Understand Your Buyer Persona To Communicate With Your Audience

You’ve figured out your target audience, know your ideal customer profile, and used that to determine the value of your total addressable market. Now it’s time to define the persona or the person your sales and marketing team will have to reach within those companies. In this section, we’re going to break down a simple buyer persona—JumpCrew style. If you’re new to the JumpCrew brand, we’re an outsourced sales and marketing company. Companies partner with JumpCrew to increase brand awareness, generate high-quality sales leads, and close new business to grow sales revenue. We make sure that they don’t have to waste time and money building in-house
sales and marketing teams.

What Is A Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is a fictional character that represents your ideal customer. Now that we’ve reminded you what we do, let’s talk about “Grant” our example buyer persona. As part of our Sales Enablement Marketing product, we create buyer personas for your company and walk you through the positioning and messaging that we believe is the best way to get the person’s attention. Most companies have more than one buyer
persona profile. In fact, it would be strange to have only one type of target customer. These persona characters are created by pulling real data about existing customers and research on the market. Multiple buyer personas are encouraged, but you shouldn’t get carried away defining every single person who has ever engaged with your business. For example, at JumpCrew we have other business units who would all have their own buyer personas but for the purpose of this article, we chose one persona that aligns closely with our brand. This persona describes someone that our strategic accounts sales team would love to pitch on partnering with JumpCrew. Meet Grant.

Why Do I Need A Buyer Persona?

Buyer personas clarify the person to tailor your messaging towards and target within your ICP. Although you may know who your target audience is when you’re typing an email, writing an ad, developing a sales pitch, etc. your tone and language can get lost if you don’t have a guiding “person” in your head that you’re writing to. Additionally, Grant’s profile helps our ad team put JumpCrew in front of the right people.

Breaking Down Our Buyer Persona

Grant’s profile is an example of one buyer persona format. There are hundreds of ways to put a buyer persona together ranging from the bare minimum (name, age, title, location) to a specific Myers Briggs profile that meshes well with your company. Once you understand the purpose and functionality of one buyer persona you’ll be able to get as detailed as you’d like. Past a certain point, the information gets superfluous, but in our
opinion, this adds to the fun of creating a persona and makes this ideal character memorable to your team.

Education

Knowledge of education level is great info for targeting. Ads can be tailored to appear to your target audience based on this demographic.

Job Title

This section tells you who to address. Some copy can actually start with
proactive, targeted language like, “Are you a sales director?” Defining job title also helps the sales team know when they’ve reached the decision-maker. We can reach salespeople or managers at potential partner companies all day, but if it’s the director level that makes decisions, that’s
who you should tailor your message for.

Relationship Status

This is one of the demographic questions that isn’t vital but adds to the big picture of the persona. Visualizing Grant’s life gives you a real person to write to or design a pitch around. You’ll have an imaginary friend in no time.

Company

This covers the type of company that your persona works for. The persona’s company should align with the companies within your TAM that make up your ICP. For us, Grant works at a B2B SaaS tech company that’s similar to some of our most successful clients. Most of these companies are in San Francisco.

Interests

Grant loves sales-related content that will make him better at his job. He reads articles on sales education, the future of sales, and goes to sales events. Knowledge of basic interests can help you gauge which online platforms Grant will be on. If his interests are mainly hobbies like sports teams, tech products, etc. you might find him on Twitter. In this case,
since Grant’s hobbies are aligned with his day-to-day work, Jumpcrew will likely bump into him on LinkedIn. Also, he enjoys sales dev courses and continued learning so LinkedIn is definitely the spot. To reach Grant we created a downloadable “The State of Digital Sales Transformation” white paper and an Excel commission calculator. We know this content would be interesting to Grant and that calculating commissions is an annoying but essential part of Grant’s job. Knowing that, we built a useful commission
calculator in Excel for him to use at work. This not only shows Grant that JumpCrew is a thought leader in the sales space, but also that we can solve his problems. He will come back to our content because of the tools we create. We can reach the “Grant” type by pushing this content piece out on LinkedIn.

Opportunity

Grant is an opportunity for JumpCrew because he is responsible for increasing sales at his company. Our most successful partnerships have derived from the need to scale, which is part of our ICP. JumpCrew provides a solution in our Satellite Sales and Full Funnel product offerings— you can see the proof here. Knowing that the opportunity is solely about the need to increase sales, we continue to add value to Grant by writing ads, blogs, creating large content pieces, and pitching him with an emphasis on
scaling sales. Putting blogs like the ones below in front of Grant is a great way to build our relationship, keeping the JumpCrew brand top of mind.

Buying Motivation

Grant will want to move forward quickly with the option that makes
him look the best. He needs to be convinced that outsourcing a sales
team in order to scale is the smartest decision. Through all communication
mediums, we will tailor our messaging to show Grant that JumpCrew is the move—that our business model makes more sense than an internal team. Here’s an example of an ad for Full-Funnel (marketing + sales where we have tailored copy towards someone like Grant who needs to decide how to
scale.

Concern

The Grant persona’s main concern is if he goes with JumpCrew, he will have
to put in the same amount of work as he would starting an internal team.
That’s why we put infographics like the one below on our website. Before
we even pitch Grant, we want to get in front of his buying concern with
content like the Buy VS Build chart.

Conclusion

Once you figure out who it is that you’re trying to communicate with, speaking to them comes naturally. You’ll be able to say things like, “If you’re a sales director in charge of scaling your sales program, talk to us to grow revenue” instead of, “JumpCrew sells outsourced sales solutions”. The first ad copy is more valuable and shows that we know who our target audience is; we have a niche and they are it. With a built-out buyer persona, you can update the profiles as you add products and services, and fine-tune
according to industry changes.