Empowering Resellers: How to Drive Customized Value to IT Teams

“If You’re Selling to Everyone, You’re Selling to No One.”

When selling any product or service, if you’re trying a one-size fits all approach and selling to everyone as if they’re all the same, you won’t make much progress in that sale. You want to drill down to the specifics of your customer, including their situation, challenges, pain points, and motivators. Buyer personas can help you learn as much as possible about the interests, behaviors, and attitudes of your ideal customer and their job. As a Veeam ProPartner, we want to equip you with all you need to know about creating buyer personas so you can more effectively and efficiently provide your target audience with relevant and engaging content and communications.

What is a Buyer Persona? 

Buyer personas and personalized sales are strategies that businesses use to tailor their marketing and sales efforts to cater to individual customer needs and preferences. This approach acknowledges that each customer is unique and therefore requires a customized experience to increase engagement and conversion rates. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of an ideal customer based on market research and data analysis. It includes demographic information, interests, pain points, motivations, and buying behaviors. By creating buyer personas, businesses can better understand their target audience and develop more effective marketing and sales strategies.

Personalized sales leverage the knowledge gained from buyer personas to deliver targeted and relevant messaging to potential customers. This approach involves customizing sales pitches, content, and communication methods to meet the specific needs and preferences of each individual prospect. The advancement of technology has made personalization even more prevalent in the modern market. Our phones, social media, and search browsers all have the ability to collect vast amounts of data about individuals, which can then be used to personalize digital experiences. From targeted advertising to curated newsfeeds, these platforms aim to create a personalized user experience that aligns with the user’s interests and preferences.

In face-to-face interactions or conversations with sales representatives, the expectation of personalization remains. People now anticipate that companies and salespeople will be aware of their individual needs, preferences, and pain points. They expect sales pitches to be adjusted for their specific requirements and want their questions and concerns to be addressed specifically. To apply the idea of personalization and customization to sales, businesses need to first understand their customers as individuals. By analyzing data, conducting surveys, and gathering feedback, companies can gain insights into their target audience.  Once armed with this information, sales professionals can tailor their approach by:

1. Customizing sales pitches: Instead of using a generic pitch, salespeople can adapt their messaging to address the specific needs and challenges of each prospect.
2. Offering relevant content: Providing prospects with targeted content, such as case studies or industry-specific reports, can demonstrate how the product or service can address their unique requirements.
3. Utilizing technology: Leveraging data analytics and marketing automation tools can help businesses track customer interactions, preferences, and behaviors, which enable sales teams to provide a more personalized experience.
4. Being responsive and empathetic: Active listening and understanding the customer’s needs are key. Responding quickly to questions or concerns and showing empathy throughout the sales process can help build rapport and trust.

Overall, the focus on buyer personas and personalized sales is driven by the desire to create a more customer-centric approach. By tailoring sales efforts to meet specific needs and preferences, businesses can increase customer satisfaction, improve conversion rates, and drive long-term customer loyalty.

Who is Your Ideal Customer?

This is one of the most important questions for any organization, and effective buyer personas can help you answer this question, understand your audience, and increase sales. Buyers have changed a lot throughout the years, and the more information you can provide your sales teams about how your products and/or services can impact and provide value, the better. Giving your sales representatives information about what your buyers care about and are motivated by can increase your chances of being able to attribute your solutions to their success.

Buyer personas should include whatever you might need to know about your customers, including their needs, pain points, and the most helpful information for your specific selling purpose. Your sales representatives will then have more effective sales conversations at every stage of the buying process when they have personalized sales material, and your sales and marketing strategy can address each of these people. Remember that your strategy should be based on who your team speaks to during the sales process, not a mere guess or assumption. Real data leads to effective buyer personas that drive results.

How to Use Personas

One of the best ways to ensure everyone in your organization is on the same page is to have a playsheet for each persona. Describe who that person is, what they represent, and the primary goals or challenges they may have. Then, come to an understanding of how you would present your solution, your elevator pitches, and full-blown sales pitches, for each stage of the buyer journey.

When your sales and marketing teams and customer-facing employees share the same information about each persona’s needs and how to approach them, you can ensure your message is consistent, personalized, persuasive, and effective.  This level of personalization can have significant impact. Plus, you can customize your email marketing and ads and create targeted marketing campaigns. This will help you connect with your ideal customers and increase qualified leads to improve sales results all while unifying your messaging across sales, marketing, and customer service. 

Buyer personas stand out from other marketing tactics because they’re based on actual customer data. There’s nothing theoretical about them, so they represent your ideal audience. There are many benefits to using buyer personas, including:

• Improved targeting: Personas help you adjust and focus your content so that it is strategically positioned to target consumers who are likely to be interested. 
• Drive personalization: Create more relevant and engaging content that resonates with the target audience.
• Better lead qualification: Identify and prioritize the most valuable leads and opportunities.
• Improved customer experience: Tailor customer interactions and experiences to meet specific needs and expectations.
• Informed insights: Personas give insights into your audience’s channel behavior. For example, where they engage, what topics they’re interested in, or what content types they prefer (e.g. video, blogs, email, etc.).
• Integrated decision making: Provide a foundation for strategic decisions involving marketing, sales, and product development.
• Higher conversion rates: By addressing the specific pain points and preferences of personas you can more effectively persuade customers to take action which can lead to higher conversion rates.
• Boost customer loyalty: Foster a deeper connection between Veeam’s brand and our customers through tailored and engaging messaging. 

A Veeam-tested Model of Creating Buyer Personas

A lot of work goes into creating practical, accurate buyer personas. One of the best ways to do this is to talk to your customers. Your company needs a B2B buyer persona for each decision maker your sales team encounters. Gartner found that there are generally six to 10 decision-makers in the B2B buyer journey, but this number can vary based on your industry. For example, you might need a persona for these people in the buying process:

• The person who does the initial research for a product or service.
• The end user within the organization.
• The gatekeeper who decides whether to include your product or service in the final shortlist that’s passed on to leadership.
• The leader who approves the purchase.

Good news is, Veeam is not new to this game, and we’ve made this process much easier. Check out our buyer personas on the ProPartner portal here to learn more. Even though we’ve already delineated our different personas, you should still take note of the steps taken in creating these detailed personas, as they evolve and your story will evolve with them. Your different buyer personas should include what you need to know about your customers, including their needs, pain points, and the most helpful information.

1. Conduct research: Through market research, you can better understand who your customers are, what they want, and what they’re looking to solve.
2. Look at your competitors: A competitive analysis will help you understand the weaknesses and strengths of companies who operate in the same industry. You can also see who they interact with and what they say.   
3. Survey existing customers: Contact loyal customers or people who engage with your brand to find out what they like and don’t like about your brand. 
4. Leverage email: Email marketing helps you discover and engage with people who already know your brand. Veeam Marketing Center can help with personalizing messaging to your audience segment.   
5. Invest in social listening: Monitor what people say about your brand or products and services by using social listening tools set up Google Alerts for your brand or Veeam’s brand.
6. Post on forums: Forums have become increasingly popular as a way for people to ask questions or get reviews.
7. Use social media: Social media engagement can reveal a lot about your audience. It can tell you what type of content they like, what content formats resonate, and the topics that drive them to engage. It can also help you see what competitors are doing across channels. This can give you more insight into the type of content they share and how it performs. This knowledge may give you inspiration for marketing campaigns, positioning, and messaging.  
8. Leverage analytics: Companies across industries have collected so much data that it can be difficult to know how to analyze it properly. With so many digital channels, it’s important that you gather data from many sources to get a full picture of your target customer. Real data is essential to creating buyer personas, since it tells you more about your audience and the devices and platforms they used to get to your page.
   • Website: Your website should be treated as the face of your brand and represent its values. Use tools like Google Analytics 4 to track visitor behavior, channels used, demographics, and engagement on your website. 
   • Landing pages: Analyzing the traffic and engagement on website landing pages or custom campaign pages can help you gain insights.  
   • Social media: All social media platforms like TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn provide you with analytics to see engagement, preferences, and demographics. You will also see what content performed the best so you can get an idea of what content types or messaging works for each one. 
   • Email: You can analyze data from email campaigns to understand open rates, click-through rates, and engagement. A/B testing can also be performed to test subject lines, body content, and call-to-actions. 
   • Customer relationship management systems: These systems allow you to track purchase history, preferences, and interactions.

Don’t Create Your Own; Use a Buyer Persona Template from Veeam

Veeam has done the hard work for you and already has the typical buyer personas in our ProPartner portal here. These are the buyer personas we identified as being the best for our solution. Here are a few of the kinds of information we’ve gathered just to give you an idea of the scope and scale of research that has gone into defining our target audience:

• Persona name and defining traits: What makes them tick, what their traits are, what gives them the incentive to purchase, their motivation, etc.
• Demographics: Age, gender, hobbies, location, and anything else that is relevant to the selling process and understanding the persona.
• Goals: What the persona’s goals are in relation to the product or service you provide.
• Frustrations/pain points: What annoys or frustrates this persona (e.g. slow load time or abad customer experience).
• Favorite brands: What are the brands and vendors that this persona likes, uses, and trusts.
• Content and information channels: What content, topics, or issues does the person engage with or search for and where? This includes what media channels, news sources, and media channels they look for, like blogs, webinars, podcasts, images, testimonials, and more. 
• Marketing messages: What are the key messages or propositions you could use to try and attract or convert this persona? What pain points are you addressing and how does your solution meet and solve these pain points?

Conclusion

The more you know about your customers, the better you can talk to them. Make sure to update your personas as you learn more about each one since this will help drive personalization and boost conversions. 

The market changes constantly due to internal and external factors. This also goes for your audience. Over time they will change and evolve, which means that their needs, frustrations, or motivations may shift. This means you need to review and refresh your personas regularly.

By following the buyer persona template from Veeam for at least three key buyer personas, you’ll be able to create content and launch campaigns that not only speak to your audience but can help your brand grow and evolve with your customers.

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