How to use buyer personas effectively

HubSpot defines buyer personas as “semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers based on data and research. They help you focus your time on qualified prospects, guide product development to suit the needs of your target customers, and align all work across your organisation (from marketing to sales to service)."

Right so we can all go home now… Not so fast! 

Now you know what a buyer persona is, do you know how to use them effectively? Here’s our guide so you get the most out of them.

Buyer personas should impact every department 

That’s right, they aren’t just for marketing and sales. Buyer personas in B2B should impact:

1. Customer Success - how they service different client groups and their offering. 
2. Product - from the roadmap through to requests, understanding personas can enable the product function to think about the real challenges your customers are facing and how these can be resolved through the product. 
3. Sales - from how you pitch to what you demo, understanding the person in front of you is critical. 
4. Marketing - allows Marketing to create content that speaks to their challenges and helps to solve them by being helpful and useful in a targeted way. 

There are vital components to good buyer personas that will enable each department to capitalise on them. They are designed to get you closer to your customer. 

If they are some ethereal google doc that no one has looked at in months they probably aren’t quite right. 

Check-out HubSpot’s templates to see if you’ve nailed yours. 

Customer Success and buyer personas

Customer Success is probably the one department that can make or break your business. Experienced Customer Success Managers who understand your clients, your product and build amazing relationships are gold dust. 

But are you setting them up for success? This is where the buyer personas can support them on their mission to retain your customers. 

Customer Success’s success rides on their ability to guide clients through implementation and beyond with your product, by using the buyer personas you can then work out what processes and resources they need in order to have great conversations with your clients. 

For example, if you sell to Enterprise size organisations you’ll need to approach this in a different way to how you treat your Tech Touch (smaller) clients for scalability. Your buyer personas should help Customer Success to understand:

• What are the types of challenges people working at different types organisations face 
• What kind of support they’ll need 
• The complexity of that organisation and the buyers job
• Where they might be potential push-back or delays to the project 

You don’t need to boil the ocean here, but using buyer personas as a starting point to build out processes will really help your team from the get go.

Product team 

The Product team is the lifeblood of everything you do. They’ll quite literally make or break your product. In order to create your roadmap, ensuring the product team has a clear understanding of who your customers are is critical.

Buyer personas can give the team in essence a snapshot of the challenges customers and prospective customers face. Especially if you understand the different complexities within the different sized organisations and the buyers job role. 

A good example of this is for Tech Touch clients, they tend to have limited resources, small teams and people within those organisations wear multiple hats. Your buyer personas will be able to give your product team a clear steer on how adding new features could potentially automate some of their workload making your product a necessary part of the way they work.

Understanding your customers = being able to build a better product = retaining your customers in the long run. 

Good for the longevity of your product and your ARR.  

Sales team and buyer personas

Your Sales team is the backbone of your business, they are the team that will help scale your business and keep revenue flowing. So why is it important for them to understand your buyer personas?

Well, they sell to your buyer personas - we all know that! But are they speaking the same language as your customers? Do they understand their pain points? Do they tailor their outreach to ensure they are showing how your product can actually help prospective customers in a meaningful way?

Here’s our advice for helping to bring buyer personas to life for Sales:

• Ensure that all sales collateral speaks to your different personas - no point talking about an Enterprise organisation if you’re speaking to a smaller one! 
• Have Marketing and Customer Success work with sales to bring to life your customer stories so they can then use those stories to showcase how your product has actually helped your customers. 
• Ensure Sales and Marketing work together to bring to life any outreach sequences they use that convey the pain points of your customers.
• Be targeted with their outreach, if you know your product does well with a specific industry or sector then work on messaging and use customer stories to bring that to life so prospects can understand in their own terminology how you help. 
• Pair up the right existing clients with prospects for reference calls. 

Marketing team

Marketing, your revenue generators, your messaging experts and your buyer persona custodians. The Marketing team will get it and they’ll no doubt have been the driving force behind creating the personas. 

Here are some ways that marketers can keep the spirit of your personas alive to help support the rest of your organisation:

• Regular marketing 101 sessions - invite the entire team to marketing 101 sessions and share exciting activities happening in Marketing, how it's impacting your revenue and also stories from customers about their experiences. 
• Segmentation of data - ensure the Marketing CRM can be cut by personas so when any outreach, email campaigns, webinar invites are happening this can go out to the right personas with the right messaging.
• Content - ensure content being generated speaks to your personas in a useful and resourceful way that enables them to overcome some of their pain points. 

Summary 

Buyer personas should impact all departments across your business. It’s important to have them as a way of understanding who you’re selling to and why. It’s never too late to create them but it’ll help your team to be more targeted, provide better insight to prospects, support customers with more precision and help you build a scalable product. What’s not to love about that?