Insights and Research for Marketing, Sales Development and Sales

Sales and SDR teams spend their time communicating with prospects to understand their specific tactical challenges, qualify them as a potential customer for the solution, and schedule a more detailed meeting. The more they know about the specific buyer personas that they are communicating with, the more relevant their messaging becomes and the more successful they will be at achieving their objectives.  

For reps to achieve their objectives, they must be able to effectively engage with prospects. The key to achieving valuable engagement is to leverage extreme value messaging.

Extreme value messaging is a practice that focuses the efforts of sales and SDR teams on which prospects they should be targeting, their critical priorities, and how they can achieve key initiatives with a solution. This approach enables sales to deliver the personalized, relevant, and empathetic engagement that today’s distracted and demanding prospects expect.

Buyer-responsive personas are key to storytelling

The foundation for a buyer persona is a thorough and actionable understanding of the prospect and their role. Buyer personas serve as guides to maximize the relevance of prospecting to those individuals. They define who the prospects are, what they care about, how they behave, and why they buy.

Top-performing reps consistently tie their engagements to something that the prospect cares about. The buyer personas need to enable them to create an actionable, extreme value experience. For example, tactical challenges that prospects face and examples of the impact are written in the prospect’s language and are things that the seller would feel comfortable saying in a conversation. These are also delivered in a way that show true understanding of the prospect because they convey a realistic balance of detail and conversational language.

A well-crafted buyer persona, especially one with actionable, tactical challenges and corresponding impact statements, serves as a building block for persona storytelling. These statements can be inserted into all touch points of the prospecting process. It is critical that reps learn and understand buyer personas but being able to translate these documents into valuable conversations is the fundamental core of their job.

Personas are the first step to develop buyer-responsive messaging

Successful sales and SDR teams do not treat every situation as a one-off; they develop and follow tried and true activities that connect them to more prospects and schedule more meetings. Creating actionable buyer personas is part of the larger messaging methodology. TOPO’s methodology (see table below) is based on the practices of world-class organizations that build standard processes to understand the prospect, develop insights, and execute messaging at scale.

Buyer personas created by a cross-functional team can help align and educate the entire go-to-market team around the right prospects. The more that sales and SDR teams know about the prospects identified by the stakeholder map, the more buyer responsive every communication touchpoint will be. And the more actionable that the personas are, the more likely that they will get adopted and integrated into the daily prospecting workflow.

By focusing on aligned tactical challenge and impact statements that guide buyer storytelling and messaging, reps will create stronger engagement with prospects and be successful in scheduling more meetings.