This post originally appeared on the Young Lions Blog. 

Everything begins with your target buyer. If you haven’t done this, stop everything and make this your top priority. No, really. I mean it. This is it. Everything begins here and the work you do here will focus and power pretty much everything else you do. 

Now this might be relatively easy if you have a highly specific product or service that you provide. Sometimes the very nature of your business or your product narrows the field of potential customers immeasurably. Still, going through this process can really help shape your team’s understanding of how and why someone might be their ideal customer and what that person actually cares about.

That being said, most companies have a broader business offering - a product or service that can have a wide range of applications. Without narrowing and identifying a few key buyer personas, you’re toast.

Let me convince you.

#1 it’s the only way you can develop a strategy for actually targeting them. Duh. 

It’s pretty rare to meet a business leader that’s hoping to just maintain. We all want to grow. That’s why we do this. We want to experience our vision and our team accomplishing goals, making clients ecstatically happy, and growing the reach of our company (and our bank accounts). Growth of any sort requires creating and executing on an actually strategy for generating demand, closing new business and growing existing accounts.

IF YOU DON’T KNOW WHO YOU’RE TARGETING, HOW DO YOU TARGET THEM?

No, I’m really asking. That’s not a rhetorical question. How do you find them? How do you create content they care about? How do you send prospecting e-mails to the right person? And how do you do those things without going absolutely batty when 90% of your efforts downright fail.

#2. It gives your team direction 

 There are few things more frustrating - or disheartening - in a job than not knowing what to do. I’ve discussed this in my post, 5 Reasons to use Goals to Improve Sales, Marketing and Company Productivity and Happiness :) It can be absolutely brutal. Not only do you never feel like you’re accomplishing anything, but then you stress and worry that your bosses will realize it too and you’ll lose your job.

We all want to do good work, but that requires direction. Buyer persona profiling is the absolute first step in this process. Once you have that work completed, you can create goals and plans to achieve them that give something for your teams to rally behind, get motivated and get working. In that same blog post I mentioned above, I also talked about the immense power of goal setting in getting your team working with passion, dedication and excitement.

Really understanding your buyer, profiling them, creating a shared language in how you talk about them and to them, all help to bring your team together. It’s an inspiring thing, truly.

#3 It protects your key resources - Time, Money and Sanity. 

When you don’t know who you should be targeting, what typically winds up happening is you target everyone, or almost everyone. In sales we refer to this as the shotgun or machine gun method. You simply spray bullets in as many directions as possible and pray that one of them hits someone or something that matters.

When you’ve got a large organization and a ton of resources, this might be a workable strategy. But when you’re a smaller company with a smaller team and a lot less money, you can’t afford so much inaccuracy. Plus, let’s say the strategy actually by some miracle works and you are able to land a whale of a client. Will you know how you did it? Will you be able to rinse and repeat? Probably not. 

If you’re able to really focus your efforts, you’ll save time, money and sanity. And you’ll figure out pretty damn quickly whether what you’re doing is working or not. Your success (or lack as the case may be) will be much more easily measured.

I know it's popular now to have every list be 50 things, but with buyer personas, you don't need 50. There may only be three things, but they are BIG things. Business changing things.

I can’t say this more emphatically. Buyer Personas are where it all begins. Don’t do another thing in sales or marketing before figuring this out. Keep following along with me, here. This is just the first in a 3 part series helping you understand all the ins and outs of buyer personas, why they matter, what they are, and how to create them yourselves. 

In the meantime, if you want to learn more about how we use buyer personas or if you'd like to talk about our process of building these for clients, stay connected and let's get talking. 

Stay Connected. Learn More. Grow More.

If any of this resonates with you and you’d like to learn more about growing your business, please subscribe to our blog. We share the very best of what we do for our clients and of what we find from other experts. Join Us Here