3. Create buyer personas for leads
Demographics tell only part of the story. Look beyond the flat statistics and build a better understanding of your prospects – and your own value proposition – by designing buyer personas and mapping existing leads to them. The persona is a detailed sketch of the characteristics, triggers, motivations, desires, needs, and preferences of a customer.
An effective persona is one which has the customer’s goals at its core. Rather than focusing on data and probabilities, the individual represented by a persona should have clearly defined needs, wants, and aims.
Identifying how your products or services satisfy a persona’s objectives and soothe their pain points can tell you far more about how to communicate with your leads than even the most detailed market research.
Personas are not static. Always keep in mind that these representative customers will be investigating other ways to solve their problems. This will help you understand how to spread out (or compress) your communications with a lead, and also assist you refining the persona as the marketplace changes around you.
In the B2B and considered-purchase world, develop personas for champions, buyers, decision-makers, and users. Each has their own requirements and agendas.
A lead may not fit neatly into a single persona. That’s okay. Ranking the persona fit by score will give you more flexibility and a wider range of tools to attract and retain their interest.