The b2b customer persona. How to understand the people you sell to

A buyer persona in the b2b segment is the foundation of your future marketing and sales strategy. Only with a detailed customer persona will you be able to sell successfully in b2b. 

Take an example — consulting services. Imagine your company implements complex accounting software for businesses. You have a site and a Facebook page, and you plan to use targeted advertising and content marketing. But before you launch a marketing campaign, you need answers to several important questions: 

• Which users should the advertising target? 
• Which article topics will be interesting and useful to your potential buyers? 

Without knowing all this, you will be moving blind. To sell expensive services in b2b successfully, work out the persona of your ideal customer. 

Why does the customer persona matter and why do generalisations fail? 

Before you put together an offer, it is very important to build the persona of your customer

The ideal buyer persona is also referred to by the abbreviation ICP (Ideal Customer Profile). 

At most companies the customer persona comes down to a couple of lines in an Excel or Word file. That is a mistake that makes a business waste resources and work less efficiently. 

Imagine you have simply exported all your customer data from the CRM. At first glance that is great and perfectly logical. But let us recall the Pareto principle. 20% of the effort produces 80% of the result. The same holds for customers. Identify the customers with the highest LTV (Lifetime Value), build the persona of that customer and concentrate on attracting similar clients. Far from everyone follows this simple idea. But it really works and raises profitability. 

For example. Imagine your business is a small copywriting agency. You have studied your customers and realised that the most profit comes from working with construction companies and interior design studios. The next step is to study exactly that part of your audience more deeply, learn their pains and needs, find out who exactly makes the decisions at such companies and so on. Then adjust your positioning and marketing so that you attract precisely those customers from construction and design. 

How do you build a buyer persona? 

How old is your customer, who are they, what do they do, what is their job? These are the questions you need answers to

Let us work out how to build a customer persona properly. 

• First of all, the target audience has to be segmented. You cannot sell something to an abstract small business. At the very least it has to be split into manufacturers, trading companies and the service sector. 
• The audience also has to be segmented geographically. 
• The description of each of your audience segments has to include information about income levels. 
• The core component of the persona is the list of your potential customers' problems and interests. 

Besides that, a customer persona should contain: 

• the gender and age of potential customers (that means the people who make the purchasing decisions);
• their job titles;
• income;
• team size;
• the resources your customers get their information from;
• the factors that influence the purchasing process;
• possible doubts and objections. 

Let us go through each of these points in more detail. 

The customer's age

In b2b this of course means the age of the people who decide on buying goods or ordering services. Age is one of the key factors when planning marketing campaigns, developing advertising and so on. 

It is important to take the customers' age into account in advertising copy too. Clearly, older people raise more objections; such customers are more conservative and inclined towards familiar solutions. 

If you know the average age of your customer, it will be far easier to find the right tone for talking to them. 

Where they live and work, and their schedule

If your company is in Eastern Europe while working the US and Canadian market, you have to allow for the time difference. That will mainly affect the timing of everything you do. 

E-mail campaigns and messages to your chatbot's subscribers have to be synchronised with the customer's time zone. It also matters to answer customers' calls, e-mails and enquiries quickly. 

Local cultural specifics 

To present your product on a market successfully, it is important to get to know the local culture and the way business is done

Remember that even when selling in b2b you are selling to a person. And people live within a particular cultural environment, with their own ideas about business communication and so on. All of that has to be taken into account if you want to avoid misunderstandings with customers and sell them your goods and services successfully. 

Gender 

Whether that is good or bad, men and women make decisions differently. You should not make all your sales copy, e-mails and advertising publications universal. Work out the ratio of men to women in your target audience (at least approximately) and aim your copy and advertising at how each category perceives things. 

Remember that this calls for a very fine touch: even if an advertising message is aimed at a female audience, do not ignore the language of numbers and elements of social proof. And the other way round — when addressing men, do not forget about emotion. The point is to find the right balance. 

The platforms your target audience uses

Draw up a list of the sites, forums and social media communities your target audience — your potential customers — visits regularly. That list will answer several important questions at once: 

• Where should you look for potential buyers? 

• On which platforms should you distribute your content? 

• Which questions and problems are your potential customers facing right now? 

With that information your marketing campaign will be far more effective. 

Job titles 

Your product may be encountered by rank-and-file employees, marketers, managers, CTOs, CEOs and so on. Each of them will have their own interests, priorities and wishes. 

For example. Imagine your company sells a CRM system. In that situation the CEO will push for the lowest price with the greatest economic effect, for the CTO the priority will be reliability, ease of implementation and integration options, and for the marketer it will be the convenience of working with customer data. 

So that clients buy your product even in a "pulling in different directions" situation, get across to them that the software or service meets the expectations of every member of the team. And that can only be done if you know who you are selling to and what each employee of the client company demands of the product. 

The customer problems your product solves  

State clearly which problems your product solves and why the customer needs it

The answer to the question "what is your product good for and which problems does it solve?" will give you the keys to building marketing properly, improving advertising messages and selling more. 

Remember that the problems have to be stated as specifically as possible. 

For example. Your company sells software. Here it is not enough simply to know that it is an accounting programme or a CRM. You have to understand that a CRM solves specific problems: 

• it makes it possible to keep track of the work with a customer;
• it gives information about which goods and services have already been sold to a customer;
• it helps optimise communication with buyers, and so on. 

If you understand exactly how your product will help a customer and make their life easier, be sure to reflect that in your advertising messages and in the content on your site. 

Objections and doubts 

Think about what might stop someone from buying your goods and services. It could be the price, the difficulty of implementation, doubts about effectiveness or other factors. Analyse them and give a convincing answer to the buyers' doubts. 

Conclusions 

Once you have recorded all this data in a concise and clear form, you will have a working tool that helps in planning marketing and advertising and in building a sales system. 

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