It’s an old adage in the business world – “know your customer” – but you’d be surprised at how many B2B businesses really don’t know their customer. Of course, they know the job titles of people they sell to, and they know the names of all their best customers, but how much do they really know about the interests, behaviors and motivations of these customers?
That’s why the starting point of any winning B2B marketing strategy needs to be the creation of customer personas. Creating these personas will help you define what you offer these customers, as well as what the perfect customer journey will look like. In short, personas are the keys to more B2B sales.
By analyzing the data that you have about your typical B2B customer journey, you will probably discover that there are multiple customer personas, one for each step of the customer journey. At the beginning of the journey, a customer will likely behave much differently than at the end of the journey. It’s important to recognize all the differences.
By mapping out these personas and how they correspond to different steps of the journey, you will be able to understand the motivations of customers when they are making business decisions. Often, these motivations are not entirely rational. That is to say, they are not based purely on economic decisions, such as the desire to maximize utility or deliver the highest possible ROI. Instead, they are based on emotions, attitudes, and yes, biases.
Over time, you will likely also find that old customer personas blend into new ones, and may even disappear entirely. In many ways, that is what we are already starting to see with the arrival of new millennial decision-makers at companies. These younger workers have a much different view of the workplace than older Baby Boomers, and that’s something that your messaging has to take into account.
By developing these personas, you will also find that you can get your sales and marketing teams to start talking to each other in a common language. Too often, B2B marketing teams simply hand off a list of prospects to their sales counterparts, and that’s the end of the cycle. But by developing a common language around personas, it’s easier for the sales team to close the loop by providing updates on what worked, and what didn’t, with the new sales leads.
All of those additional insights have the net impact of helping to improve the overall customer journey. Along each step of the journey, it’s important to collect additional data to give as robust a view of the persona as possible. That includes direct interactions (phone calls and in-person meetings) as well as indirect interactions (emails, website visits, social media visits).
You’ll soon realize that the customer persona is more than just a mix of demographic data, such as age or gender or geographic location. It also includes how your customers perceive the world around them. By understanding these motivations, ideas and behaviors, you’ll be in a better position to convert them from leads into satisfied customers.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.