One way to improve the success of your sales and marketing campaigns is to structure the messaging so that it communicates directly to each buyer persona that you target. In this sales training video, we outline a methodology that you can use to try to implement this strategy.

 

What is a buyer persona?

Buyer personas are basically the categories of buyers to whom you can sell. Your set of buyer personas can be organized according to their characteristics or attributes.

You could organize your different personas by industry, company size, department, title, or stage in the sales cycle. Here are some details on how to break down your campaigns.

 

Grouping by Industry

Breaking down each by industry type is an excellent place to start when building sales and marketing campaigns. This is helpful because prospects in different industries will have slightly different interests, problems, trends, etc. They can sometimes also have their language and vocabulary.

When you build individual campaigns for the different industries you are targeting, you can tailor your messaging to what the buyers in that industry will care about, but also in a language they will more likely understand.

 

Focusing on Different Departments

If you sell B2B, you will likely sell to one or two different departments at a company. For example, you might sell a software solution, and you can sell it to IT. But your solution also impacts Operations, and it can make sense for you to talk to prospects in that department.

Even though your product or service will do the same thing for these two different departments, it will likely impact them in different ways. And the individuals in those departments will have different needs and interests. This can and should impact your messaging.

 

Level in the Organization

When selling into a department, you can likely sell and talk to prospects at different levels. Each level in the organization could be viewed as a different buyer persona.

When you talk to a VP, you may want to tailor your pitch differently than what you say to a front-line manager, as they have different interests. You might have a different set of questions that you ask when talking to prospects at different levels.

 

Stage in the Sales Cycle

You could also look at prospects that are in different sales cycle stages as different buyer personas. For example, you might have different messaging for an inbound marketing lead that comes in through your website compared to an outbound telemarketing campaign.

The place where this really applies most is when you build sales and marketing campaigns for your existing and past clients. That messaging can be very different from what you use for prospects that have not purchased from you or do not know who you are and treating each buyer persona as different can help you to improve the effectiveness of your sales and marketing campaigns.