Why Salespeople Must Understand Buyer Personas

A study conducted by Forrester Research tells us that sales professionals must tailor their message specifically to each unique buyer type (IT hiring manager) they interface with because corporate decision makers expect the time they spend with a sales person to be educational and valuable.  For those selling IT staffing and IT professional services you most likely call on and sell to many different buyers.  For instance, you may call on the CIO or VP of Application Development but you may also sell to the Manager of Help Desk Operations or the Software Quality Assurance Manager or the Director of the Project Management Office (PMO).  Chances are you also interface with Human Resources such as the VP or Director of HR or a Recruiter or HR Generalist.  Having said that, how can IT staffing sales professionals-especially those who never worked in a corporate IT department and/or were never trained in software engineering and/or never led a team of IT professionals-create a valuable and memorable customer experience?  

A buyer persona tells you what prospective customers are thinking and doing as they weigh their options to address a problem or achieve a goal that your company can help them with. Much more than a one-dimensional profile of the people you need to influence, or a map of their buying journey, actionable buyer personas reveal insights about your buyers’ attitudes, concerns and criteria that drive prospective customers to choose you, your competitor or stick with the status quo. When you have insights into what your buyers think about doing business with you, such as verbatim quotes from people who have recently made the decision to solve a similar problem by using your service, you have the knowledge you need to align your messaging with the needs and values of your buyer’s. Buyer personas are the foundation for consultative selling.

The strongest buyer personas are based on market research as well as on insights you gather from your actual customer base (through customer surveys and interviews). Depending on your target market you could have as few as one or two personas, or as many as 10 or 20.

Don’t Confuse Buyer Personas
Keep in mind that buyer personas are not your target market. Your target market is at a macro-level such as the industries that you service, the size of companies that you target and other account qualification criteria. Your target market includes characteristics of the types of customers you have had success with in the past and those that you have struggled with.  These characteristics however are at the account or industry level rather than an individual level.

Job titles are also not buyer personas. Job titles can give us clues or indicators of what characteristics make up a buyer persona.  Actual real people are not buyer persona’s. This is where a lot of people get hung up.  Remember, a buyer persona is a general representation.

Your IT staffing sales training program should include content that focuses on educating your salespeople on your ideal buyers and that training should play a key role in the first thirty days of sales onboarding. 

Now that you understand why salespeople must understand buyer personas it is now time to understand why salespeople must understand the buyer's journey. 

To learn more about buyer personas and the buyers journey and the role they play in consultative selling, downloading our eBook, Your Guide to Mastering Consultative Selling.