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Must Haves: Customer Profile & Buyer Persona

No one wants to waste time talking with the wrong companies and people. While it’s beneficial to network and learn new industries and meet people, and that should certainly happen with regularity, outreach needs to be targeted and intentional, both with marketing and with sales. Statistics show salespeople lose between 60-90% of deals after the first contact. Wow! Imagine the conversion rate, when you’re laser focused on the type of company and the exact person in that company you should be reaching out to and talking with.

It seems easy, but it’s not. Many businesses that we work with don’t want to limit their opportunities, so they are reluctant to commit and define their customer profile and buyer persona. If you are in this category and are growing at or better than your plan, then great. However, if you are not growing at the pace you would like or need to do something different in the coming year to drive different result, take time to define both. First, know what they are and why you need them.

Customer Profile
A fictitious account that would get significant value from your service and would provide substantial value to your company in return. The type of customer that costs the least to acquire, stays with you for a long time and has a strong lifetime value, is less likely to churn and, eventually, becomes an advocate for your brand.

Buyer Persona
A semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about people who have bought from you in the past. Buyer personas provide structure and context for your company, making it easier to map out content, allocate your team’s time and resources, and achieve alignment across your organization.

There are many templates out there on how best to create your client profile and buyer persona, but don’t over complicate it. You know who your best clients are and you know which client contacts you’ve had the best, long-term relationships with. I am all for keeping things simple. You can always fine tune the characteristics as you are working with your sales team, managing your funnel and pipeline, optimizing a social or email campaign or as you revise or launch services. Just start with what you know, make it a collaborative effort with everyone involved with marketing & sales, document it and drill back to it often.

I walk the walk, so I wanted to share EMI’s client profile and buyer persona for one of our programs.

EMI’s Customer Profile for the Competitive Differentiation Program: Regional, small to mid-sized professional services firm without a full-time marketing person on staff. The owners or partners work in the business as practitioners and may have support staff or other practitioners in the firm. The firm can be located anywhere in the country and may have multiple offices but must have a regional footprint.

EMI’s Buyer Persona for the Competitive Differentiation Program: An owner, partner or operator whose credibility or reputation are key to attracting clients directly or to the firm. They work primarily in the business with their clients, so they have limited time to work on the business and need turnkey solutions. Budgets are small so they need multi-faceted programs that deal with multiple problems and solve for many needs. They may have partners other practitioners or support staff in the firm, but they lead the organization and make the decisions.

If you found this blog helpful and would like to discuss further, please feel free to contact me at [email protected] or (513) 309-0719. If you fit the above profile and persona, check out our Competitive Differentiation program at https://eminetwork.com/programs/!

 

 

 

 

References: https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-generate-more-sales-with-the-perfect-prospect-profile-bb64cdf8225e, https://www.singlegrain.com/buyer-personas/4-steps-to-discover-your-ideal-buyer-persona-for-b2b-marketers/, https://www.vainu.com/blog/ideal-customer-profile-vs-buyer-persona/