Why is Having a Buyer Persona Necessary?

Sales teams know better than most that time is money. The amount of time spent courting a lead that isn’t ready or interested in buying when you could be building a relationship with one that is can make or break a quota. In an average sales environment 80% of your results come from only 20% of your team. That’s because there are only a small amount of reps who actually understand when and who to sell to. By creating a buyer persona  within marketing automation, bad leads will be filtered out before they ever end up in front of sales. This saves time and money and increases ROI by having sales reps only interact with sales-qualified leads.

Marketing automation allows sales to know the person they’re selling to. Understanding your customer’s motivations and their scale of interest is necessary to secure a sale. With interests and needs driving a customer to buy, knowing who is interested and who isn’t at the right time in the sales process can save your sales team money and resources that would otherwise have been used on a dead end. Buyer personas create defined customer types that your company can target to achieve more desired results.

Having a Defined Customer Personas Increases Sales

Everyone needs the right tools to succeed. If a surgeon doesn’t have the right medical technology to do an operation they won’t be successful. And if a sales rep doesn’t have qualified leads being passed onto them they are being setup to fail. Buyer’s persona within marketing automation can help resolve that by defining the ideal customer.

The first step to implementing marketing automation is the same as the first rule to closing a sale, know your customer. That’s why companies need a buyer persona. While it may be marketing that identifies the leads, it’s the sales department that closes the deal. Sales reps have the most direct interaction with the customer which gives them a better understanding of what buyer’s persona makes a “sales-ready” lead. A buyer persona aligns marketing with sales goals by demanding more decisive communication and agreement. Start to create different buyer personas by having your sales team communicate with marketing on what buyer persona makes a customer ideal and ready to buy.

Take into account:

• Gender
• Age
• Interests
• Economic background
• Marital status
• Concerns
• Educational background
• Knowledge base
• Location
• Income
• Buying habits
• Work history
• And any other applicable characteristics

There can be different buyer personas for a single company based on the different products that are offered. Discovering these different buyer personas creates a basis for marketing automation to filter out customers that don’t have the ideal buyer persona and identify one that do. This will then allow the preferred customers to be nurtured into quality-sales leads that will increase sales team’s ROI by acquiring a targeted customer base that is more likely to buy.

How Customer Personas Contributes to Lead Scoring

Understanding where a customer is in the buying process is an important step in evaluating and nurturing them. Forrester Research cites that “Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more Sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost.” Lead scoring helps assess where a buyer is in the sales process by assigning numeric values to each digital interaction a potential customer has with a business to avoid unneeded interaction with a sales teams and dead end leads. Every digital interaction works further to determine who the potential customer is and their viability.

By targeting the different buyer personas established, a company has the opportunity to do the following:

• Reduce the amount of leads that are not interested or aren’t the ideal clientele
• Further individualize by following up with specified content based on expressed interest and score

For instance, if you are a hotel you aren’t going to send the same content to a business looking for a conference location and a couple who’s looking for a romantic getaway. The different buyer personas established for your company will fuel different responses to digital interactions and scoring results.

Where Will Your Leads Bring You?

With improved targeting and personalization through the combination of buyer persona and lead scoring, relevant individuals are directed to sales after being primed by marketing through a more efficient process. Automation: How Marketing Can Sync With Sales cites that sales reps are 21 times more likely to get a lead evolved in the sales process if they follow up with a web lead within five minutes. By having these prospects tracked by lead scoring and fit into the different buyer personas established by a sales and marketing team, companies can follow up faster with qualified leads and make more conversions.

Building a buyer persona may be the first step to starting marketing automation, but it’s also a defining factor for the whole process. Overall, buyer persona aligns and focuses your company’s sales and marketing teams to increase productivity and ROI for greater success.