sales Solutions and a Sales Development Representative (SDR) at Salesforce.

Working in sales roles at Fortune 100 companies has taught me the importance of a strong sales process and how to map it back to each buyer persona.

Here are just a few trends that I have seen among my most successful peers:

• They seek to understand what their client’s priorities are and make sure to ask the right questions, early on.

• They uncover who their buyer partners with inside of the organization by getting all key stakeholders involved quickly.

• They learn how to help their customers make an impact by helping them to receive recognition and accolades.

At the end of the day the goal should be to build a mutual agreement and create a working relationship that benefits all who are involved in the sales process. This is easier said than done, but the guide below will help you get closer to mastering this necessary sales skill.

Identify who your buyer is what motivates him/her

Before even reaching out to a sales prospect identify who your buyer is and get to know what drives their decision making. Get to understand their organizational structure and possible challenges within their market.

I prefer to tailor this by industry, how long the company has been operating and what I can find out about the business during initial research on their website and social profiles.

Reach out to multiple decision-makers at a time

Reach out to more than one decision-maker at a time if you sell to larger companies. Typically sales conversations need to be warmed up and you don’t always know who is going to bite first. So for the sake of time management you can multi-thread your way into an organization.

Some tactical ways I approach this include:

• Use social media to leverage existing relationships and find warm company entry points

• Research the organization structure and decision-makers on Linkedin by searching for relevant job titles/keywords/locations

• Locate email addresses to initiate highly targeted outreach through Leadfeeder Contacts

Here are some key questions to ask yourself that will help you understand your buyers and what motivates them:

1. What is their role, what are they responsible for, what keywords or descriptions highlight their main responsibilities?

2. What goals do they typically have?

   • Examples: Increasing pipeline, making better hires, cutting down customer support case to resolution time

3. What problem/pain point would you/your product/your solution solve for and why is this important to the primary stakeholder you’re reaching out to?

4. What buying groups will be stakeholders and who do they partner with inside of their own company?

   • Examples: Sales and Marketing, IT and Sales Operations, Human Resources and Legal Services

5. Who else will involve in the decision-making and evaluation process, and why?

   • Example #1: The VP of Sales might involve their Regional Sales Managers: One of their common priorities is to build and maintain a healthy pipeline

   • Example #2: The Director of Customer Success might involve the VP of Customer Support A shared priority of this group is to increase the company NPS Score

6. Where would your solution fit within the organization and who would be involved after a purchase?

   • Pro tip: Make sure those organizational leaders are a part of the early evaluation discussions.

After you’ve identified your B2B buyer personas and their associated buying groups you are ready to focus in on real-time sales needs.

The best methods of outreach often includes value upfront

A few things to keep in mind here:

• Understand the decision-makers individual goals at that moment. Perhaps you are speaking to a Director of Sales and its year-end, you know they are most interested in driving that last bit of revenue.

• Are there any other key initiatives under way? Perhaps the company was just acquired and they are working to restructure or they just raised a big funding round and will be massively hiring.

Understanding your B2B buyer personas is a great way to kick start sales into high gear. You can also prioritize your sales outreach to buyer personas that are interested in your product or service today using website analytics tools like Leadfeeder. Some of our customers have had great success, check out how one company was able to book 700% more sales demos in just 1 month.

Reach out to me with questions or share your buyer profile success stories with me on LinkedIn or Twitter!