Why is knowing the customer’s image so important?

An external sales team can only be as successful as being in person. Anyone can throw darts at the wall and call it a sales strategy, but only the best in the industry properly use buyer persona in their demand generation efforts to develop a targeted, pain-free outbound campaign. In this blog, we will define what a buyer persona is and explain why it is a crucial part of any outsourcing sales strategy.

What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is a semi-fictitious representation of the ideal customer or, in the case of generating B2B demand, the ideal lead. Imagine in your head what your “perfect” lead looks like. What is their professional title? What is the size of their company, what industry do they operate in? All of this and much more constitute your “buyer person”. If you want to reach these types of people, you need to find ways to reach them effectively, and if you can, you will benefit.

Why Buyer Personality Matters
Now that we have figured out what buyer persona is, why does it matter? Let’s take a look at three reasons why buyer personas are critical to your external sales team.

Find the right customers / partners
Not all customers are created equal. Whether they admit it or not, every B2B company has a few customers who are “better” than others. This can be for a variety of reasons, from the point of contact to the industry to the company’s success. The important thing is that you have a vision of what your ideal partner looks like, because without that vision, you only throw darts at the wall in the hope of hitting something good.

Creating a buyer personality helps guide your strategy towards getting the perfect customer, customizing your message, and making sure you’re sticking to the nuances. You need to know who you are talking to to sell them. Selling a lawyer is very different from selling to a marketing director in a technology company. If you haven’t identified your target person, your sales strategy probably has no direction and won’t stand out from the crowd.

The best way to reach someone is to understand their needs and motivations, and it cannot be done effectively for everyone under the sun at the same time. A hypertargeted, personalized sales approach that is tailored to the needs of a unique, defined person will ultimately help you generate more high-quality leads than an undifferentiated approach.

Understand Market Sectors
Concentration and purposefulness in your sales strategy is the best way to learn. Think of it this way. If you send a sales email to 1,000 random seats, what assumptions can you make about the problems and needs for a specific title in that group? Probably not many. However, if you email 1,000 marketing directors in technology companies with 50 to 100 employees, you can learn a lot more about this particular segment in one fell swoop.

The sooner you understand the customer journey and the needs of a particular segment, the faster the external sales team can successfully sell to that segment. The beauty of focusing on a specific buyer is that each day gives you more learning opportunities and more feed for your future strategy. If you take an undifferentiated approach to selling with several different target people all thrown into the same generalized sequence, your learning will be limited and it will take longer to fully understand the market and role of your business.

Provides Strategic Alignment
Once a buyer persona has been defined, the entire Outsourcing team has a clear goal to pursue. If the sales team operates without fully segmenting the market or understanding who it is targeting, their message can become inconsistent and there can be widespread disconnections throughout the sales funnel. Each persona’s customer journey and sales cycle may look different, and without your entire external sales team unifying about the target person, there’s little chance that your team is operating at peak performance.