Creating Buyer Personas That Give Your Sales Team Superpowers

Buyer personas can give your sales team superpowers.

Well, maybe not superpowers, per se, but your buyers will think you have the power to read minds, predict the future, and provide insanely accurate solutions. 

Why? Because well-structured, accurate buyer personas give life to your ideal customer profile and invigorate your sellers to optimize their approach to new and existing clients. 

But before we hone in on the superpowers personas give your team, let’s cover the basics: what is a buyer persona?

What are Buyer Personas?

“Buyer personas are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers. They help you understand your customers (and prospective customers) better, and make it easier for you to tailor content to the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of different groups.” – Hubspot

Yet, creating buyer personas can have an even greater impact on your business than this definition leads on.

Buyer personas aren’t just a tool for finding the right leads but an asset your entire organization can leverage. For instance, your product development team can design better solutions for what your clients need. Your sales team can use buyer personas to understand how your buyers make purchasing decisions, their influences, external factors for targeting prospects and upselling. They can give your marketing team a vision of buyer behavior, which allows you to make content maps, buyer journeys, and generate truly targeted content and campaigns.

Buyer personas are versatile. And they have the power to impact how you sell, how you prospect, how you produce content, and even how you hire/onboard new sellers.

But, we’re not here to argue the definition of buyer personas. Rather, we’d like to talk about the questions, five actually, you should ask when creating buyer personas – accurate buyer personas that give your sales teams superpowers. 

Five Questions that Create Powerful, Effective Buyer Personas

Question #1: Who are my customers?

That’s a massive question right there, especially if you’ve been in business for more than a decade. 

The best strategy for creating buyer personas is centered around the real people your company regularly serves. Going directly to your buyers is a great way to identify who your typical customer has been in the past and who they are right now. 

However, before you start interviewing buyers, you’ll want to talk to your team to find out who has been your best customers in the past and why.

Step One: Interview Your Team

Ultimately, your buyer personas are a composite image of your overall buyer scheme. So, your fellow salespeople and Marketing team will be an incredible resource in identifying the people and companies most likely to buy from you. Go to them and ask, “who are our best customers, and what generalizations can you make about them?”

Talk with the Sales team about current clients, prospects, and leads in the pipeline, converse with customer success and support, find out what the product team has to say, learn how your services have evolved to match the buyer’s needs, and then you’re ready to talk to customers.

Step Two: Interview Your Customers

Your customers have so much information to offer you, and conversations with them will permeate through superficial demographics and open up psychological criteria (e.g., attitudes, aspirations, emotions). 

You get a) general targeting information and b) an understanding of how a person does things and why. Talk with old clients and new clients, try to create an encompassing vision of each of your customers with the following details:

• • Demographics: Background, Age, Location, Education, Job Characteristics, etc.
  • Psychographics: Attitudes, Overall Identifiers, Aspirations, Inspirations, Emotions, etc.

The result of this exercise: you know who your buyers really are, and what they really care about. 

You’ll have a general sense of both who they are as people, as well as who they are in their professional environment.

Now it’s time to identify where you fit into their company. 

• • What problems they have, and how you can solve them. 
  • What goals they have and how you can help them achieve them. 

Related Content: How to Impact Buyers Through a Digital Selling Experience

Question #2: What are the goals of each customer on the buying committee? 

At the individual level, you’re going to have varying answers for each different group. For instance, a CEO will be more concerned with competitive differentiation, product-market fit, and operational efficiency, while a VP of Marketing cares about marketing ROI, lead generation, industry trends, and data tracking/reporting to name a few.

The differing concerns for your buyers is why interviewing as many people and POCs is central to creating buyer personas. The buying committee on average today is at least six decision-makers – and it’s essential to know the personas of each. Creating three-dimensional buyer personas isn’t just for the initial contact you’re going after, they’re for the buying committee and anticipating each profile’s needs.

Question #3: What are the challenges my buyers face?

Understanding someone’s challenges and pain points allows sellers to pinpoint where their product or service can fit in the customer’s life. It opens the door to what solutions they need, what solutions you can provide, reminiscence of previous engagements, and possible customizations.

And in the context of their goals, you can augment your messaging and sales materials to embody those objectives. You’re not only providing a solution to their problem or alleviating a pain point, you’re helping them achieve their goals. 

The best teams don’t stop there, though. They begin to find out something beyond the mere existence of a problem. They look for its catalyst. Understanding what triggers the problem might be more important to your customer than the problem itself. Too often, sales teams focus on the steps moving forward with the introduction of their product that they miss the critical steps that led to the issues in the first place.

Understanding the challenges is a way to define the overall business strategy and direction of the organization. This approach is no foreigner to impactful sellers, and it’s worth the effort when you’re working through accounts from enterprise to SMB.

Related Content: How to Be a Resource & Give Value to Buyers

Question #4 & #5: What can we do to help our clients succeed, and what are the common objections our buyers bring up?

Starting with the first part, knowing how you can help your customers achieve their goals can be a Sales team’s catalyst for aligning their product with their customer’s objectives and how they can solve their problems.

It’s more than “what do we do as a company;” it’s, “What do we do that can help this customer, and how do we apply our methods and solutions in the context of their organization?” It takes persona development into the greater context of your relationship with your clients.

Whether you’re a service provider or product seller, your pitch isn’t one size fits all. Every sales deck, pitch, or demo should be as unique and individualistic as every customer. With detailed personas, you can create a template for best practices at every stage of the buyer’s journey. With each new client, you’ll quickly rework it, massaging and molding it into a composite of the solution you provide in tandem with the solution they need.

So, the key to this question is answering it from both the salesperson’s and the buyer’s perspectives. Imagine how you’ve helped clients in the past, how they experienced the solution you provided to enable their success, and use that information to create an expansive answer to the question above.

However, within that, it’s critical to fortify the pitch’s worth with responses to objections. Moving to the second part, what are those common objections the persona you’re selling to would have about your product/services? This is where it’s critical to work with multiple sellers and interview them on where sales have fallen through. Knowing the ins and outs of popular objections allows every seller to navigate them. 

Own Your Buyer Personas, Own Your Superpower

In the case of buyer personas, hard work pays off (and can pay a lot if done right). Answering these five questions is the heavy lifting, but once it’s completed, you can put your personas into action. 

You can write a script that’ll resonate with your clients. You can compose emails that strike a conversation about being a partner in helping them achieve their goals, not just a salesperson hoping to close a deal. After creating your buyer personas, there are several channels you can launch into and start creating meaningful relationships with customers.

As you begin to work through your buyer personas, check out our Buyer Personas Worksheet to streamline the process and create buyer personas that help you sell.