Personas Versus Profiles What's Best for Demand Generation Success?
How do You Identify Your Best Sales Prospects?
How do You Identify Your Best Sales Prospects?
This question may seem rather silly, but a lot of business people fail to identify their B2B customers properly. There has been a lot written and talked about buyer personas as the best way to identify you best sales prospects. We know there is a better way for B2B marketers to classify B2B sales prospects. This trustworthy, verified methodology enables you to identify your ideal buyers.
This is the first principle you need to know that separates successful marketers from the unsuccessful. We will walk you through the stages that comprise this approach that will deliver better customer acquisition outcomes.
Personas vs. Profiles
Persona Definition
Buyer personas are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers that are supposed to help you understand your customers better. Personas are generalizations of “ideal customers.” The persona acts as a way to develop a geographic, demographic, and psychographic picture of your customer.
Profiles Definition
A customer Profile begins with identifying the shared pain points between and among customers and likely customers. It recognizes that shared pain and the need for solutions for that pain is what drives customer engagement.
Purpose of Personas vs. Profiles
The purpose of Personas is to create relatable messages based on the attributes of the persona as it moves along a nice predictable linear path that allows your marketing automation to engage with them at set points along the traditional sales funnel.
There are only two huge problems with the purpose of Personas.
- B2B buyers do not move along a linear path that would make marketing automation successful in attempting to engage them from step A to step B to step C and so on.
- You cannot push your solutions or sell your persona on your solution until you have actual engagement by the persona
The purpose of Profiles is to develop templates of your existing customers that you can use to identify the best industries and market segments that are closest to your best-performing customers.
Template in hand you can develop a scoring system to rank and prioritize your customer profiles. This will create a hierarchy of optimal customer profiles that will become strong indicators of like customers in terms of customer value and performance.
Ultimately, this profiling exercise is critical and forms the foundation for messaging, engaging, and converting more prospective customers like your existing best customers.
This is a far superior way to rank and score customer potential than just what content they downloaded last. Your internal templates of your existing best customers and the traditional qualification and lead scoring using B.A.N.T. are more than sufficient to identify the sales prospects that your company needs to pursue to achieve your marketing goals.
How Can You Use Profiles?
Profiles are a far superior way to rank and score customer potential than just what content they downloaded last. Your internal templates of your existing best customers and the traditional qualification and lead scoring using B.A.N.T. are more than sufficient to identify the sales prospects that your company needs to pursue to achieve your marketing goals.