In this video, we outline step 2 in building sales pitches that are tailored for individual buyer personas. This step in the process focuses on identifying the value or benefits that you provide to a specific buyer persona.
What is value?
The first thing to start to keep in mind here is that value is not what your product does, it is what your product helps your customer to do or to improve.
Here are a few areas that you can look at as you start to think about the value that could be included in your sales pitches:
- Does your product help to improve any processes?
- Does your product help to save time in any way?
- Does your product help to make anything more reliable or decrease risk?
- Does your product help to increase income or revenue?
- Does your product help to decrease costs or expenses?
If you answer “yes” to any of those questions, it is the end result to these that is your value and that you should include in your buyer persona sales pitches.
Your Value Changes When You Change the Buyer Persona
When you start to think about the value your product offers, it is important to keep in mind that the value can change or be different when you change the buyer persona.
For example, at one point in my career, I sold workforce management software (software to manage the time and schedules of employees). I could sell to manufacturers, retailers, and hospitals. The product offered the same features to these different types of buyers, but each of the different industries had very different types of employees and this changed the type of value or benefits that the buyers realized.
Changing Industries will Change the Buyer Persona
A manufacturer had a lot of union and blue-collar workers and cared a lot about overtime and paying the workers according to how much they produced. A retailer had a lot of part-time workers that were often young and students. A hospital had a lot of employees with different certifications and had a lot of scheduling complexity.
You don’t need to understand all the details of what I just outlined, but what I want you to take away from that is the understanding that different industries can use the same product in different ways to solve different problems or challenges. This is an example of how these different industries become different buyer personas and why this should create different sales pitches.
Different Contacts at a Company Can be a Different Buyer Persona
You can apply this same logic to different buyers inside a company. Contacts that you interact with in different departments will have different needs and interests. For example, you might be able to sell to both HR and Operations.
Again, even though the product will function the same way for everybody that uses it, HR will see things very differently than Operations and you can improve your results if you create different sales pitches for the different departments and buyers inside of a business.
Also, Read Step 5 in Writing Sales Scripts that Target Buyer Personas