Buyer Personas vs. Profiles: How To Win More Sales

There is one key differentiating factor between typical buyer personas & buyer profiles and its absence in your sales and marketing foundation can say a lot about the company’s approach to its customers; perhaps even it’s future success.

Let’s first take a look at the elements that make up both a buyer profile and a buyer persona:

What is a Buyer Profile?

Buyer Profiles: A buyer profile or what is now being called an “avatar” in some circles, is a portrait built based on one of the business’s ideal customers. These profiles outline specific personal, professional, and company information. the data that these profiles are composed of, is used to zero in on segments of a broader target audience, allowing the sales & marketing teams to group prospects that match the outlined details within the profile, into a refined audience segment for each ideal prospect the business wishes to target. These refined segments can then be reached with specific messaging that encompasses relevant details that match the information in the buyer profile, such as the job title, professional goals or reference to company size; messaging that will resonate specifically with the segmented audience they are looking to convert.

Buyer profiles typically include information in the following areas:

Personal Information:

• Age
• Marital status
• Family size
• Education level
• What are their personal interests, hobbies, and preferred brands/products?
• How is this person connected? What channels could be used to reach them?
• For visualization purposes, a fictional name, and photo are included?

Company information:

• Industry
• Revenue per year
• Geography
• Company size

Professional information:

• Job title
• Role in the company
• Who do they report to?
• How their success is measured?
• The professional skills required for their role
• Incentives & rewards from their job
• Biggest challenges that this role faces
• What channels do they used to source solutions to professional challenges they face?

 

Here is a sample buyer profile:

 

Benefits of a Buyer Profile:

• The information collected allows for a certain degree of personalized messaging, that speaks too and resonates with the audience segmentation that you are looking to target. This is achieved through the use of target-specific information in the messaging.

• They Aid you in seeing your target audience as a real person, with interests and hobbies, a family and spouse, career goals and challenges, and a boss to impress. This allows you to build an emotional connection in your mind with the audience, which in turn will make communication easier. To put this into perspective, compare the ease of getting a friend to do you a favor, to the thought of making the same request of a stranger you have never met before and know nothing about. For the majority of people, the conversation with the friend is a less stressful situation than the same conversation with someone with whom they have no emotional connection.

• The buyer profile also shades light on the channels that will provide the best chances of reaching the segmented audience and why other channels may present problems – allowing you to refine your marketing and sales efforts and optimize your budget.

What is a Buyer Persona?

Buyer Personas: Includes the information gathered when building buyer profiles, however, they typically take it to the next level by being centralized around the purchasing process, and the factors and key players that influence the buying decision.

The key difference, therefore, is the inclusion of buying insights.

By examining the buying insights of your ideal prospect’s purchasing process, the purchase cycle, the internal and external factors that trigger or affect the process as well as the key players that influence the buying decision, you will be able to answer:

• Which buyers to focus your efforts
• The features, benefits, and values with the highest importance to these buyers
• The barriers that prevent these buyers from including your offerings in their evaluation
• The channels or industry resources that these buyers utilize to evaluate the options available
• Who is involved in the purchasing decision and the influence they have

Benefits of a Buyer Persona:

• Through analysis of the of the buying insights, you can optimize the buyers’ journey through your funnel. With the buyer being the centralized aspect, creating a seamless experience for your prospects is of the utmost importance and through this method you can achieve the holy grail of marketing and sales alignment; allowing each to complement the others efforts by making the touch points the priority rather than focussing on the handoff at a certain stage. ultimately ensuring each touch point within the funnel is relevant to the relationship that prospect has with your business, regardless of the source.

• Make the most of your time and budget by identifying which types of buyers you need to influence and the best ways to reach them.

• Create effective messaging that resonates highly with the buyers you are targeting.

How Buying Insights & a User-Centric Mentality Impacts Your Success

Building out the full buyer persona, and revealing the buying insights, requires the ability to pivot from your point of view and step into your customer’s shoes, looking at this process from their perspective and structuring your approach to provide a seamless experience; one that compliments their internal purchasing process. Organizations that have a “user-centric” mentality include this attitude as a cornerstone in every aspect of their business and by doing so, ensure that they move fluidly with the needs of their buying base while staying on top of industry trends. A “user-centric” approach may mean funnel or organizational changes are required, to better align your marketing, sales and customer service efforts with what resonates with your prospects needs and complements their decision-making process, however, it will also remove the need for guesswork in your marketing in sales efforts.

If you have buyer profiles created, layering on the buying insights and making the necessary adjustments will increase your appeal to prospects while improving the communication messaging and timing, ultimately resulting in higher levels of conversions.