B2B BUYER PERSONA TEMPLATE

The first step in developing useful Buyer Personas is identifying the types of companies for which they work. These are the main categories of businesses that purchase your organization’s products or services, and will be the basis for developing your ideal customer (or firmographic) profiles.

The end result of this exercise should be a short list of criteria that are based on your ideal customers—the business that you are best able to serve, and that deliver the most value in return to your own company. This list should include:

• Industry

• Annual revenue

• Number of employees

• Geographic location

• Any relevant information about their typical sales cycle (how long is it? Is it seasonal? Which factors act as triggers to initiate their buying process?)

If you’re already serving your ideal customers (but aim to expand your client list), you may start by examining your current customer base and using real data points to build out the list above. If you’re taking this approach, you can create a list of your top customers by revenue or another metric that makes sense to your business—for example, if 30% of your annual revenue comes from your top three customers and the other 70% is generated by smaller sales, a list of your top five or ten customers may not necessarily give you a holistic view of the companies driving revenue for your organization.

In the case of a new product launch which targets a disparate set of potential clients, or another such pivot from your current practices, you can create an ideal customer profile by looking at companies with which you’d like to work, or by simply identifying the basic firmographics that qualify any other company to work with yours.

Many organizations find it effective to develop ideal customer profiles along industry verticals if you sell to businesses within more than one industry.

If your product or service is extraordinarily niche and only targets one industry, you could segment target customers by business size/revenue, geographic location, or typical sales cycle.

For a real-life example of a ideal customer profile, you can review Kula Partners’ Who We Work For page here.

Each ideal customer profile you’ve developed describes a company that is qualified to purchase your products or services. Within each company, there are a series of decision-makers who influence the sales cycle. Knowing who they are—and how and when to market to each—is critical to closing more sales for your organization.

For each ideal customer profile, identify the individuals who will be involved in making the purchase decision for their company. In our experience, a typical B2B buying committee is made up of the following seven members:

• Project Owner

• Procurement Officer

• Executive Sponsor

• Chief Executive

• Operations Lead

• Dependent Department #1

• Dependent Department #2

Creating a Buyer Persona for each of these roles would be a mammoth undertaking. To bring more focus to your marketing efforts, we recommend creating Buyer Personas to market primarily to active buyers, or those most likely to contribute a “yes” to the decision-making process. That usually narrows the list down to:

• Project Owner

• Operations Lead

• Executive Sponsor (in some cases)

For additional context and insights around defining the active buying roles within your ideal customer profiles, click here to read our blog post Active Buyers: Marketing to the Yes.

Just as you reviewed data about your existing customers to create your ideal customer profiles, it may be useful to review some of the key contacts at businesses with which you work to help characterize your Buyer Personas. Identify some of the decision-makers matching the above roles at top companies in your customer portfolio (or ideal organizations that match your firmographic profiles) and review their LinkedIn and/or other social media profiles to answer some of the questions below.

Interviewing real people at businesses that already purchase or are qualified to purchase from you will take some time, but will always give you better and more accurate Buyer Personas than relying on internal knowledge and assumptions alone.

Professional Background

• What is their job role? Their job title?

• What happens in a typical day, and what skills are required?

• What knowledge and tools are required?

• Who do they report to? Who reports to them?

• What is their education level?

 Demographics

• Gender

• Age range

• Household income

• Location

• Marital status

 Psychographics

• What are their core values?

• What social media platforms are they active on?

• Where do they get information relevant to their jobs? What blogs or publications do they read? Which conferences do they attend?

• If relevant, what are their typical interests and hobbies?

• What do they find fulfilling in their personal and professional lives?

• What are their attitudes toward critical issues in their industry? What concerns them most about their industry?

 Goals / Responsibilities

• What are they seeking to accomplish in their role?

• What does it mean to be successful in their role?

Challenges

• What problems are they facing and looking to resolve?

• What's stopping them from accomplishing their goals / responsibilities?

Marketing Triggers

• Which events cause them to seek your product / services?

What Information Is This Persona Looking For At Each Buying Cycle Stage?

• Awareness Stage [when leads discover that there is a need and the realization that (your product) can potentially fulfill it]

• Consideration Stage [when the customer evaluates how your offering meets this need, including the evaluation of offerings from other companies]?

• Decision Stage [when the customer’s logical and emotional inclination is toward one solution or another, ultimately leading to a purchasing decision]?

What Influences Their Purchasing Decision?

• Are there any factors that will help or hinder their decision to purchase?

 Objections / Questions

• What are common objections and questions this persona raises during the sales process?

How You Help

• How do you help your persona achieve their goals?

• What makes a persona choose you over a competitor?