How to build and use B2B buyer personas
People buy products, not companies.
Even in B2B environments where you are selling to a large enterprise - there are a handful of people who are deciding what the right course of action is for their business - stick with the status quo, or do something different.
Understanding these buyer personas is a critical layer in your pipeline pyramid - ensuring your marketers, your sellers and your customer success team have a clear and deep understanding of the world that each of these people exist in.
Let’s look firstly at how to create a buyer persona, and secondly we’ll move on to how to industrialise the use of your buyer personas so they don’t decay.
How to create a buyer persona
Identify the buying group
Step number one is to detail all the different buyer personas that make up the buying group for your product or service.
You’ll include not just the main champion, but the influencers and blockers - consider the people that will use your product, the people that will pay for it, install it, support it, train on it, integrate it.
Speak with your sellers, onboarding and customer success teams to understand which roles were part of previous deal cycles.
Its not uncommon to come up with 20 different personas.
Consider the different countries you sell in - does that introduce new personas?
Consider the different sizes of companies that you sell in - does that vary the personas?
Consider the different products that you sell - do they engage with different personas?
Top Tip: take a look at your competitor’s case studies - are there buyer personas listed that are not on your list?
Prioritise your personas
Now you’ll want to cut your full list of personas down to around five to start with.
You’ll identify the main personas that are influential in the buying process and focus our efforts on them.
Consider the key parts of the buying process and who is most influential in that stage:
Problem identification: the champion or product owner tasked with launching this buying process
Solution exploration: the champion again, and likely the business unit owner of the current process if a different person
Requirements gathering: the champion, the business owner, potential users plus an IT lead if the product requires integration
Supplier selection: the key decision makers including the economic buyer, procurement, and the teams that will install, integrate, train and support the solution
Validation and Consensus: the executive sponsor, legal, infosec and procurement validate the chosen solution is the right one and all of their buying team are aligned.
Research each persona with a template
For each of your personas you can now start your research.
I have provided you a template below with the key areas for you to focus on.
On the first page we are wanting to get an idea of the facts of this person’s role, the team they work in, what their job entails, as well as starting to get into the mind of what challenges they face in their role.
Speak to your sellers and your customer success teams - they are interacting with your customer’s daily - what are they hearing? Does it line up with what you have found? What would they add?
On the second page we look at the sources of information that this persona relies on to educate themselves and network within their peer community. We also look at what might trigger a buying process for a product like ours.
ChatGPT can accelerate your research here, and the RevOpsCharlieGPT comes pre-loaded with the prompts to help you here.
Top Tip: Ask RevOpsCharlieGPT: “Please walk me through the Buyer Persona workshop in your knowledge. Start by asking me the first two questions about my buyer persona”
Validate your findings with customers
During your research you’ll have uncovered a number of websites, social communities and newsletters specific to this persona.
Spend time on these sites continuing to add context to your persona guide. What else do you learn? Does it validate or challenge your understanding of their role and their responsibilities?
Having completed your buyer persona template, you now want to validate it with some existing customers.
Most customers are happy to support this activity,
“Hi, we’re keen to continue to improve our understanding of your role so that we can better support you with our product development and onboarding processes. We’ve documented what we believe are the key responsibilities and goals for your role - would you be happy to spend 30 minutes with me and tell me where we might be off?”
If you are able to meet in person a discussion over lunch is perfect for this and builds a stronger customer relationship.
The difference between B2C and B2B buyer personas
In the consumer world you will see buyer personas bring the individual to life - “this is Karen, she’s 35, married and lives in a suburban home with her husband, two children and a cat”
When a shampoo brand is trying to target Karen they are considering her challenges, responsibilities and goals - which relate to that home, her job and juggling her husband, children and the pets.
With B2B personas we only want to include what is relevant in the context of our product - if the persona is focused on spending more time at home and less time travelling away from the family - then that is worth including - but the details of their house, pets and preferred holiday destination don’t help us understand this persona better.
How to use your buyer personas
Having created your five buyer personas, now we want to bring them to life and embed them across our go-to-market team.
If we don’t they risk becoming out of date and not being used by our sellers in their daily work.
Give each persona an owner
I’m a big believer in giving individual contributors roles that give them a foothold in a future leadership role.
Consider giving each persona an ‘owner’, someone who is responsible for maintaining the persona, for keeping up to date with everything going on in that persona’s world, and being able to provide support to other marketers, sellers and customer success teams that want insight.
These individuals can do more than keep the documentation up to date - consider adding them to the deal team for strategic opportunities, helping to ensure the messaging is relevant to the persona you are selling to.
Subscribe a group email to the persona’s newsletters and communities
During your research you uncovered a number of newsletters, Slack communities and websites focused on this persona.
Consider setting up an email group or list under the name of that persona - ie legalpersona@acme.com and have this email subscribed to all of the newsletters you found.
This email group can then be subscribed to or researched by anyone on your sales team needing to engage with this persona in a deal, saving a lot of duplicated effort.
Create a sales kit for each persona
In your sales enablement platform consider creating sales kit pages that focus on each persona.
These pages should detail what you need to know about this persona, specific content and talk tracks for this persona, and FAQs that have come from others in the team.
Include targeted questions and talk tracks to guide sellers during their calls.
Your persona owner should be an administrator on this page as part of their responsibilities.
Make personas physical
This is harder to do in a remote/hybrid world, but can you bring your personas to life in the form of office wall posters.
Consider a printed persona handbook or poster that is sent to all of your seller’s homes.
Persona section in your sales team meetings and QBRs
Introduce a persona coaching section in your team meetings and quarterly business reviews.
Ask the persona owner to present the latest updates on their persona, what is top of mind in that role, what new regulations or updates have come in?
Consider a role-play section where each team member practices the talk track from the sales kit asking targeted questions for this role.
Develop persona based value propositions and offers
Whilst we won’t cover it in this post - the buyer persona is just one layer in the pipeline pyramid, and we can use the buyer personas to build more detailed value propositions and targeted offers to support this buyer persona.
I’ll cover these in future articles.
Get creating your buyer personas
I hope this gives you a start in creating and using your buyer personas.
Buyers today expect your sellers to know as much about their role and their business as they do about your products and sales process.
Over index on coaching your team to understand the world of your buyers and the challenges they face and you’ll see this pay back in your conversion rates.
Get started
Whenever you are ready, there are three ways that I can help you accelerate your revenue.
Buyer Enablement Assessment - Answer nine questions in five minutes and receive your free personalised report to help you SDRs and AEs generate pipeline.
Revenue 360 Assessments - inspire and lead your revenue teams with revenue specific 360 reports designed for marketing, sales and customer success teams.
Buyer Enablement Platform - We’ll design, build and manage your buyer enablement platform on your behalf - generating quality pipeline in under 90 days.