3 Ways to Start Using Buyer Personas to Close More Deals

Here’s a rundown of what we’ll cover. First, we’re going back to the basics, reviewing what a buyer persona is and what it is not. Next, I’ll review the importance of negative personas. Finally, I’ll give you some tips for integrating personas into your sales process. And if using personas is a bit new to you, I’ve got three steps you can take to get started.

Let’s dive in.

Let’s start with a quick refresher.

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your target customer.

It’s a picture that you paint based on research and interviews with actual customers.

Personas go beyond basic demographics and include some of the intangible elements that make a person tick.

This information is helpful for answering questions like:

So, we’ve reviewed what a buyer persona is. Here’s what it’s not. It’s not a role, like Director of HR. And it’s not a particular market segmentation, like a “company with over 100 employees in the Finance space”. A persona is not the type of company, the size of the company, or the vertical.

A buyer persona gets into the psychographics of who someone truly is.

Before we get into the practical application of personas, let’s review one more thing.

There’s a difference between demographics and personas.

Market research reveals essential information about the people who are most likely to buy your products or services. For example, you might have a customer who could be female, age 25–35, caucasian, employed, single, and living in an urban environment.

These are useful facts that are helpful to know about your customers.

But persona development provides a deeper level of understanding that helps you truly speak to your target customer.

Let’s keep going with our example of the 25–35 year old female. An effective interview with that customer for generating buyer persona research might also tell you other things.

Here’s a few key facts you might learn about her from that interview: She doesn’t own a car, so, the ability to make online purchases is important to her. She has disposable income, but the way she’s wired, she still loves getting a good deal.

This information is deeper than demographics and provides helpful insight into the personality of our buyer.

Having your personas developed enables your sales team to tailor their communication efforts, based on a specific individual’s preferences.

This piece of personas often gets overlooked.

But negative personas can save your organization a lot of time and money.

We all know there are certain types of customer who just won’t work well with our business. These customers typically end up costing us far more time and money than they really are giving us.

Developing negative personas enables your sales team to proactively identify the types of prospects that would potentially be a drain on your resources.

Successfully segmenting out these negative personas can lower your customer acquisition cost and increase your sales productivity.

Here are my four tips for applying persona research to your sales process.

These are also called battle cards. The idea is to help your sales reps understand the best ways to communicate with each type of individual. As a marketer, try to develop a one page persona overview for each campaign. This will help your sales team to meet the needs of your future customers in a better, more efficient manner.

Segment your database on personas. One of your personas might prefer long, detail-oriented conversations, while another only wants very direct information. It can be cumbersome and inefficient for your salesperson to jump back and forth between these two types of personalities. Have your sales reps focus on calling only one type of persona at a time — this will be more efficient.

Suppose you know that one of your specific personas tends to visit your API documentation page during a specific stage in the sales process. You can configure event notifications for your sales reps to let them know that prospect has moved to that page on the site. This could trigger the next follow up or at least give the sales rep insight into how the deal is progressing.

Customize your online chatbots by persona. Show persona based questions and prompts instead of sending the same generic prompt to everyone.

If you’re just getting started with persona development, here are the three places I recommend you start.

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