Using Buyer Personas to Accelerate the Sales Process

So your marketing team created buyer personas. Are they wasting away at the bottom of a desk drawer, gathering dust up on the wall of your office, or sitting ignored on the company intranet? It’s time to reimagine their potential to help you close more deals, faster. Personas can be INCREDIBLY useful tools to train sales staff, drive more profitable conversations, decrease sales cycles, and improve the relationship between marketing and sales.

In fact, in a recent B2B industry benchmark study we conducted, the majority of high-performing organizations leveraged personas as part of the sales process and within sales training. Surprisingly, only 8.2% of those surveyed felt that at least 75% of their organization could confidently name their personas and key attributes.

If your marketing team knows what should go into a buyer persona, they’ve given you a critical strategy tool. Here are some fresh ideas for using this tool to drive more sales:

1. Use words and phrases from the persona to ensure your sales prospecting echoes the word choice, tone, and voice of your potential customers.

2. Understand the preferred channels for each audience segment to tailor your outreach to the ways they prefer to be communicated.

3. In discovery calls, use the priorities and drivers of your persona to explore critical, top-of-mind issues at their particular organization.

4. Make personas available within relevant leads/contacts in your CRM to empower sales enablement and give your sales team critical buyer insights for more relevant conversations and cross/up-sell opportunities.

5. Help your sales executives understand the various members of the buying committee, what they each distinctly care about and how to build consensus to close the deal.

6. Onboard new reps faster by including personas in your sales training materials to equip the team with what they need from day one to have relevant, empathetic conversations.

7. Bridge the gap between sales and marketing by fostering a unified understanding of the SAME target audience.

If you think your marketing team hasn’t created useful personas, remind them of 6 ways your personas are wasting sales time. After all, time is money!

 

 

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Successful young businessman happy falling the money while sitting infront of his computer with the graph showing the arrow going up increasing in sales. Business growth concept. A contemporary style