Using personas to sell:  How to identify and visualize your ideal clients and customers.

My friend and sales pro Brad Roderick recently wrote an article for ENX Magazine on how to create marketing personas to better reach and convert clients and customers.

Brad has been in sales and marketing for over 30 years and is one of the best. He’s a regular speaker and writer on sales strategy and is also a founding member of the Persuasive Communications Roundtable (more on that later.)

Brad makes some great points on how to create personas and I’ve included a few excerpts:

You MUST have a very clear picture of who is most likely to contribute to the success of you and your company by selecting you as a business partner. Sounds simple, but it can be very difficult.

 

I am going to suggest though that you do two things:

1.        Identify and characterize your best customers

2.        Create personas based on real people at those real companies

 

Creating Profiles and Personas

From a practical standpoint, start with your largest revenue contributors (they may not make the final cut but we need to start somewhere). 

 

Next, look at the ones generating the most profit. Continue weeding and cutting while considering factors such as the length of the sales cycle, the amount of time required by a sales person or team to service, etc. 

 

There is no magic formula to this, it merely serves as a guide to help isolate 5-10 customers that you want to replicate. 5-10 customers that if you had 5-10 more of them, it would make a huge difference.

 

There are other practical matters to be considered. Do they represent future growth opportunities or are they in decline (their industry or need for your products/services)?Are they so large that they cause a customer concentration problem or is this a factor? Are there other companies like them?

 

Once you have your 5-10 ideal candidates, take stock of all of the characteristics and attributes of their businesses. Size, location, industry, years in business, centralized vs. decentralized. When you roll up all of this information, you have a very clear picture of the types of companies you should be spending your time pursuing.

 

Personas are realistic representations of the key people that you will be engaging with. These are not lists of the actual people; these are stand-ins for the real people you will meet.

 

Here are a few key suggestions for creating personas that will help you blow past your competitors.

1. Base them on real people from your best customer list
2. Include more than one person/role
3. Pack as much information into the persona as possible so that you feel like you really know them
4. Keep the persona to a single page
5. Describe what drives them and what they fear
6. Each persona gets a name
7. Create an actual visual picture of the persona

 

You should now have a very solid picture in your mind (and in front of your face) of the people that you will be talking to. Remember to make the conversations about them, talk to their interests and speak to their emotions. The real people will reward you for it! And you will close more business faster and have more fun doing it.

 

As Executive Vice President, Brad Roderick sets Sales and Marketing strategy for InkCycle across all channels and is responsible for the entire “Customer Experience” from products to partnerships. You can reach him at broderick@inkcycle.com or find him on Twitter @BradRoderick.  As a Customer-Facing and Relationship thought-leader in the Imaging Supplies and Solutions Industry, Brad speaks, blogs and writes articles focused on creating and delivering value to B2B customers.

Have a great week.

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