An outsourced sales team can only be as successful as its persona targeting. Anyone can throw darts at the wall and call it a sales strategy, but only the best in the business make proper use of buyer personas in their demand generation efforts to develop a targeted, pain-point driven outbound campaign. In this blog, we’ll define what a buyer persona is and explain why it's a critical part of any outsourced sales strategy.
What Is A Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer, or in the case of B2B demand generation, your ideal lead. Imagine in your head what your “perfect” lead looks like. What’s their job title? What’s their company size, what industry are they in? All of this and more constitutes your “buyer persona.” If you want to reach this type of person, you’ll need to find ways to reach them effectively, and if you can, you’ll reap the benefits.
Why Does Your Buyer Persona Matter?
Now that we’ve established what a buyer persona is, why does it matter? Let’s dive into three reasons buyer personas are critical to an outsourced sales team.
Find The Right Customers/Partners
Not all customers are created equal. Whether they’ll admit it or not, every B2B firm has some clients that are “better” than others. This could be for a variety of reasons, ranging from the point of contact, to industry, to the success of the firm. What’s important is that you have a vision of what your perfect partner looks like, because without this vision, you’re merely throwing darts at the wall and hoping you hit something good.
Establishing a buyer persona helps guide your strategy towards obtaining your ideal customer, tailoring your messaging and ensuring you’re adhering to the nuances. You need to know who you’re talking to in order to sell to them. Selling to a lawyer is far different from selling to the director of marketing at a tech company. If you have not identified your target persona, your sales strategy likely lacks direction, and will not stand out from the crowd.
The best way to reach someone is to understand their needs and motivations, and it's impossible to do this effectively for every persona under the sun, at the same time. A hyper-targeted, personalized sales approach that is customized to meet the needs of a unique, defined persona will ultimately help you generate more high-quality leads than an undifferentiated approach.
Understand Sectors Of The Market
Being focused and deliberate in your sales strategy is the best way to learn. Think of it like this. If you send out a sales email to 1,000 random job titles, what kind of assumptions can you make about the pain points and needs of a specific title in that group? Probably not many. However, if you were to send an email to 1,000 marketing directors at companies in the tech industry with between 50 and 100 employees, you could learn much more about that particular segment in one fell swoop.
The faster you understand the customer journey and needs of a particular segment, the faster an outsourced sales team can effectively sell to that segment. The beauty of focusing on a particular buyer persona is that every day represents more learning opportunities and more fodder for future strategy. If you’re taking an undifferentiated approach to sales with several different target personas all lumped into the same generalized sequence, your learnings are going to be limited, and it's going to take more time to fully understand the market, and your firm’s role in it.
Ensures Strategic Alignment
When buyer personas are defined, the entire outsourced sales team has a clear goal to work towards. If a sales team is operating without fully segmenting its market or understanding who they are targeting, its messaging can become disjointed and there can be rampant disconnects throughout the sales funnel. Each persona’s customer journey and sales cycle can look different, and without alignment across the entire outsourced sales team on what persona to target, there’s a slim chance the team is operating at maximum efficiency.
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If your team is struggling to get the most out of its sales program, we can help. FullFunnel has built effective, scalable outsourced sales programs for dozens of satisfied partners. Request a consultation today to learn how FullFunnel’s innovative approach to demand generation can help grow your business.
