A top priority for most B2B sellers is reaching more qualified leads and selling more products. After launching your online storefront and meeting your first wave of customer orders, your next step is to generate more orders. To start, you need to create B2B buyer personas for your business.

Buyer personas are detailed descriptions of the types of customers you want to reach. They help you understand who your customers are, what they need, and how you can help them. Using buyer personas correctly gives you incredible insights into strategies to enhance your marketing and attract more qualified buyers.

What is a Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. It describes the type of customer who finds your product valuable and will likely buy from you.

Buyer personas act as living representations of your target market for B2B businesses. Each seller has a specific type of customer they want to sell to. This could be a business with particular needs and goals or a firm with a specific turnover range. Creating a buyer persona means breaking down this target market into specifics to understand better whom you want to sell to.

You gather extensive research and data about your customers to create buyer personas. You document your ideal customer's goals, hobbies, motivations, family, frustrations, and challenges. The primary goal of creating a buyer persona is to know your target customers well so you can sell to them effectively.

Sample of a Buyer Persona

When selling to businesses, you need to create detailed profiles of individuals. This helps you understand them and influence their buying decisions. B2B buyers are individuals, some of whom will play a crucial role in deciding whether the business buys from you.

Depending on the type and complexity of your target market, you may need more than one buyer persona. Some sellers may need ten or more buyer personas, while others only need two or three. The important thing is to cover all the types of buyer personas your business wants to sell to.

Types of Buyer Personas

Businesses identify their target customers uniquely and create detailed descriptions of these customers. Here are some types of buyer personas:

1. Ideal Buyer Persona: This represents the customers you want to sell to. They find your product valuable and are likely to buy from you.
2. Negative Buyer Persona: This represents customers you don't want to sell to. Maybe you are unlikely to make much headway with these buyers, or selling to that market isn't financially sound. Creating negative personas helps you refine your understanding of your ideal customer.
3. Micro Personas: These are more detailed versions of your initial persona. They provide more depth by identifying different types of customers within the initial persona.

Why Should Sellers Create B2B Buyer Personas?

Although creating buyer personas is essential for any seller, B2B sellers benefit more because B2B buyers are unique in how they interact with products and suppliers. Typically, B2B buyers spend more time in your sales pipeline before they convert. Usually, a team identifies procurement needs and prospects for suitable suppliers and determines if the opportunity is acceptable. There is also a separate decision-maker who makes the final purchase decision. Therefore, selling to B2B buyers, more often than not, takes more time and effort than selling to other buyers.

To ensure your investment of time and effort is well-spent, you must speak to leads likely to make a purchase. Creating buyer personas helps direct your sales and marketing efforts to attract such leads. 

Why Are Buyer Personas Important?

Buyer personas help businesses think about their products from the customer's perspective, which is essential for several reasons. Sellers often make the mistake of creating products and marketing them as if their customers have tastes, preferences, and motivations similar to their own. However, this approach could be wrong if you make fewer sales than expected or your marketing efforts are not yielding results. Well-researched buyer personas help you understand your customers better, allowing you to anticipate their needs accurately and position your sales accordingly. Businesses with detailed personas can easily exceed their revenue and marketing goals due to the valuable insights provided. It is easier to develop marketing and sales strategies with the information about consumer behavior provided by buyer personas.

How Buyer Personas Are Used in Marketing?

Marketers use buyer personas for prospecting and finding qualified leads. In marketing, a lead is a potential customer interested in your products. A qualified lead is more likely to buy from your business than others. Many leads eventually fail to exhibit a real and sustained interest in a company's product due to inefficient marketing efforts, costing you time and money that could have been better spent elsewhere.

Marketers also use buyer personas to personalize their messaging and content, allowing them to target customers with relevant content at their buying pipeline stage, helping them move to the next step. This is a winning strategy since offers and personalized content are more likely to result in a sale.

How to Create B2B Buyer Personas?

Creating detailed buyer personas requires collecting enough information about your target buyers through research, interviews, and complex data. Then, you must compile all this data before forming conclusions about your ideal customer. This process involves much time and resources and includes the following steps:

Questions to Ask

You must gather detailed information to understand your customers' motivations, challenges, and pain points. A good buyer persona should include age, gender, marital status, information about their children, location, fun activities, preferred communication channels, qualifications, and social networks.

Here are some industry-specific questions to ask:

1. What type of company do you work for, and what is your role? This helps you understand their work environment and responsibilities.
2. What are your career goals? Knowing this helps you see what they want to achieve in their job.
3. What does a typical workday look like for you? This gives you an idea of their daily tasks and routines.
4. What challenges do you face in your job? Understanding their challenges helps you see where they need help.
5. How do you define success at work? This shows you what they consider essential and successful.
6. What are your biggest fears or pain points at work? Knowing this helps you understand their main concerns.
7. What are the most common objections you have to possible solutions? This tells you what might stop them from choosing a solution.
8. How do you prefer to communicate about work-related matters? This helps you know the best way to reach them.

Some product-specific questions to ask include:

1. Have you used our product or a similar product before? This shows their experience with your product or similar ones.
2. How do you choose suppliers or vendors? This helps you understand their decision-making process.
3. What is most important to you when making a buying decision? Knowing this helps you highlight the key benefits of your product.
4. What are your most common objections to our products or similar products? This shows you what might stop them from buying.
5. How do you use our product or similar products to achieve success at work? This helps you understand how your product helps them at work.
6. What are the success factors when making a buying decision? Knowing this helps you see what they need to feel successful with their purchase.

You can make these questions more specific to your target market or industry. The most important thing is understanding your customers' behavior regarding your products and the context behind that behavior. Follow up each question with others that help you understand the context. For example, when you ask, "What is most important to you when making a buying decision?" follow up with "Why?"

Conduct Customer Research

The next step is to find answers to these questions through your experience with buyers, interviews, and data collected from various sources. Ensure everyone you work with is on the same page when conducting this research, as you will need input from all parts of your business, including sales, marketing, and customer relations, to create an accurate buyer persona. 

Conduct Internal Interviews

If your business has started selling, your ideal customer comes from existing buyers. Different departments have unique and helpful information about your ideal customer. For example, the sales department knows which products B2B clients like to order and what they prefer. The marketing department understands where buyers came from, the content they responded to, and other similar trends. The customer relations department knows about the typical complaints regarding product satisfaction. This information provides a good starting point for understanding your ideal customer.

Survey Your Existing Customers

Internal knowledge isn't enough. You need to contact your existing and previous customers to understand what attracted them to your business, what motivated them to buy, and how they used your product to solve their business challenges. Offering incentives, like a discount on future orders or a free product sample, will increase your chances of receiving responses.

You can conduct your survey through phone call interviews, physical questionnaires, or online surveys using tools like SurveyMonkey or Google Forms. Call your customers and ask them questions directly, hand out paper surveys for customers to fill out, or use online tools to create and send surveys.

Interview Other Real People

Your business prospects or leads are another sources of information about consumer behavior. These individuals may not have purchased anything from you yet, but they can provide valuable insights. Use similar tactics to those used in interviews with existing customers to survey these individuals. Ask them about their needs, challenges, and what they look for in a product.

Confirm What You Know with Online Data

Interviews give you a good picture of your customers. Data helps clarify and refine that picture and can debunk incorrect assumptions. Consider these data sources:

• Google Analytics: This free tool provides information about who visits your website, where they come from, how they find it, and what areas they interact with.

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software: CRM software's analytics provide insights about your customers, including their industry and every aspect of their buyer journey.

• Social Listening: Use tools on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram to monitor conversations relevant to your product. Tools like Facebook's Audience Insights help you understand how people interact with your product. Quora and Reddit are also great places to look into questions about products in your industry and how people behave regarding these products.

Segment Your Customers

After collecting customer data, segment it into relevant groups. Not all your customers work in the same company or industry, and their challenges and pain points can vary. Segmenting your customers based on their responses helps you understand your buyer groups and determine how many buyer personas you need to create.

If you find fewer than four customer segments, don't worry. Most businesses make 90% of their sales from three to four buyer personas. The important thing is to ensure your data and the personas you create are as accurate and detailed as possible.

Define Your Buyer Persona

You've completed your research about your ideal customer and identified the most common segments. To craft your B2B buyer persona, understand the elements you must include in each profile. These elements should represent common characteristics found in a group of customers, not necessarily based on any single customer. Include the following components:

• Name: Use descriptive names for this purpose.

• Personal Data or Description: Include demographic data about the buyer, such as their interests, education level, daily life, family, income level, etc.

• Identifiers: List features that help you identify which buyer persona you are communicating with, such as their demeanor, preferred communication methods, and whether they are likely to have an assistant.

• Role at Work: Understand the buyer persona's title and if they are a decision-maker. Ideally, it would help if you reached decision-makers because they generally decide whether the business buys from you.

• Work or Industry-Related Data: Include the business's goals, challenges, pain points, experience with similar products, and how they source suppliers.

• Success Factors: Record what makes a difference when the buyer chooses suppliers, what they want from a good product, and how the product helps them succeed.

• Action Points or Messaging: Describe how you would approach the customer and what messaging they will likely respond to for a successful sale.

Developing comprehensive B2B buyer personas is a foundational step for any business to expand its reach and increase sales. By understanding your ideal customer's motivations, preferences, and challenges, you can tailor your marketing and sales strategies to address their needs. This targeted approach makes your efforts more efficient and improves your chances of converting potential prospects into customers. Create your buyer personas today, and watch your business grow as you connect more effectively with the right audience.