Welcome to our second ‘Better BD’, where members of the team and industry experts share their experience, tips and tricks on making the most of the return of booming business in 2021 and beyond.
In this edition, Martha Connolly, Senior Channel Consultant at HubSpot, one of Propeller Group’s partners, explains the importance of targeting and creating personas for your business development strategy.
Martha focuses on three key areas for partner success:
- Enable quality service delivery by partners across any HubSpot customer
- Educate partners on advanced product use cases and strategies
- Support partners in growing their partnership with HubSpot
What is a targeting ‘persona’?
The Hubspot definitions of a ‘persona’ is:
A persona is a semi – fictional representation of your ideal customer based on data, interviews, and some educated guesses.
It’s essentially a definition of your ideal buyer presented in a way that sounds like it’s talking about a specific person.
Download our Persona Template here.
Why do personas matter?
Buying personas matter for market segmentation; allowing you to segment your customers into different groups.
With established groups, each (with unique motivations, preferences and habits), you can better target each group and your new business programme and strategy is more likely to be set up for success.
Personas are also valuable when evaluating the success of previous marketing campaigns and approaches; working out what works for one group, but not another, so these insights can be used in the future.
Martha’s top three things to consider;
First, persona creation is not a one-off task, which, once completed, can be forgotten about. Your personas require updates, maintenance and development. Using them across your entire strategy from day one will ensure your team develops good persona habits from the start, and that these personas stay current and accurate.
Second, it can seem a mammoth task, finding somewhere to start to create your personas. So start small, and grow from there. Analyse your most successful customers’ data, and establish where one persona ends and another begins.
Finally – be detailed! Demographic information alone isn’t enough. Step into the minds and lives of your personas – their habits, their challenges, their preferences and things they avoid – all of this will contribute to the creation of an accurate and personalised persona.
The one thing to avoid;
Do not ignore your “negative or exclusionary personas”. These are the leads that are never going to buy from you, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore them; engage with them to thank them for their interest, but also save your sales team from wasting their time.
It is just as important to know who you don’t want to target as those you do want to target.
Final advice from Martha;
Be as detailed as possible, understand your persona’s way of thinking.
Don’t forget about the buyer’s journey – the persona is only the first step! The ways in which you communicate with your contacts should change depending on what stage of the journey they’re at.
Make sure to check out our next ‘Better BD’, where we discuss creating content to power up your new business efforts.
If you’re looking at developing an award winning BD strategy, book a meeting with Propeller here.