Buyer personas are super hot in the B2B marketing world. They’re also more than a bit misunderstood. Here’s a sample buyer persona designed to help you know what to include and how to format the information.
What Are Buyer Personas?
Buyer personas are representational sketches of stakeholders in your marketing and sales process. They help you map out who you need to message to at specific points, what you need to say to them and how you need to proceed.
Imagine you’re writing a blog post or crafting, say, a weekly marketing tips email. It’s a lot easier if you know who you’re writing for and what they want. That’s the point of a buyer persona.
What Buyer Persona Template Should I Use?
Everybody has a pet template for buyer personas. HubSpot offers one for download. Xtensio lets you build them in a web tool. We prefer to do them in Airtable, which is basically halfway between Excel and Access.
The big picture? It doesn’t matter what template you use. What matters is what goes in them.
Sample B2B Buyer Persona
Here’s a sample buyer persona for a CEO – the ultimate decision-maker in most high-end B2B sales. Note that we’re not including a silly name nor how many cats she owns; just relevant information that helps paint a picture for our content creation and sales teams.
The CEO
Age: 55
Salary: $250K
Behavioral Notes: The CEO is very busy. She tends to trust her team to do the research and bring her vetted information, since she typically doesn’t have the time to Google the answer. You’ll hear her say “I’ll know it when I see it” at least once in any marketing- or design-focused conversation.
Sources of Information: The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review
What Does She Care About? There’s emotion involved in every decision, but the P&L (and shareholder happiness) ultimately drives the CEO. She wants to know the ROI of any project or product, and she needs utmost confidence that budgets and timetables will be hit.
What Questions Does She Ask? Does my team buy in? What will it cost? What are our competitors doing?
How Do We Reach Her? The CEO is almost never the first person sales or marketing comes across, particularly in larger organizations. Assume that an employee is doing the research and running information and recommendations up the chain. That means we need to appeal to the folks looking for what you’re selling and make it attractive for them to recommend you.
Where Do I Get This Information?
No rocket science here; this is all personal information, so you’re going to get most of it from personal sources. Talk to your sales team. Think about your past interactions at trade shows and conferences. Buy your buddy a beer. The more you absorb, the better you’ll be able to synthesize it.
Need something more quantitative? Modern tools make it relatively simple to run your own market research through surveys and advertising on platforms like LinkedIn.
Need a hand with B2B buyer personas? We’d be happy to help. Drop us a line or call 610-421-8601 x122 to chat with one of our buyer persona experts!
