As marketing professionals, it’s critical that distributors understand and target the decision-makers who they can best serve with their products and services. Determine who makes an ideal client by developing buyer personas – profiles, based on research done by your company, of who make your best customers. You can compare a lead or prospect with these profiles to make sure they’re worth pursuing. It’ll also help you to market to them more effectively, helps your team serve them better and helps to inform decisions made on adding products and services.

The data shows that those companies that take the time to develop personas see better ROI than those that don’t. According to CRM platform SharpSpring, 71% of companies that consistently exceed their lead generation and revenue goals have formal buyer personas, and 82% of firms with them improved their value proposition.

Use these steps to develop buyer personas.

1. Brainstorm with your team.

A well-rounded persona includes input from all parties at your organization. Decide who should be involved – sales, marketing, customer service, really all the main areas of your company – and ask them for feedback. What attributes do the most successful clients have in common?

2. Analyze successful campaigns.

Take a deep look at how satisfied clients – from the industry they’re a part of, to the marketing that appealed to them, to their budget and need, to the products they chose and how they were distributed. Note commonalities so you can track patterns that will point you to ideal clients.

3. Dive into Google Analytics and your CRM.

Take a look at search terms entered into your site and your most popular marketing content. Look at patterns for how people – particularly those who became paying customers – explore your site, and find out their geographic location, age, gender and position at their company.

4. Interview customers.

You can also make phone calls to happy customers – let them know you’d like some feedback for internal research, and ask them what they liked about working with you, and what could use improvement. Track commonalities and use them to form your personas.

71%
the percentage of companies that consistently exceed their lead generation and revenue goals that also have formal buyer personas.

(SharpSpring)

5. Segment them out.

Ideally, you should have a persona for each market you serve. Take all the research you’ve done (the most time-consuming part) and segment personas by industry. If you have those who don’t fit into your “industry” boxes, take note of them, but plan to establish personas (at least three to five) for your core markets.

6. List basic and detailed information.

For each persona, note both their basic and more detailed information. Basic data includes their title, decision-maker status, industry, and even age, salary and education. More detailed information includes their pain points, objectives and how your company can help them, along with the ideal marketing strategy for them.

7. Craft tailored strategies.

From there, create marketing and sales strategies for each persona with buy-in from all parties. Develop a plan for comparing leads and prospects to the ideal profiles, so you can see how they stack up. Those with more commonalities will most likely bring you better ROI than those that share fewer or none.