The Key to Building Better Buyer Personas for B2B SaaS

Business, Marketing Strategy

Delivering a best-in-class customer experience, one that truly elevates your brand from the competition, involves more than an executive commitment to putting the customer first.  To do this effectively, you need to understand your buyer as an actual person – not just one of your buyer personas or another company in your ICP.

Buyer personas (imaginary people who represent a group of ideal buyers)  are a terrific way to better understand your customer and ensure there is a common understanding of whom you are selling to across your organization. Traditional buyer personas usually include information like:

  • A fictional name and bio picture
  • Basic demographics (age, location, education level, income, marital status) 
  • Job title, responsibilities, and pain points
  • Personal interests, likes, dislikes, hobbies, etc.
  • Goals (personal & professional)

Although they serve a valuable purpose, traditional buyer personas don’t offer a lot in the way of emotional intelligence.  To make meaningful connections with prospects requires you to go deeper to truly understand your buyer as an actual human being – an individual with a unique set of experiences, beliefs, biases, and goals – all of which likely have a more significant influence on shopping behavior and purchase decisions than demographics.       

TL;DR

Adding a dimension of empathy to your buyer persona template will empower you to design more effective user/customer experiences. To do this, gather information around what your buyer is:

  • Thinking: What are their hopes, dreams, aspirations? What does success look like? Do they feel your product/solution will help them? How do they think it will help them? 
  • Feeling: Do they feel underappreciated or overwhelmed? Are they excited to learn more about your product?  Do they feel internal support around the purchase?  What are their fears and worries?
  • Doing:  What takes up time in the buyer’s day?  How does this compare to their job responsibilities and/or what will enable them to reach their goals? How does purchasing your product fall among other priorities? What do they want to start or stop doing? How can your product help?

Good sources of insight include focus groups, 1-1 interviews, social media threads, and sales calls. 

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