A buyer persona, also known as a sales persona, is basically a made up representation of the typical customer whom you would target. In order to effectively create a buyer or sales persona, you need to understand what motivates them, the demographic or your target market, and purchasing behavior. In today’s business climate, that also means you need to understand their online behavior.

Why Would You Need a Buyer Persona?

When sales and marketing teams within an organization don’t have a clear picture, a unified understanding of the target audience, the people whom they will be targeting, then how can the organization develop a message that will create the deepest impact?

Buyer personas allow sales and marketing professionals to understand their key demographic. They help to highlight the particular personalities, ambitions, and motivations of these potential customers.

The more insightful, more detailed, and more realistic that a buyer persona is, sales and marketing will be in a much better position to craft the ideal message that will reach the target audience and make an important impact.

How to Create a Buyer Persona

Buyer personas are not developed by sitting down and pondering who your target audience might be. It’s not about guessing the interests of those potential clients or customers. Buyer personas are developed through careful and diligent research, conducting surveys of current customers, and taking part in interviews with those individuals.

It also includes potential customers, prospects, and those who are beyond your contact database but who might have comparable interests to your target audience. It’s also critical to include those customers and individuals who had negative experiences with your company as well as positive ones.

It’s easy to dismiss “bad” prospects because you wouldn’t expect them to return or purchase from your company, but an honest and effective sales persona comes through encompassing the good and the bad.

The goal of the research you conduct will be to discover both qualitative and quantitative data so that you understand your ideal customer, know the values that are important to them, and how your products or services –the solutions you offer- will cater to their basic needs.

Once you’ve gathered the information, it’s time to put it all together into an actual buyer persona. This is a fictional person with a background, career ambitions, income, personality traits, goals, challenges they face, and most importantly how your organization can help overcome those challenges.

Within the buyer persona, it’s important to include actual quotes from people who took part in the research aspect of building the persona. Include common objections that this persona would likely put forth.

Once you have developed a buyer persona, your sales and marketing teams will be able to craft that ideal message that will resonate with your target audience, which in turn will generate stronger leads and, ultimately, more sales.