Building personas for your inbound inside sales process
Why build buyer personas?
The inbound inside sales methodology starts with identifying who your target audience is. This is important because you want to attract the right audience to your website or product. To put this into context, would you want primary school children visiting a website that talks about tax saving? Absolutely not!
Building personas is important to make sure that your content, offering and sales pitch are all aligned.
What does a buyer person look like?
Before we start talking about persona's lets look at what a persona looks like.
Building a Persona
The simplest and most effective way to build a persona is to fill out each section from top to bottom. Skipping to major sections will result in incorrect information and could end up generating an incorrect persona.
Let's start with the most obvious the persona name. Choosing an image and name that one can remember and relate to is important. Right below the name and job description is the details of the company that Maxene works for.
This is important when it comes to building a persona as the persona is part of the bigger picture which is the company you are selling too.
Profile
The personal profile should include information like hobbies, demographics and also their educational background. The profile section will have a role to play in the overall delivery channels as well in how you sell to the persona.
Current challenges
This section talks about he challenges a persona is facing. The challenges are all business goal related and should not talk about features. You will notice in the sample persona we have not talked about stuff like needs 99% uptime.
Conflicts
If challenges are what is keeping the persona awake at night, the conflicts are what are stopping them from moving beyond those challenges. It is important to understand that challenges and conflicts are interlinked but are distinct and not the same thing.
Social media and influencers
To attract the person to your website/product you need to understand where they get their information from. In our example, Maxene seems to be influenced by industry experts, blogs and twitter. However, what will be valuable is also Instagram as her outdoor habit probably has her posting pictures on Instagram and Facebook.
Understanding this section of the persona will make sure you are not missing out on any channel for distributing your content.
Current situation
This is self explanatory. It talks about the status quo. It is okay to do some competitor analysis to know what you are up against but don't get carried away when you are using this in your inbound strategy.
Product/Solution placement
Once you have analyzed every thing before this section, you will now be able to appreciate exactly what your persona is interested in and what will interest the persona.
Do not jump to this section before you have actually gone through every single section in the person first.
We will be talking about building a inbound strategy that centres around your prospect's persona in coming blog posts. So stay tuned and if you found this article blog post interesting don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter.