A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on data. Sit down and interview 15 customers from your company and ask them all the same questions. We need to interview about 15 customers to create an accurate buyer persona. You might even consider scripting the questions so you make sure you ask them the same way to each person. Persona interview questions:
- Goals – how can we help?
- Challenges – what is preventing you from how achieving your goals?
- Watering holes – Where do our customers learn, podcasts, attendees
- Shopping preferences – process, people, buy online
- Then combine with ideal customer profile
The job theory will help you predict if prospects will buy tomorrow. It is a way of digging into why people buy products. You can position yourself as an alternative to your indirect competitors. Focus on the people who need your help instead of fighting over prospects who just aren’t that into you. Uncovering your customer’s jobs. You can conduct a survey of demographic and psychographic questions to timeline or storyboard how people become customers for your customer.
Ask them…
- Why did they buy it?
- How long did they think about it before they made the decision?
- What was it that made them finally go through with the sale?
- Had they thought about buying before and not done it?
- Were they making do with something else (or nothing at all)?
- When did they realize they didn’t have to make do anymore?
Why are people going through this story in general? What job are they trying to get done Then make a hero statement? Who do you want to be a hero too? Your company is a hero to (somebody – persona) that wants to (something – job to be done). Example, Here to 10 to 15 million companies that want to double the size of their business in the next 3-5 years. Can we do that? Should we do that? Is that what we do. PICK ONER PERSONA. PICK ONE JOB. OWN IT. Content is great teaching. Great communication. Marketing should empower people with knowledge. Two ways content helps sales include attracting people to your company and helping them through the sales process. Bottom – ready to buy; 80% the questions on every phone call. Get rid of the questions to get further along in the sales process.
Try using a stopwatch to see if the salesperson can find the right piece of content in under 1 minute for a pitfall or challenge example. You can easily share content with email templates that link to content or have content in them. Salespeople should think of themselves as educators now. Create content that will enable your sales team to add value throughout the sales process. By creating great content, your sales cycles go down, sales appointments go down, qualified leads go up, and closing rates go up. Salespeople need to spend less time teaching and more time selling by utilizing buyer-centric questionable content. The more education you can provide your prospects before they meet with sales, the more qualified they’ll be when they get there.
The biggest mistake I see is people creating a division between treating marketing and sales as two separate divisions. They have to be one cohesive as a unit to make you successful. Salespeople in the filed need content and content need to be generated from questions. Salespeople provide Marketing with the direction that will resonate with prospects and how they use the content in closing those deals. Having a relationship between marketing and sales and having that relationship be seamless has been ever important. You might be successful in leads, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t close them. Try hiring your buyer persona. There needs to be an active discussion of content for sales so marketing creates content that salespeople can use. Marketing and sales should collaborate on sales because Marketing has a better skill set for creating content, but sales have access to more timely information. They also need to collaborate if your marketing collateral doesn’t align with your sales collateral, you’re going to have problems.