A step-by-step guide to creating buyer persona for sales [+template]

If you are asking yourself "How can I use Buyer Persona to boost sales?" or  "What is a B2B Buyer Persona, at all?" then you are in the right place.

Buyer persona became a popular term that got tossed around in marketing teams, but then it landed in the sales lap and made them question their entire existence. Well, it wasn’t that dramatic, but it did make the sales teams think twice about who they should target when doing outreach. 

Did you know that 56% of the companies that used buyer personas generated higher-quality leads? 

Yes, Buyer Persona is that useful. Therefore, if showing you how to make an ideal customer profile was like taking your blindfold off while playing darts, going through how to create a B2B buyer persona for sales will be like placing the laser on your dart to make sure you hit the bull’s eye.

What is a B2B buyer persona?

Let’s start with the definition. A Buyer Persona is a description of a person who is your ideal customer with all behavioral, demographic, firmographic, and psychographic characteristics. In other words, a buyer persona mirrors who your perfect buyers are, from age, location, their likes and dislikes, goals, and wishes to challenges and motivations. 

Buyer Persona is based on existing customer research and other data that might help you define your ideal buyer persona in detail. 

There is a common misconception that Buyer Persona and Ideal Customer Profile are the same. However, there is a big difference between them. In short, ICP represents the company profile, and Buyer Persona focuses on the particular type of person’s profile only. Similar to Ideal Customer Profile, Buyer Persona is a perfect representation of the customer who has the shortest buying cycle, highest LTV and is a preacher for your product. 

Did you know that 3 to 4 Buyer Personas usually represent 90% of the company’s sales?

If various customers use your product for different aspects of their business, or they simply differ in their position, you might want to think about creating multiple personas. Whatsmore, it is pretty common to have a couple of buyer personas for the sales team. 

Example:
Let’s say you have project management software. Your software could be used both by programmers, sales, marketing managers, and alike. Each of these managers presents an individual buyer persona with different wishes, goals, and challenges. 

Benefits of having buyer persona for sales

Do not think that Buyer Persona is the document you are going to create, look at it a couple of times and never use it again. Buyer Persona is a powerful document, and it is of great help when you are doing outreach. Why? Because of all the benefits listed below.

Provides details for prospecting and outreach

Buyer Persona provides context for your sales team to zero in on who exactly they should outreach to while outreaching. It will provide you with information such as age, position, industry, education, and consumer patterns to use for prospecting to your fullest. 

Personalized approach 

Once you have identified Buyer Persona, you will have access to information such as their pain points, challenges, and what type of person they are, so you will know exactly how to personalize your approach and present your product or service in the most alluring way to the prospect. Maybe you can throw in additional personalized images or GIFs according to their liking to improve the response rate. 

Improves productivity

Having a Buyer Persona means that the sales team will ultimately ease up their process, improve productivity, results, and lower the time spent on their efforts. In addition, they will attract high-quality leads with more ease, who will ultimately have a higher retention rate. 

Addressing customer’s problems

We all know that the core outreach rule is focusing on customers and addressing their problems instead of your own. B2B Buyer Persona will keep you on the right path to doing just that. Whenever you create your outreach message, ask yourself if it addresses the challenges or emphasizes how to reach goals listed in Buyer Persona documents. If it does not, get back to the drawing board. 

How to create a B2B buyer persona?

Buyer Persona isn’t hard to create. However, it does take a little bit of time to get it right with all the information you need for the outreach. Luckily, we are here to explain six easy steps to create this useful piece of documentation. 

1. Customers breakdown

Before jumping into the details of your B2B Buyer Persona, you need to break down your current customer database into groups. To do this, you need to decide on the broader criteria by which you will break them down and then move on to more narrow criteria. 

Example (part 1): 

Let's say your broader criteria is the length of the buying cycle. We can agree that some buying cycles are longer than others. Since you are looking for a shorter cycle for your future customers, this is a nifty point to start at. 

The following step is to define your second and third criteria to deepen the breakdown. 

Example (part 2): 

Let’s say from this short-buying-cycle group you have different industries. Naturally, your following criteria would be to break the customers down by industry and then by decision-making role.

If, however, you do not have current customers, you can start with an industry breakdown and proceed to the decision-maker division.

2. Demographic parameters 

Now you have a rough draft of B2B Buyer Persona. So, it is time to assign them demographic attributes. The key is to notice the pattern these customers have - their age range, interests, or location. If you are unable to pinpoint these patterns, here is the list that will help you out: 

• Age
• Location
• Company type
• Function
• Seniority Level
• Job position
• Industry
• Years of experience
• Education
• Role in Buying process
• Recent life event

In case you do not have your current customers or customer insight, fear not. You can use the combination of Google Analytics and LinkedIn to gather this kind of information. If you are using Google Analytics, simply jump to your existing Audience Insights section (or ask your marketing team to do it for you :).

For LinkedIn, simple filter options will do the trick.

3. Psychographic parameters

To fill in the picture, you would need additional personal information. Psychographic characteristics are a great way to do it, as it will help you perceive your B2B Buyer Persona as more human, which will also humanize your approach.

Dedicate your Buyer Persona a name to start with, and then proceed on with:

• Likes And Dislikes: It is far easier to talk to someone whose general preferences you know, rather than hope that you won’t mess up if you mention something they do not like. 

• Character type: This will give you an insight into how you should approach the person and construct your social selling. You can use 16 Personalities or similar to determine character type. 

• Brand and influencers: You can choose the general ones or narrow them down. In addition, choose brands or influencers similar to your business to adjust your sales pitch.

• Work motivation: Information such as what drives them to go to work every day and what they like to do the most. 

• Story Behind Buyer Persona: You can write a short description of what led them to a current position, what is their main trait, how many years they’ve been doing business, and so on. 

• Preferred means of communication and Social Channel use: It’s also a good idea to find out where the ideal buyer spends time online and how they like to communicate so you know whether you should use multichannel outreach. 

How to come by this kind of information?

If you have current customers, the best way to gather this kind of information is by simply talking to them. Here are a few key points to talk about with your customers: 

• Means of communication they prefer; 
• Social Media they consume the most;
• What is considered to be an achievement in their job role;
• Their motivations;
• What tools do you use as part of your daily routine? Why?
• What they like and dislike most about the job and communication with people;
• How they would describe a product’s purchasing journey;
• How would they describe their working persona;

Through these questions, the idea is to understand your potential customers’ true behavioral patterns and motivations. The more qualitative and quantitative detail you gather from this conversation, the better you will be prepared for these types of B2B Buyer Personas. 

If you do not have your customer base or someone from your buyer persona to talk to, you can use LinkedIn to search for this kind of person and see what they write about in their post and gather information from there. 

4. Identify buyer personas’ goals and pain points

In most cases, your prospects’ goals will be your own. Keep in mind, you are not just a salesperson, but the helping hand, a friend in need for their business efforts.

That is why you need to identify their goals, priorities, challenges, and pain points. Furthermore, depending on their pain point, you can adjust and personalize your outreach more to pinpoint and present what your prospects are looking for. 

This is where conversation with your current customers comes into play once more. What you need to keep an eye out for is what are...  

• your challenges?
• long-term and short-term goals? 
• technology and tools used to achieve your goals? 
• your work priorities?
• the influences of your purchasing decision?

Additional Note: If you do not have current customers, reach out to your leads anyway. You would be surprised how many people on LinkedIn will be willing to help by just telling them that you are doing the research. 

5. Common objections and value proposition

Sometimes when you talk with customers, they will speak about your product or service. Let them, because they will reveal much about your product itself, and the problems it solves for them. 

Furthermore, ask them about what they dislike about your product. It is important to understand negative viewpoints to bulletproof your outreach message. The message with this information will be a valid and irresistible value proposition for the B2B Buyer Persona. 

Now is the time to ask one last tricky question: What do they usually say when they try to decline the offer from a salesperson? This is perhaps the most valuable information since they will list of objection handling situations that you can prepare for when you outreach this type of B2B Buyer Persona.  

6. Assemble your B2B buyer personas

Gather your findings in one place and start building your B2B Buyer Persona. Keep in mind that every piece of information we mentioned above is applicable in practice, be it for outreach or prospecting. You can always go into even more details when defining a B2B Buyer Persona, such as marital status and so on, but the information mentioned above should be your core guide. 

With this information, you have a specific description of your potential customer. Give your Buyer Persona name and surname, a picture, and you are done - at least with this one 🙂 Remember to repeat the process in the first step to create a couple more Buyer Personas for the outreach.

B2B buyer persona example and template

Here is an example of how it looks when you sift through the information and present them neatly in the document. A sight for sore eyes, isn’t it?

We’ve even created the template for you. You can download this buyer persona by clicking here. Click on the “Make a copy” button, and it shall be done.

How to use B2B buyer persona in lead generation? 

Creating a Buyer Persona can be challenging, but now the real fun begins - it is time to put it into practice. 

Remember that these are your IDEAL Buyers. However, if the person outside of your Buyer Persona is interested in your product or a service, do not discard them and proceed with the sales process. 

Here is how you can use your Buyer Persona to find leads, create personalized messages and outreach them with more ease.

1. Find leads matching buyer persona using LinkedIn

There are two ways to find leads: by LinkedIn basic account search or Sales Navigator Search.

Find leads using LinkedIn basic search

Go to your LinkedIn account and research the position defined in your Buyer Persona document. Once you do, use additional filters available to narrow down the search according to your Buyer Persona, such as location, industry, and so on.

When the search is complete, create a CSV file with every prospects’ first name, last name, profile URL, and email if you can find it. Additionally, you can import variables such as Value proposition from your B2B Buyer Persona document. Save this file for the next step.

Find leads using Sales Navigator

Go to your Sales Navigator account and click on Lead Filters.

You will see the filters list you can use, so insert all the ones from your Buyer Persona document, such as Education, Years of Experience, Job title, etc.

Once you’ve filtered out the search, hit the “Save Search” button to save leads to the lead list.

Another great way to find leads that are a twin picture of your ideal B2B Buyer Persona is to find that exact person, preferably your current customer, in Sales Navigator and hit the “View Similar” button. Sales Navigator will find leads most similar to the lead profile you select, according to position, age, education, and so on.

Save this list by clicking the “Save” button next to their names, and you are done. 

2. Create an outreach campaign

You can outreach the leads you found manually, but to make this process easier, you can use a sales engagement tool to do it for you. Let’s take Skylead as an example. To create an outreach campaign, take the CSV file from LinkedIn results or URL from the Sales Navigator lead’s list, and upload or paste it into Skylead.

3. Create a Smart sequence for outreach

The Smart sequence will allow you to define the steps you need to take for your outreach towards the selected leads. Move and connect the elements, such as actions and conditions, will result in a sequence such as:

4. Personalize your approach

Remember when we mentioned the value proposition, motivation, and type character your B2B Buyer Persona is? This is where you are going to use them. When figuring out the message for the outreach, be sure to personalize it according to all these parameters. 

Depending on how many steps your sequence has, you might use these pieces of information sporadically. Here is an example of one type of personalized message for outreach. 

Summary

Buyer Persona helps you bring the right prospects to the table. Furthermore, it provides you with the details which you can use for prospecting and outreach, improving productivity and results. Here are the steps to remember: 

1. Customers’ Break-Down
2. Define Demographic Parameters
3. Define Psychographic Parameters
4. Identify Goals And Pain Points
5. Define Common Objections And Value Proposition
6. Assemble The Buyer Persona

Now you go! Create your outreach campaign, use the information you gathered and watch leads convert more efficiently and with ease.

Wish to use Skylead to find and outreach your Buyer Persona with ease? We would be happy to meet! Drop us a message via chat on our website. Or, try out Skylead by signing up for a 7-day Free Trial.