Segmenting and Targeting Prospects Based on Buyer Personas
Canadian Professional Sales Association
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Sales organizations aiming to create sustained growth need a strategy to identify and engage their ideal customers. One of the fundamental components to this is developing a go-to-market approach which identifies what those ideal clients would look like in the first place. This involves segmenting prospects based on specific demographic criteria.
What is Segmentation?
Segmentation involves breaking your audience into groups based on specific interests, needs or demographics. For example, a sales team looking to sell performance management software into medium-large sized organizations may look to target HR professionals or other decision makers responsible for employee development in companies of over 100 employees.
They may have other demographic criteria in mind too when looking to find the best prospects such as geography, buying cycle, budget and industry type. Segments can be used to help sales and marketing teams define the topics and tone of messaging, identify the best channels for communication (e.g. phone v social v email).
What are Buyer Personas and How Do They Help Attract New Business?
Buyer personas are groups that you define to represent the different buyers you commonly come across in your marketing and sales process. Your buyer persona might be defined by things like industry, company size, location, and other details.
Connected with this is the 'lifecycle stage' which refers to where in the buying process an individual lead or contact currently sits (and, more importantly, how soon one can expect them to convert). For smaller sales, one should aim to identify buyer personas set to convert faster. For larger, account-based sales the sales cycle can take much longer but the rewards will ultimately be a lot bigger.
Combining Buyer Persona & Lifecycle Stage to Define Your Segments. It can be a good practice to define segments based on lifecycle stage as well as persona. This approach looks at who an individual lead or contact is (their goals, interests, demographics) and how they expect to interact with your brands products and services.
How to Use Segmentation to Target and Attract Customers
Once you’ve established your personas and classified your leads, it’s easy to start putting your new segmentation plan into use. Consider these tactics:
- Create workflows to nurture leads of a certain persona
- Offer content through social media, your website and elsewhere that will cater to different personas & lifecycle stages
Defining your prospects’ buyer persona will help you to tailor your marketing and sales tactics based on the buyer persona or 'ideal customer'. Your scripts should be varied and unique to suit the prospect’s needs, based on persona classification.
Summary
Segmenting, like personas, should be unique to your business and will depend on factors such as industry, company function, geography, sales life cycle, company size and communication channels.
Following a structured and systematic approach which recognizes buyer personas and the segments they live within, will help create greater alignment, higher quality leads and an integrated sales and marketing strategy.
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1 年Canadian Professional Sales Association - Good reminder. When I ask prospects who their ideal client would be - too many say "I work with all companies". Maybe you could, but segmenting and targeting your ideal prospect as laid out in this Sales Connection article will mostly likely save you time and increase your conversion rate!