Why You Need Effective Buyer Personas for B2B Lead Generation
Why You Need Effective Buyer Personas for B2B Lead Generation
A buyer persona is a hypothetical customer that serves as a model of the buyer you want to target. Personas are based on an ideal customer profile (ICP), which is a set of metrics that guide your overall sales strategy. Personas take this information and build it out to clarify the needs, behaviors, goals, and concerns of your audience.
If you’re outsourcing your B2B lead generation to an agency, they will need to understand your ideal customer profile in order to run an effective campaign. To ensure high-quality lead generation, you need to understand how your audience thinks. Why do they buy? What problem is your product or service really solving?
Understanding Your Ideal Customer Profile
Buyer personas can be created through research, surveys, and interviews. It’s important to talk to your actual customers rather than relying on high-level demographic data. Even those outside your existing database may provide useful insights, assuming they align with your target audience.
- Identify your target audience
- Explain the value proposition
- Determine the ideal customer profile
- Include pain points of the target market
- Develop a unique selling proposition
The best way to identify your best customer types is to ask your sales team, but it’s also helpful to think about your customers’ motivations and the specific problems they have. How do the different types of customers you serve use your service? What prompted them to look for a solution?
Distill all of the information you’ve gathered into a persona that encompasses patterns, commonalities, and includes actual language you’ve gathered from customer conversations.
Create at least one primary persona, and share that persona with the rest of the company as well as your B2B lead generation agency.
Use the Buyer Persona to Align Your Lead Gen and Sales Efforts
Buyers are 48% more likely to do business with companies that personalize their marketing and sales outreach to address their specific needs.
If you don’t have a detailed B2B buyer persona, you’re likely to end up chasing leads that aren’t a good fit. They may churn, take forever to close, or turn out to be unhappy with your solution.
Personas ensure your team and your lead gen agency are aligned on who you’re trying to get in front of. It also helps your team understand how to sell to this audience. You’ll end up with faster sales cycles and customers that are a perfect fit for your business.
Do You Actually Need a B2B Buyer Persona?
Yes. The answer is yes. Without a clearly defined buyer persona, your sales and marketing teams will waste time and resources. It’ll be hard to close new business. Your pipeline and revenue will suffer.
Having a detailed B2B buyer persona improves your entire sales funnel. It will also help your lead generation agency find prospects that are a good match for your business. Targeting based on a poorly defined persona generates poor results.
With a clearly defined persona, it’s easier to qualify leads before passing them along to your sales reps. If you’ve hired an agency to help with cold outreach, you can qualify leads before even reaching out to them.
The entire team, both internal sales reps and your outsourced SDR resources, will be more productive. Good personas help you close more business.
Use the Buyer Persona to Create Copy That Will Convert
Email campaigns based on a detailed buyer persona have better open, reply and click-through rates. Personas make your website more effective and valuable for your target audience.
When it comes to writing persuasive copy, there’s no better way to gain an understanding of your audience’s needs and expectations than by creating a buyer persona. It’s virtually impossible to write effective cold outreach copy if you don’t have a deep understanding of the target audience. The clarity provided by a persona improves the ROI on outreach activity because you’re already targeting the right people.
For most companies, there are 3-4 personas that account for the vast majority of your sales. According to Marketing Insider Group, 93% of companies who exceed revenue goals are segmenting their database by buyer persona.
How to Tell if Your Buyer Persona is Effective
Every B2B business needs effective buyer personas in order to find, convert, and retain more customers. Your personas should reflect the primary ideal customer types for your business. Including “negative” personas can also be helpful, to avoid reaching out to prospects who will be a poor fit in the long run.
If your marketing and sales efforts are not delivering the results you need, it may be worth taking a look at your buyer personas. Are they detailed? Accurate? When is the last time you updated them? The market and industry you’re operating in may have changed, and your personas could be outdated.
Need Help with B2B Lead Generation?
MarketJoy can help you accelerate sales cycles, fill your pipeline with qualified leads, and get you in front of decision-makers at your ideal prospect companies. Book a free discovery call to find out how we can help grow your business.