If Socrates was a modern marketer, his maxim would be “Know thy customer”. Knowing the personality of your customer – who they are, where they come from, what they need, want, and dream of – is crucial for your business’ success. Once you figure out why, when, and how people buy the value you offer, you can fine-tune your service to a perfection.
To sell well, you must know who you are selling to. Creating and identifying buyer personas are a must-do to dive into the minds of people. These personas serve as a conceptual representation of real people that you will encounter on the ground – Individuals with unique styles, tastes, and personalities – but people with a common goal: to experience awesome products and services.
Why Use B2B Buyer Personas?
Knowing the major buyer personas your B2B business will be engaging with has unrivalled advantages:
- It helps you understand your customers better, so you can market to them more effectively.
- It enables you to decipher what customer base to target, and equally importantly, what customer base to avoid.
- It allows your marketing and sales team to better understand how different personas interact along the customer journey.
- It empowers your business as a whole to make intelligent decisions when creating and launching new products and services.
What To Consider When Identifying Buyer Personas?
To know your buyer personas inside out, you must know what to look for. Here are the key factors and questions to keep in mind:
1. Demographics
Demographic factors such as age, occupation, and decision-making capabilities can shed a lot of light on how in-charge they are of their choices.
Questions to consider:
> What age range does the persona belong to?
> What is their job title?
> What are their cultural leanings?
> How digitally adept are they?
2. Emotions
Sentiments govern a lot of decisions people make in life, and the products they pick or services they choose are no exception.
Questions to consider:
> What are their dreams?
> What are their worries?
> What are their fears?
> What are their influences?
3. Goals
The end game a persona is looking to play is the focal point of their buying choices, especially for B2B businesses.
Questions to consider:
> What problems are they looking to solve?
> What milestones do they want to achieve in their role?
> Are they looking for a short-term solution or long-term?
> Are they looking to streamline processes or build supplier partnerships?
4. Needs
If necessity is the mother of all invention, need is the father of all B2B business deals. Recognizing your persona’s needs and meeting them effectively is key.
Questions to consider:
> What does the persona need to succeed in their roles?
> How can your business uniquely help them meet these needs?
> Are their needs urgent or routine?
> Are their needs specific or dynamic?
5. Pain Points
Often what your persona is looking for is not to find a new solution, but to fix the current one.
Questions to consider:
> What are their core frustrations with the current product or service?
> Do they have any personal ideas or suggestions on how to make it better?
> What are the key challenges that they have to overcome in their role?
> In an ideal world, what does their day at work look like?
6. Resources
Buyers can only stretch their arms as far as the resources they got. Identifying ranges of resource availability can help you better tailor your business to cater to different people with different pockets.
Questions to consider:
> What is the lower and upper limit of their budget?
> What are the payment methods they prefer?
> How much time are they willing to invest?
> What devices/technology are they able to interact well with?
7. Personal Factors
The reason why your persona accepts or rejects your B2B offerings can be based on something beyond what meets the eye.
Questions to consider:
> What are their motivations?
> What are their interests?
> What are their biases?
> What are their predilections?
Also read: Keep Customer At The Centre Of The Marketing Flywheel
B2B Buyer Personas: More Challenging, Thus More Important
The distresses and objectives of B2B personas are much more complicated than B2C personas. Which makes it even more imperative for B2B businesses to know their customers.
For example, an end-user looking for a computer part during the consumption phase would likely want to simply get it from a proven brand through a trusted expert, satisfied with one-time purchase without having to get too deep into the details. Parallelly, an engineer looking for a computer part during the manufacturing phase would likely want a reliable, long-term supplier that can provide detailed specifications, visuals, real-time inventory transparency, and custom pricing if they require only a specific part.
Providing value to B2B clientele tends to be more challenging because of their job roles and duties can largely vary. To further complicate things, the same roles and duties can differ a lot between different organizations. Which brings us to the question:
Also read: Ultimate B2B Buying Motivation – Quick Psychology
What Are The Major B2B Buyer Persona Groups?
It’s important for B2B personnel to be aware of the kind of persona groups your potential customers can fall into. In your forays as a B2B marketer or salesperson, you’re bound to come across some of these common buyer personas:
Partner managers
These are experienced veterans who’ve been in the business for some time and likely know all its ins and outs. They have the last say in major buying decisions such as whether or not to hire your business or shop on your platform, or what price their company is willing to pay.
What to expect:
> You will usually interact with partner managers during the acquisition stage
> With a focus on the big picture, they will be in charge of making big decisions such as whether to integrate your platform into their business for the long-term
> Expect partner managers to have a thorough questionnaire or checklist to assess your B2B product or service, do a comparative analysis with competitors, look for KPIs, and areas of improvement
Engineers
These are technical leads who have in-depth knowledge in their field of operation. They bear the mantle of making sound technical decisions like what parts or software to buy when the present one is obsolete, how to enhance efficiency through technology, and what platform switches to make to remain current.
What to expect:
> You will usually interact with engineers during the discovery stage
> With a focus on the minute details, they will be looking for specific parts to meet specific requirements, with the most efficient of resources
> Expect engineers to be working off product spec sheets, scouring for particular product codes, making tangible observations, creating visual diagrams, testing components for compatibility, asking for samples, and cross-checking standard operation procedures
Production buyers
Production buyers are on-ground personnel keenly attuned to the physical world. They bridge the gap between ideation and implementation, creation and use, by organizing engineer requests and coordinating approvals and deliveries.
What to expect:
> You will usually interact with production buyers during the discovery stage or conversion stage or both
> With a focus on the smooth flow of processes, they will be looking for production essentials like sourcing parts, getting quotes, and creating baskets
> Expect production buyers to be working off the analysis and recommendation of their engineers, validating your B2B business’ value against the production regime in the short and long term, ordering for your service/product in bulk, and keeping close track once purchased.
Approvers
Approvers range from seasoned personnel from varying backgrounds and specialities to special quality control experts brought on board for strict quality checks. Approvers usually manage cost centres, monthly spends, project scope, and general sign-offs.
What to expect:
> You will usually interact with approvers during the conversion stage
> With a focus on high-quality control, they will be looking for ways to enhance the accuracy of scrutiny, cross-examination, and order authorization
> Expect approvers to be working off-budget spreadsheets or ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software, monitoring every approval for excess expenditure and preparing intensive reports on the performance of projects approved.
Schedulers
Schedulers are natural organizers with a knack for managing resources, especially time. They ensure everything runs like clockwork by organizing work processes, staff activities, client meetings, periodic reviews, and calendar events.
What to expect:
> You will usually interact with schedulers during the implementation stage
> With a focus on acute organization, they will be looking for more efficient ways for creating action plans, scheduling systemic processes, and getting the job done on time.
> Expect schedulers to be working off job schedules, identifying prior requirements, scrutinizing delays, acknowledging dependencies, fetching order updates, monitoring causes of impediments, and creating contingency plans.
Administrators
Administrators are individuals that bring leadership to day-to-day tasks, ensuring every cog of the B2B wheel functions smoothly both on the board and on the ground. They guide others to do their jobs better by helping to strategize a success plan, arrange the available resources, command the path forward, and manage everything else that happens along the way.
What to expect:
> You will usually interact with administrators during the implementation stage
> With a focus on fluid management of internal resources, they will be looking for more intuitive ways to direct day-to-day processes, coordinate interdepartmental collaboration, and keep the business running smoothly overall
> Expect administrators to be assigning access permissions, supervising entry to sensitive portals, receiving and directing visitors, and leading the charge of the planning, organizing, directing, and controlling phases of B2B implementation.
Technicians
Technicians are the silent lifeblood that keeps the B2B systems ticking in the background. They are responsible for predicting, analyzing, tweaking, solving, and securing technical processes that require extensive getting-your-hands-dirty kind of know-how.
What to expect:
> You will usually interact with administrators during the implementation stage
> With a focus on the frictionless running of complex systems, they will be looking for faster ways to detect and solve errors, make complicated functions easily accessible, and integrate non-interactive endpoints
> Expect technicians to be keeping interfaces up to date, collating and analyzing product data, anticipating and debugging technical problems, implementing the nitty-gritty for the smooth running of perpetual digital processes.
Also read: What Are “Named Accounts” In Account Based Marketing
Here Are Some B2B Buyer Persona Profiles
The Case in point is a B2B business that provides well documented, vendor verified software packages and code components to everyone from solo developers to development leads to product managers of small or big enterprises. Their USP is that they go above and beyond to ensure that code seekers buy and sell only top quality, well maintained, verified code packages at full-value prices with a never-before ease.
Since this business is especially customer-focused, as in it provides a platform to both provide and sell software to and from B2B customers, it becomes especially important for them to understand their buyer personas inside out.
After careful evaluation, they boiled down the personas to six major attributes, namely:
1. Age
2. Gender
3. Income
4. Education
5. Location
6. Persona
7. Desires
Group Demographics:
Age – Overall: 16 to 45; Target: 20 to 35
Gender – Mostly male
Income – Medium to High net worth
Education – High School to Post Graduate
Location – Global, with emphasis on the United States
Persona – Developers, designers, entrepreneurs, managers, and enthusiasts for anything coding and computer science
Desires – Buying and selling code online to be easy, cost-effective, trustworthy, and hassle-free
Also read: Buyer Persona Development & Why You Should Do It
Individual Buyer Personas
I) Creative, Reserved, Passionate, Perfectionist
Adam is a 22-year-old from Utah, the USA who works as a solo developer. Single, introverted, yet socially active, he loves working on side projects while he pursues his undergraduate degree in computer science. With a deep passion for coding ever since he first picked up the subject, Adam finds his life purpose in writing robust code to bring innovative ideas to life.
Ultimately, he wants to build a business that enables him to do what he loves and earn a lot while doing it. What he currently desires the most is to be able to conveniently buy coding components that are well designed, high quality, and easy to work with. He uses laptops as a primary interface for work and is most frustrated by sites that are difficult to use and coding components that are overcomplicated.
Age – 22
Gender – Male
Income – Medium
Education – High School
Location – USA
Desires – To buy coding components that are well designed and easy to develop
II) Balanced, Social, Professional, Opportunist
John is a 28-year-old from California, the USA who works as a freelance developer, often collaborating with small teams remotely. Married without kids, outgoing, and adventurous, he loves hanging out with friends and working on side projects that appeal to him. Expertly balancing pleasure with passion, John’s ultimate end-goal is to help build projects that profit both him and the community in meaningful ways.
What he currently desires the most is a top-notch platform where he can buy code components that are verified, up-to-date, and well-priced, also allowing him to easily sell the code he develops independently or with his team, and receive the best compensation for it in the market at the same time. He uses desktops as a primary interface for both works and play and is most frustrated by platforms that make it difficult to make money owing to their poor accessibility and interface.
Age – 28
Gender – Male
Income – Medium High
Education – Graduate
Location – USA
Desires – To make money out of a reliable platform where he can sell and explore coding components easily
III) Leader, Family-oriented, Team-player, Profit-driven
Amit is a 35-year-old from Delhi, India who works as a product manager in a big development agency. Married with 2 kids, he loves spending time with his family, working out, and developing new business ideas. He’s a businessman to the core who likes to get things done quickly and invests only in people and projects that give him the best bang for his buck. Not a developer but a technical manager by trade, Amit’s ultimate aim is to find and lead projects that maximize the expansion of his company in economical ways.
Currently, he desires most to explore and create avenues that monetize development solutions in high-profit, scalable ways. He uses tablets as a primary interface to look-up new opportunities and is most frustrated by a badly designed search page.
Age – 35
Gender – Male
Income – High
Education – Post Graduate
Location – India
Desires – To explore and find ways and platforms to monetize agency development solutions and maximize returns
Also read: Why You Should Hire A Marketing Agency
These were some of the key ways to create and identify buyer personas that can help your business hit the ground running. Feel free to pick your pieces from the ways and examples we’ve laid down for you, and be sure to match it well with your needs and goals while you’re at it. With all the essential persona details at your fingertips, you can create a comprehensive profile of your ideal customer, and therefore, will be able to serve them ideally.