How to Build Buyer Personas for B2B SaaS Sales

Quarterly Company Stage: Pre-Revenue

A common phrase is that a sales team doesn't sell to a company but to a person. So, we want to add one more perspective to inform your go-to-market strategy by creating an archetypal buyer persona. A buyer persona will paint a picture for your teams to keep in mind as they sell, market and develop your product. A persona adds flesh to specific key buyers in your segments -- who they are, their challenges, needs, motivations and goals -- so that your company can be best prepared to serve those key buyers.

A very important note here is to create a buyer persona relevant to where you are in the technology adoption curve \[for more information, see Play: Overall Sales Philosophy\].

Are you just beginning and in the Innovator stage? Then you must create personas for both the companies and then the people within those companies who would be classified as Innovators. Don't try to sell to people or companies later in the adoption curve than where you are. It won't be worth the effort.

The impact: Through this process, you will identify the buyer most likely to purchase your product within each segment and then add information to elucidate that buyer's decision-making process. In all, your company will gain a deep understanding of who they are selling to and their needs. This will position your company to develop and deliver what your customers truly want and intuitively understand how to market, price, sell, and expand your product. Teams at high-growth companies have high internal and external expectations set on them, so a focused, detailed go-to-market strategy that includes personas will enable them to reach their targets.

The goal: Create a persona of your ideal customer, including information such as demographic, role within company, pain points, needs, and uses for product. As much as possible, rely upon qualitative data (ie customer interviews and focus groups) and quantitative data (ie user analytics, internal data on sales process and support calls, customer multiple-choice surveys through Survey Monkey, etc) to inform this process rather than assumptions.

How can Golden Section Assist?

Steps

1. Meeting 1: Vision and Brainstorming
2. Preview work plan, timeline and needs from stakeholders.
3. Brainstorm specific mandate. What are the questions that need to be answered regarding the buyers in your customer segments? Is it understood who the buyers are? What are their pain points? Motivations? Buying roles? Buying criteria? Buying process? Decision-making authority? Use of other tools?
4. Internal Research: Aggregate existing internal knowledge on the personas to form a hypothesis of what each persona looks like.
5. Following the direction and questions set out at Meeting 1, interview key internal players to build out hypotheses on the
6. Example questions to ask each team:
   • Sales Team:
7. Is there a typical sales process? What does it look like?
8. Who are the key players in the process? What are their titles and roles?
9. What are their needs and motivations?
10. What makes them pull back from the process?
11. Who are our competitors?
12. Why does our company win or lose when evaluated against competitors?
    • Marketing Team:
13. What is the current marketing strategy and why?
14. How has that marketing strategy evolved and why?
15. What value propositions get the best response?
16. What is our RAS per marketing vertical?
    • Customer Success Team:
17. What have you learned from the implementation process regarding how the product is used?
18. How would customers like to use the product?
19. Where are they struggling to use the product correctly?
20. What changes are customers suggesting?
21. What kind of complaints do you receive?
22. Why do customers churn?
    • Product Team:
23. Who did you develop the product for?
24. Why did you add certain features?
25. What features have you not added and why?
26. Collect and aggregate data systematically to form persona hypotheses based on the information collected so far. At this point, you should have a fair picture of:
    • The key buyers and users (specific role within company) within each segment.
    • For each persona:
27. His business role
28. Buying role
29. Key criteria (needs, challenges, requirements)
30. Current software ecosystem
31. Existing solution (that your product would be replacing)
32. External Research: Conduct external research to clarify, update and expand on your draft personas.
33. Develop any external research tools you are going to use: Interview guides, focus group guides, surveys, etc.
    • A word on Interviews: customer interviews are a very important part of building out a buyer persona. What better way to understand the thought processes of your buyer than by asking the buyer herself?
34. It is important to be prepared with questions drafted beforehand. Plan on asking no more than 10 questions so as to not overwhelm your interviewee. Mainly ask open-ended questions. Sometimes helpful to include a few quantitative questions using a 1-5 scale.
35. Always begin your interview by introducing yourself, your company, and what you are trying to learn.
36. A very good way to start an interview is with an open-ended question regarding how the problem at hand has affected the interviewee and what she has done to try to address it. An open-ended question like this allows the interviewee to explain her process to you and might reveal factors that had not previously been discussed.
37. Coordinate the logistical details of primary research interviews and surveys.
38. Conduct interviews and surveys.
39. Analysis
40. Standardize responses from raw interview notes.
41. Aggregate all interviews, surveys and other data collected.
42. Analyze data, building a persona for each segment that answers the team's mandated questions from Meeting 1. Persona should include:
    • Business Role:
43. What is she responsible for?
44. What does it mean for her to be successful?
45. What problems does she want to solve (in her words)?
46. How technically savvy is she?
    • Role in buying process:
47. How does she get involved in the process?
48. What is her decision-making authority?
49. Who does she influence and who is she influenced by?
    • Use of Product:
50. Will she use the product? If so, how does it fit into her product ecosystem?
51. How does the product benefit her? What is the value proposition to her?
52. What feature will she use? What undeveloped features does she want?
53. How often or how much will she use the product?
    • Buying Criteria:
54. What characteristics matter most to her (ie performance, tech, ease of use, etc)?
55. What are her concerns related to the product?
56. Who are competitors? How they out- and under-perform our product?
    • Engagement Insights:
57. Create an Elevator Pitch.
58. Create a Marketing Message to describe your solution.
59. Send aggregated raw data, analysis, and persona presentation to team.
60. Meeting 2: Gut Check and Planning
61. After a period to process the information sent, reconvene to discuss the findings.
    • Do the personas sit well with the team?
    • Is there additional color that needs to be added?
62. Brainstorm how the company can shift to align itself to better use the information included in the persona and the order of operations to accomplish this. Particularly, consider:
    • How to tailor
63. Messaging
64. Sales process
65. Pricing model/level
66. Product bundle
    • Create segment-specific sales and development goals
67. Codification: Gather your conclusions in a presentation or document to store and communicate to additional stakeholders (board members, investors, new employees etc). Refer back to this document periodically to assess your hypothesis as your business develops. Everyone in your company needs to know your buyer personas because these characters will also be involved in your implementation, support, and renewal processes.

One Step Farther: Create a negative persona, or the prospect who is not worth engaging. This will maximize your resources for high potential prospects and keep your acquisition costs low and sales productivity high.

Troubleshooting

If you're struggling to provide enough meaningful information to construct the personas, start with our alternative Value Matrix. It is a simplified version of the personas and is a good starting place. With more sales experience and customers, you can add to the value metric over time to more fully flesh out the personas.

Structurally Drawn From:

http://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/366266/file-1826191113-pdf/eBooks/Buyer-Insights-(http://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/366266/file-1826191113-pdf/eBooks/Buyer-Insights-eBook-Final.pdf) eBook-(http://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/366266/file-1826191113-pdf/eBooks/Buyer-Insights-eBook-Final.pdf) Final.pdf(http://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/366266/file-1826191113-pdf/eBooks/Buyer-Insights-eBook-Final.pdf)