Everything You Need to Know About Crafting a Winning Buyer Persona

Everything You Need to Know About Crafting a Winning Buyer Persona

Hey friends! How’s your week been? How’s your month been? Are we on track to hit our quota??

If you’re wanting the 411 on buyer personas, sales intelligence tools, or mastering RevOps, we’ve got you covered.?

Let’s get to it.?


Buyer Personas: How to Accurately Profile Your Target Customers

Well-crafted buyer personas turn disjointed data points into composite characters that your team can more easily identify and transform abstract ideas into actionable market intelligence. Here’s how to craft winning buyer personas, some examples in action, and ways to use them for campaigns that drive improvement in your marketing KPIs.?

How to Build Buyer Personas

Persona templates are a useful starting point, but it’s important to build buyer personas that match your customers. Here are a few examples that you can customize with data from your customer base.

1. Start With the Basics?

Mine the data in your customer relationship management (CRM) system to create broad profiles based on shared traits among existing customers.??

For example, B2B buyer personas could start with:

  • Location
  • Age range
  • Education level
  • Job title and authority level
  • Company size and industry
  • Favored websites and news sources
  • Primary buying motivations and concerns

From these data points, you can extrapolate and add other information about your buyers, such as content consumption habits and communication preferences.

2. Analyze Prospect and Customer Data

Ideal customer profiles (ICPs) should include more than just firmographic data. A mix with technographic data is ideal, as well as any intent data and advanced buying signals you can collect.

3. Explore Different Data Types

Beyond the data collected from your marketing campaigns, other sources of information should inform the personas, including:

  • Social media audience data: By analyzing audience data on social media platforms, you can learn more about your prospects and what they like, or dislike, about your brand.
  • Customer support records: Customer support records identify which ones get the most value from your solution. Some customers rarely ask for support, while others struggle to get full value from your product.
  • Competitor data: Sometimes it’s worth following your competition. Using audience analysis tools, you can learn about the audiences that interact with competing sites and social profiles.
  • Customer feedback: Some of the best customer insights can be found on review sites. These comments provide an unfiltered glimpse of who your customers are and what they’re thinking.

4. Talk to Current Customers?

Customer interviews can be an efficient way to understand how they feel about your brand and products — and what matters to them. Once you know what the majority likes, play around with different approaches to find what resonates with various buyer types. Feed this information back into your B2B personas, which will inform marketing strategies for different customer segments.?

For examples of buyer personas, and tips on using buyer personas to improve your marketing strategy, read our blog.?



Sales Intelligence Tools: A Guide to Predictive Prospecting

Data is at the heart of business growth. With enough time and budget, you can always find firmographic data, org charts, email addresses and direct dial numbers to keep you busy chasing prospects. But today’s sales call for more than the basics.?

Modern sales teams require predictive sales intelligence tools with accurate, up-to-date data that informs dynamic customer profiles, lead generation, and efficient prospecting. Good sales intelligence to fuel your go-to-market strategy includes decision-makers, reporting structures, financials, budgets, company initiatives, personnel moves, tech stacks, and predictive features such as buying signals and intent.

Sales intelligence software should give you actionable, accurate information about individual contacts and their respective companies. Here are the top capabilities to look for:?

1. Prospect Intelligence

Correct and updated information about potential customers, including:

  • Contact information
  • Job function
  • Management level
  • Organizational chart
  • Professional certification
  • Academic and employment history

2. Tech Stack Data

One of the most effective ways of prioritizing accounts is by assessing the technologies a company uses. This data is important early in the sales cycle because it helps identify opportunities, target displacement campaigns, and introduce a compelling talking point for tech-stack consolidation. For example, ZoomInfo has profiles of millions of technology pairings in the categories of enterprise applications, hardware/OS/systems environment, virtualization, security, and networking.

3. Buying Signals

Understanding a prospect’s technology stack is important, but it’s buying signals that should prompt timely outreach.

Buying signals provide up-to-the-moment information that infers a prospect’s likelihood to purchase –- such as a flurry of web searches or multiple content downloads on a particular topic. Opportunity data can mean favorable selling conditions, such as a financing round or a new key executive hire.

4. Extensive Integrations

Intelligence is only as good as how it’s delivered. Look for a platform that provides key integrations into common sales applications, such as customer relationship management and sales automation tools, and prospecting environments, like company websites and social media platforms.

5. Data Accuracy

Your sales intelligence data should have both breadth and depth, meaning a comprehensive collection of contacts and rich layers of information about them. Most importantly, this data should be accurate, trustworthy, reliable, and compliant with all applicable data regulations.

6. Real-Time Alerts

Technology can continuously monitor other contacts and companies for you.

You should be informed about events like product launches, funding rounds, and changes to executive leadership — as soon as they happen. Sales is all about timing and these alerts allow you to get to a prospect before someone else does.?

With the right sales intelligence platform in place, how do you use it for effective predictive prospecting? Read this blog to find out.?


Mastering RevOps: Key Steps to Reduce Tech Bloat & Accelerate Growth

Revenue operations (RevOps) is an increasingly important voice on go-to-market teams. Analysts predict that 75% of the highest-growth companies will soon employ a RevOps strategy.

The reasons are clear: RevOps professionals are the experts in streamlined processes and consistent, sustainable growth. And one of the clearest ways to tap into that value is through evaluation of your company’s go-to-market technology stack.?

Here are some key milestones in any GTM tech stack assessment.

Aligning Business Strategy With Technology

RevOps professionals work to align business outcomes and behaviors with processes and systems. For ZoomInfo VP of RevOps, Tessa Whittaker , that work has to start with the business strategy long before diving into a list of tools and vendors.

“What is the business outcome I’m trying to drive? What is the business behavior I want to see?” she says. “I can evaluate whether the system we have is the right system — or if we need a new system — but I need the requirements first.”

Evaluating and Consolidating Your Tech Stack

Once you’ve defined your strategic goals, it’s possible to more clearly evaluate your tech stack and understand key gaps and overlaps in the GTM operation, from forecasting and pipeline management through prospecting and outreach. This includes checking for duplication, utilization rates, and upcoming renewals.?

Mapping out these details sets RevOps teams up to pinpoint opportunities where tech can be consolidated. This overview allows them to make informed recommendations about the best path forward and to get away from subjective reasons for adopting or maintaining a potentially subpar tool. A strong tech stack review also reveals gaps and whitespace opportunities to address currently unmet needs.?

“Of the systems that I have, are they the best systems out there, or are there other things I should start looking at?” Whittaker says. “You have to come up with a strong point of view of what a strong tech stack looks like.”

As a bonus, those data-driven discussions offer an opportunity to ensure that GTM teams are operating across shared systems, with unified data to fuel their strategies and tactics.

Read our blog for additional ways to your RevOps tech stack.


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