A big mistake we often see SaaS businesses make is not having a clear customer profile also known as a buyer persona or ideal customer profile (ICP). Everyone is not your user. Realizing that early on is going to allow you to stop pursuing unprofitable contacts.
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer, an avatar, used in any marketing messaging and product development. The profile includes the characteristics, goals, and motivations of your ideal users. It is an essential part of any successful business out there as it helps to put together messaging that’s tailored exactly to them and results in better conversions and makes content creation easier.
How to create a Buyer Persona?
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Your ideal customer profile should be based on real data and strategic goals. If your CRM already has users, you can analyze your database to find commonalities and with that information, you can start crafting your ideal customer profiles.
You can and should create more than one buyer persona. Write down everything you know about them – their age, gender, position, and work title. List their interests, pain points, and problems. Don’t forget to give them a name and assign a photo (a stock photo is fine). This will help you build a profile that is accurate and you can connect to.
To create a buyer persona, you’ll want to take into account things like:
- Industry: You will want to define the industries where your company has a competitive advantage or can build the largest number of use cases.
- Job title: Use LinkedIn’s Job Titles as a reference. What are the roles of your target people?
- Company headcount: How big is their company? Potentially what are their purchasing procedures?
- Company revenue: This can be an important filter to eliminate or include specific companies (e.g. if you want to target startups or exclude them).
- Tech used (if necessary): You may want to target companies that already use a CRM, for example, Salesforce.
- Social channels: Where do they spend time online? Are there communities on social networks? Do they use LinkedIn? Twitter? identifying the right channels is going to make the reach more efficient.
Example of a Buyers Persona
Here is an example of a 32-year-old Product Lead for Anchor at Spotify – Sarah Cheung. This example contains all the major elements you need when creating your buyer persona to fuel your marketing and sales messages.
Name: Sarah Cheung (she/her)
Role: Product Lead for Anchor @ Spotify
Age: 32
Education: Bachelor of Arts in Communication
Status: Single
Location: West Hollywood, CA
Industry: Tech
Company Headcount: 5000+
Favorite channels: LinkedIn, Twitter
Quote: “If I don’t understand what my customers do, I can’t do anything for them.”
Overview
Bio
Sarah is a product lead for Spotify’s latest acquisition, Anchor – a mobile podcasting platform. She is leading the transition and assuming ownership of the product and with that comes a new learning curve. Sarah is new to podcast production and is looking to rally her cross-functional team by conducting user research that builds empathy for her customers – creators of podcasts so that she can integrate the product and map new product development with confidence and meaning.
Role + Tasks + Goals
Product Lead
Wants to better understand her customers
Responsibilities
- Lead the acquisition and integration of Anchor’s product into the Spotify family.
- Create and share a common understanding of a podcaster’s workflow.
- Establish a roadmap for product integration and product differentiation to establish Spotify as the leading platform for podcasts.
- Identify and groom talent across both Spotify’s incumbent team and Anchor’s acquired talent to form a new product leadership going forward.
Pain points
- Getting everyone on the same page.
- New to the podcasting world and there is a lot to learn about the customer segment of podcast hosts/producers.
- Integrating leadership from Anchor into Spotify’s culture.
Core Needs
- Share the knowledge base and collaborate with the team on shaping the product in the future.
- Conduct user research with podcasters to understand their needs.
Bring the Buyer Persona into your cold outreach campaign
Now that you have spent time understanding your ideal buyer personas and created detailed profiles with names and photos assigned, it is time to write a cold outreach email to them. Think about the information you discovered about your target audience every time you want to reach them.
An example of a cold outreach campaign message:
Hi [fname], I'm Matteo from Stratega. I am writing to you because I noticed that with [companyname] you use Salesforce [ Customizing makes it look like it's not a massive email ] to manage your communication agency and I wanted to know how you are. Specifically, do you lack integrated CRM/CMS management? [ specific pain point → Hubspot has integrated management if it were a big problem I would immediately have the hook to sell ] I deal with this issue with my company [ I qualify but without exaggerating ] and I wanted to understand how much this was a problem for the reality like yours [ always focus on the customer, never on us ] as we are writing a research paper. If you'd like to talk about it, I'd like to ask you for 15 minutes of your time [ non-invasive CTA, it's a first email ]. [Business]
Conclusion
Creating comprehensive buyer personas is an important part of any marketing strategy or outreach campaign for that matter. By understanding who your ideal customers are, where they hand out and what problems they deal with from real-world data, you can create highly targeted messages that are more likely to succeed and turn into paying leads.
