Using Personas To Sell

How to Identify and Visualize the Right Target

Good news—I just looked at your schedule and you have unlimited time and resources to use to call on an unlimited number of people in hopes of closing unlimited business opportunities. You no longer need concern yourself with the finite nature of time and money. You no longer need to trouble yourself over trying to decide who to call on—they’re all equally valuable to you! And here’s the best part, for only 3 easy payments of $99.95 each, plus shipping and handling, all of the secrets can be yours! But wait, there’s more…

I admit, I wrote the paragraph above and I got excited reading it! Part of me wants to chase every deal. To not worry about how I spend my time. But the problem is that is a guaranteed path to failure. The “easy” or “lazy” way usually is. None of us have unlimited time or resources. We can’t afford to spend time on low possibility/low value opportunities. For the first few years in my selling career, I chased anybody that would fog a mirror. Seriously, I tried to sell a copier to a guy who ran some kind of import/export business out of the basement of his house. And when I say “basement,” I mean cinder block walls, exposed floor joists, clothes hanging on lines strung up between support beams. His desk was boxes piled up with a piece of plywood for a top. No joke. The fact that the house was in one of the worst parts of town, none of that mattered to me – I was going to sell that guy a copier! OK, I was going to lease him a copier. Of course, I didn’t. He didn’t really need one and he didn’t have any money. Even if he had the money, it would have been the lowest end unit we had and I would have to present, demo, come back and close. And I would have had to split the commission in half because I enticed my buddy to tag along, “Just in case it gets hairy man.” Looking back, that’s probably why he scared the fuser oil out of me when he showed me the gun he was carrying. All this is long before anything like concealed permits were necessary and significantly more than seven years ago.

Fortunately, as a reader of a professional sales publication, you are likely far ahead of where I was 30 years ago. You know that you must find better and better ways to identify, attract, engage and retain accounts that make a difference to you and your company. For some, those are mega deals, for others, they will be smaller, but regardless of the size, you know your sweet spot.

The last few years has seen a rise in Sales 2.0 or “Death of the Cold Call” or “The Secrets of the Digital Gurus.” I’m not knocking the use of social media, lead generation and other sales and marketing attraction programs. I am suggesting that whether those tactics are appropriate for what you sell, whom you sell it to and how your company operates, more than ever, you MUST have a very clear picture of who is most likely to contribute to the success of you and your company by selecting you as a business partner. Sounds simple, but it can be very difficult. Now don’t worry, I am not going to suggest that you turn into super sleuth and spend countless hours researching every company before engaging. I am going to suggest though that you do two things:

1. Identify and characterize your best customers
2. Create personas based on real people at those real companies

 
How to Select Target Prospects

There is a lot of information floating around the sales-o-sphere about selecting targeted prospects but one of the points that they often overlook is the importance of truly defining who your best customers are and what they look like. Often times the “Target” list is based on “Who We Think We Would Like to Do Business with But Really Have No Idea”.

From a practical standpoint, start with your largest revenue contributors (they may not make the final cut but we need to start somewhere). Next, look at the ones generating the most profit. Continue weeding and cutting while considering factors such as the length of the sales cycle, the amount of time required by a sales person or team to service, etc. There is no magic formula to this, it merely serves as a guide to help isolate 5-10 customers that you want to replicate. 5-10 customers that if you had 5-10 more of them, it would make a huge difference. And do not leave out some of the warm-fuzzy characteristics. If you really can’t stand working with an account or if they are forever on the verge of “maybe having to switch vendors” or if they call themselves a partner and label you a “tertiary supplier,” maybe you want to choose a different customer as you look to add ones just like them. Maybe not, your call.

There are other practical matters to be considered. Do they represent future growth opportunities or are they in decline (their industry or need for your products/services). Are they so large that they cause a customer concentration problem or is this a factor? Are there other companies like them?

Creating Tailored Personas

Once you have your 5-10 ideal candidates, take stock of all of the characteristics and attributes of their businesses. Size, location, industry, years in business, centralized vs. decentralized. You get the picture. When you roll up all of this information, you have a very clear picture of the types of companies you should be spending your time pursuing. Think of this as where you want to invest (you, your money, your time, your emotional energy, etc.).

You and I are probably tracking together pretty well up to this point. We want to keep growing our businesses and do it profitably. We recognize it will take more new customers (and deeper and wider in existing accounts) and we know that we have to spend our time where we have the greatest opportunity for a high ROI.

Now we move on to some more challenging ground. We are going to need to create personas. Personas are realistic representations of the key people that we will be engaging with. These are not lists of the actual people; these are stand-ins for the real people we will meet. The personas will help us visualize as many of the characteristics, goals, desires, fears and motivations of the people we will be working to influence as possible. Personas are not real people; they are based on an aggregation of the characteristics of real people.

Position, title, age, education, hobbies and personal interests, marital status, kids, the list goes on and on for as much detail as you can glean. The creation of personas can rely heavily on various types of research, surveys, studies, and scientific data, or, for most of us; they will be based on the best accumulation of our personal observations. The one thing they must represent is real people from the kind of companies you are looking to bring on board and NOT the personal opinion of you or your sales team. This is serious stuff and for it to work, the details need to come from something other than pure anecdotal speculation which, generally, is what we want the characteristics to be, not what they actually are.

One size does not fit all. Remember when we looked at 5-10 of our best customers? Chances are that they weren’t all the same. Possibly they were in different markets, industries, channels or segmented in other ways. Each group will require separate personas as will each of the roles of the people you will likely engage with.

Here are a few key suggestions for creating personas that will help you blow past your competitors.

1. Base them on real people from your best customer list
2. Include more than one person/role
3. Pack as much information into the persona as possible so that you feel like you really know them
4. Keep the persona to a single page
5. Describe what drives them and what they fear
6. Each persona gets a name
7. Create an actual visual picture of the persona

 
Put in the hard work. Follow the seven suggestions above. And by all means, say “hi” to your personas—after all, you already know them.

You should now have a very solid picture in your mind (and in front of your face) of the “people” that you will be talking to. Remember to make the conversations about them, talk to their interests and speak to their emotions. The real people will reward you for it! And you will close more business faster and have more fun doing it.