How to Leverage a Sales Persona for Lead Generation
For the past three seasons of Love Is Blind, 90 people have participated in a blind speed dating social experiment to hopefully find the love of their life, without ever meeting them face-to-face. After their tenure on the show, only four couples have endured and are still together. That’s a whopping 8.9% of contestants. Why have such a small percentage of couples on Love Is Blind worked out? Because they were never able to develop a sales persona of the person they were talking to.
Yes, I just compared sales personas to a cheesy reality dating show, but it’s true.
When we don’t have the full image of who we are talking to it’s impossible to empathize and learn to love them. In the case of marketing, without a fully developed image of who we are talking to, it’s impossible to understand them and target them strategically. Let’s look a little deeper into sales personas and see how leveraging them can create leads and long-lasting relationships for your business.
What Is a Sales Persona?
A sales persona is a fictional representation of an ideal client or customer created by a salesperson or marketer to help them better understand their target audience. Sales personas typically include demographics, behaviors, motivations, pain points, and goals, as well as their preferred communication channels and purchasing habits. By creating a sales persona, you can tailor your marketing efforts to the needs and interests of your target audience, increasing the likelihood of making a conversion.
Is That Different From a Buyer Persona?
A sales persona and a buyer persona are effectively the same but have different intentions. While a buyer persona helps you understand your buyer and better reach them, a sales persona helps you understand your audience and convert them into potential leads.
What is the Importance of a Sales Persona for Lead Generation
Sales personas are important for lead generation because they make campaigns, messages, outbound marketing, and inbound marketing strategies more effective. They can also help businesses better understand their audience and communicate with them with more targeting and personalization, ultimately leading to increased lead generation, sales, and customer loyalty.
When you’re developing a sales persona for your marketing strategy, you must first consider your audience. Without a clear understanding of your audience, you can’t possibly offer any solutions to potential clients because you’ll never recognize their pain points or goals. This is especially true when developing content for lead-generation purposes. If you don’t target your content to a particular audience, no amount of inbound marketing will convert page visitors to paying clients, and your pipeline will dry out.
To speak more about the importance of sales personas for lead generation purposes, here is Marketwake Account Manager, Zac Daniel:
If you’re not generating leads for your pipeline consistently, you aren’t doing your business any favors. You can’t rely on what you think you’re going to land; you have to rely on what you currently have. Building your ideal sales persona comes with time, but it’s better to figure it out sooner so your pipeline doesn’t dry out and you don’t get behind the eight ball.
How to Create a Sales Persona
To define a sales persona it is imperative to start with research. This can be information acquired through interviews, surveys, stakeholder analyses, etc. However, you should primarily use the quantitative and qualitative data of audiences who do not use your product or service. Once you have the data from the research, you can begin molding your sales persona.
There are four integral steps to creating a sales persona:
1. Acquire Demographic Information
Learning about the geographic location, age, gender, and psychographics of your target audience helps craft a message that resonates with them and entices them to become paying clients or customers. It is also important to learn what modes of communication they prefer and what media compel them.
2. List Their Goals and Motivations
A lead’s goals and motivations come from the answer to “why” questions. For example, if a lead says one of their main pain points is that they can’t find agile enough marketers to keep up with the pace of their business, you should then ask why. Assuming they attribute it to the poor internal structure of marketing agencies, you can adjust your messaging strategy to ensure that your marketing agency has a streamlined internal structure that enables it to move faster than its competitors.
3. Overprepare for Conversations
Include information such as quotes from your research, your client's concerns, the lead’s mission statement, talking points to avoid, and practical solutions to their pain points guided by preliminary research.
4. Provide Examples of Messaging
Develop headlines, taglines, and quotes that embody the voice and tone of your lead, and resonate with them on a deeper level. Here’s a tip: write down words or phrases that continue to come up from the research process and keep them in mind for this step. It might just come in handy.
How to Leverage a Sales Persona for Lead Generation
Once the research is complete and you’ve crafted your sales persona, it’s time to strategize. Here are some examples of how the team at Marketwake leveraged sales personas to ensure their clients thrived:
Icon Source
Icon Source is a powerful sports-endorsement platform that connects collegiate and professional athletes with brands for impactful partnerships. When the NCAA changed its ruling on name, image, and likeness, Icon Source knew they had to step up and get more athletes and brands onto their platform. With Marketwake’s help, Icon Source built a sales persona for their content strategy that would target student-athletes and convert them into downloading the Icon Source App. From this strategy, Icon Source saw a 579% increase in overall users, an 865% increase in organic users, and a 380% increase in overall direct traffic to their website.
OVME
OVME is a medical aesthetic enterprise that looked to take their brand to the next level through a paid media strategy. To do this, Marketwake crafted a sales persona for the digital ads they would be producing. With Marketwake’s digital advertising strategy, OVME saw 11.8 million ad impressions, 94,910 ad clicks, and a 121% return on ad spend from the campaign.
Take sales personas out of the equation. Think about how you like to be sold to. How do you like to be talked to before you purchase a product or service that you had no idea existed? People crave authenticity, so always make that paramount when creating a sales persona.
Account Manager, Marketwake
To Wrap Up
Creating a sales persona is an integral strategy for lead generation. However, there are other strategies you can implement to see some of the same results.
Love may be blind, but your marketing strategies don’t have to. Don’t know where to start? Let Marketwake be your guide to leveraging sales personas for lead generation and growth, and feel free to contact us whenever you’re ready to get started.
FAQ
How do you create a sales persona?
To create a sales persona you should:
- Conduct target audience research
- Identify common characteristics of your target audience
- Use data to create detailed individual personas
- Prioritize your personas by potential value
- Regularly update your personas as your business evolves
What are the six buyer personas?
The six most common buyer personas are:
- The Decision-Maker
- The User
- The Influencer
- The Budget Holder
- The Researcher
- The Loyalist
How do you define customer persona?
A customer persona is a fictional representation of an ideal customer or group of customers a business creates to understand and target their audience.
You can define a customer persona by identifying patterns and characteristics of the target audience, including their age, gender, occupation, location, and interests.
What are some buyer persona examples?
There are many examples of buyer personas depending on your target audience, but here are some common examples:
- The Small Business Owner
- The Tech-Savvy Millennial
- The Luxury Shopper
- The Environmental Activist
- The Busy, Working Parent
- The Senior Citizen
