FROM THE EDITOR
The importance of customer personas!
A number of years ago, I recall asking a client about their target audience and who their ideal customer was. They responded by saying they didn’t care who their customers were as long as they wanted to buy. I don’t hear that as much anymore, but there remains a reluctance to put time, effort, and resources into developing buyer personas to adequately support effective B2B marketing communications.
The Follow Your Buyer methodology is built on six foundational principles: Defining, Identifying, Learning, Helping, Engaging and Understanding. A common thread that runs through them all is the seller’s ability to deeply know their prospects.
For B2B marketing and sales, casting a wide net of messaging and hoping to gather an adequate number of interested prospects doesn’t work. Doing this places a burden on the prospect to vet whether your solution is a fit for them. Yes, they ultimately have the decision to purchase. But when a prospect gets a cold email or call for something that is woefully misaligned, the impact is annoyance. Consider those emails you deleted from your inbox today.
For sellers, the risk is that you are presenting your brand and its solutions to people who are not a fit. This isn’t a big problem when it happens occasionally by accident. But if the wide-net approach is your strategy, it harms your brand. Over time, potential buyers form a negative opinion of specific brands based on the messaging alone. This is a tough way to grow a B2B solution provider business.
This week’s newsletter features a great article by my friend Adam Lofquist. I think you’ll find the data that supports the benefits of developing customer personas to be enlightening. And there’s more on buyer personas and how to develop them.
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- Perry
Perry Rearick
Chief Editor | Follow Your Buyer
prearick@followyourbuyer.com
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