What is a Buyer Persona?

Buyer personas are examples of the real buyers who influence or make decisions about the products, services or solutions you market. They are a tool that builds confidence in strategies to persuade buyers to choose you rather than a competitor or the status quo.

Marketers who segment buyer personas around key insights need, on average, half as many personas as those who focus on demographics such as job title, industry, geography or company size. More criticaly, insightful buyer personas readily inform strategies for persuasive messaging, content marketing, product or solution launches, campaigns and sales alignment.

1. Priority Initiative

What causes certain buyers to invest in solutions like yours, and what is different about buyers who are satisfied with the status quo?

Tips and Examples

• Do not confuse Priority Initiatives with pain points that you simply reverseengineer based on the capabilities of your solution.

• You want to understand the personal or organizational circumstances that cause your buyers to a locate their time, budget, or political capital to resolve the pain.

• For example, you could guess that the safety executive buyer persona has pain in the area of marketing metrics and campaign automation. But an insightful buyer persona would te l you which marketing executives are most (and least) receptive to your marketing automation solution and why.

2. Success Factors

What operational or personal results does your buyer persona expect to achieve by purchasing this solution?

Tips and Examples

• Success Factors resemble benefits, but this insight is far more specific and written from the buyer's perspective. ·

• For example, you might currently emphasize your solution's impact on cost reduction, but an insightful buyer persona would identify the category and degree of cost reduction that buyers anticipate.

• Examples of personal outcomes include impressing peers, widening the buyer's sphere of influence, or increasing their ability to control something about their environment.

3. Perceived Barriers

What concerns cause your buyer to believe that your solution or company is not their best option?

Tips and Examples

• Expect to gain insights into product or company-specific barriers that are no longer (or never were) factua ly correct.

• These perceptions often result from negative experiences with similar solutions, online interactions, or direct feedback from peers.

• Other barriers relate to personal or business obstacles that prevent your buyer from investing in change. Examples include the need for business process change, gaining acceptance from end users, or other politica lycharged issues.

4. Buyer Journey

This insight reveals details about who and what impacts your buyer as they evaluate their options and select one.

• To help you target the most influential buyer personas, this insight identifies which personas have the most impact on the decision to continue to evaluate your solution at each step in the process. (Tip: the economic buyer or decision maker isn't as influential as you think.)

• To help you prioritize your marketing investments, you need to know which resources the buyer trusts at each step of their evaluation for this decision. For example, a marketing executive would not rely on the same resources for decisions about web conferencing and off-site event planning.

• For persuasive messaging and content, the Buying Process insight specifies the Decision Criteria, Success Factor, and/or Perceived Barrier that has the most impact on the buyer's choice at each step.

5. Decision Criteria

Which aspects of the competing products, services, solutions or company does your buyer perceive as most critical, and what are their expectations for each?

Tips and Examples

• You will know which of your capabilities has the most impact on your buyer's choice to do business with you. (Tip: this is unlikely to relate to what is newest or most unique).

• This insight informs messaging and content marketing decisions, clarifying both the buyer's questions and the answers they want to hear.

• For example, if the buyer wants a solution that is "easy-to-use", the Decision Criteria Insight specifies which aspects of the solution this persona expects to be "easy to use" and how they determine which solution is the easiest.

ICP Persona Copy Template

• Name Assigned to this Persona:

• Industry/Segment(s):

• Job Title(s):

• Reports To:

• Age Range:

• Years in this Role (Total Career):

• Years In this role (Avg. Company Tenure):

• Education:

1. Job Description Briefly

   Describe the qualifications and responsibilities associate with this persona.

2. Priority Initiatives:

   Identify the 5 problems or objectives that this persona designates as highest priority. Ensure these initiatives are within the buyers control or influence and that s/he would a locate time, budget or political capital to achieve them. (Be sure not to a low our capabilities to influence this section.)

3. Perceived Barriers:

   For each initiative in Section 2 that you can address with a product, service or solution, detail out the steps the persona has already taken towards achieving this initiative and why those steps failed.

Product to Persona Connection

Product to Persona Connection Template

Insights about the Buyer Persona:

In Market Segment: Attitudes About Product, Service, Solution, etc.

1. Why We Win/Buyerʼs Success Factor: Describe the tangible and/or intangible rewards this buyer persona believes they will achieve by purchasing this solution.

2. Why We Lose/Buyerʼs Perceived Barriers: Describe this buyerʼs reasons to question whether this product is not positioned to achieve their Success Factors.

3. Buying Triggers: When is this buyer looking for this type of product, what business circumstances trigger this buyer personaʼs decision to initiate the buying process.

4. Decision Criteria: Which three aspects of the product does this buyer persona assess for each competitor as they evaluate the alternative solutions?

5. Buying Influencers: What role does this buyer persona play in the buying process? Who else in the organization wi l be involved in the buying process, what is their role?

6. Resources Buyers Consult: Identify the 2 or 3 most influential resources this buyer persona relies upon at each stage of the buying process. For each answer be as specific as possible about the name of the resource(conference, blog, website, etc.) the buyer consults at this stage.