Finding your unique niche and audience is the key to opening the door to new prospects and exponential growth. But truly understanding each persona involved in the buying process isn’t always as simple.
Luckily, with our proven system and these following steps, you can more accurately and effectively target a quintessential set of customers and personas you need to succeed.
B2B marketing is often more complex than B2C marketing because the size of the opportunities is much larger. As a result, these larger B2B opportunities take longer to win or close.
The best way to think of this sales scenario is to know you’re selling a “considered product or service” with an extended sales cycle.
Meaning, that the value of the product or service being offered is often considered by multiple stakeholders/buyers in the company and not just your direct contact.
So, what does that mean? Discovering and understanding the unique challenges and needs of each stakeholder is the key to your sales success.
Often, the leader of the company will task a lower-level employee to do the initial research on a particular pain or problem, and then report back on key findings to the buying committee. Each member of the buying committee has unique challenges and perspectives that need to be addressed. So you need to understand each persona involved in this buying process.
We recommend you focus on these personas –
- Researcher – This persona is simply researching all of the possible solutions for a specific problem and picking the top three or so solutions to compare. The key to attracting the researcher’s attention is to showcase how your product differs from your top competitors that they’re likely researching, too. This helps control the narrative vs. the researcher making their own assumptions.
- Influencers – This persona might have an influence on the product or service being considered or influence over the other members of the buying committee. Think of the employees who will be responsible for implementing a service or solution, or the accounting staff that’ll be responsible for allocating funds towards the purchase.
- The End User – This persona is the one who will ultimately end up using the service. This means, they’ll know the most about its functions and features and will ask specific and direct questions on how it will serve them, best. Like, how easy is it to use your product or service? What does training look like? How long will it take for me to get up to speed? What kind of support should I expect?
- Decision-maker – This persona will want to know if your product or service will fix the problem they are experiencing. Will it make my team more efficient and effective? What kind of ROI can I expect?
- Financial Authority – This persona will want to know the terms of the contract. Such as what is in the service level agreement and other details, like the escalation or cancellation policies, too.
As you can see each of these personas all have different questions and needs that need to be addressed in your marketing and sales efforts. All of these personas must be identified when developing your ideal customer profile.
Download our guide on developing an ICP by filling out the form below.
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- Which Companies You Should Target
- How to Identify The Right Personas
- What to Ask and Say to Each Persona Involved in the Buying Process
- Serve Your Customers Better by Knowing Their Pain Points and Needs
- Reduce Customer Churn
- How an ICP Can Help Onboard New Sales Reps
