Importance of Buyer Personas

A buyer persona is a profile of a type of buyer. A buyer persona doesn't describe an individual. It represents an audience that shares important characteristics that relate to a sale.

Buyer personas encapsulate your business' knowledge and understanding about the types of people marketing and sales speak to in the sales process.

The top 3 reasons why we find the creation and use of buyer personas particularly valuable:

1. Buyer personas take the focus off of you, your product, and your business. They help you put your prospect in the driver's seat - which whether you like it or not is where they are in a sale.
2. Buyer personas put you in the frame of mind of your prospect. They help you understand your prospect's world, their context and their issues. They help you empathize with your prospect.
3. Buyer personas help you identify areas of vision and value that will resonate with your prospect. Until you understand these, you might as well be talking a foreign language to your prospect.

Buyer Persona Building Blocks

Depending upon the type of product you are selling, certain traits will have more import for your buyer persona than others.

• Demographics - gender, age, marital status, income level, location, education
• Psychographics - personality, values, attitudes, interests, lifestyles
• Bizographic - industry, seniority, functional area, role, responsibilities, knowledge, risk
• Motivation - needs, goals, pains, ideals, challenges
• Relationships - individual, directed, collaborative, competitive, contentious, subordinate, superior, consensus
• Modality - methodical, spontaneous, humanistic, competitive

By the way, we don't pull buyer personas out of the air. Buyer personas are often developed out of the experiences people in customer-facing roles (sales, customer service, executives, marketing) have had with real prospects.

Check out our one day Buyer Persona Workshop where you can learn about and create a buyer persona for your key buyer.

At Applied Product Marketing, we help coalesce, filter, and refine those experiences into buyer persona profiles. Contact us to discuss how we can help you create buyer personas that improve your marketing and sales efforts.