Finding high quality prospects is a tough job for sales teams in B2B SaaS. In spite of knowing the buyer persona, it's not easy for sales executives to pick prospects with a high propensity of conversion.
Let us explore the nature of buyer personas in B2B businesses, why personalized messaging with buyer persona is essential. Furthermore, let’s also understand how technographics data helps your sales team prioritize prospects, and how technographics data and buyer personas can work together to boost sales.
B2B business and multiple buyer personas
In B2B businesses, identifying the right buyer persona as part of the prospecting activity has a direct correlation with improving the conversions. A buyer persona is a strong representation of a potential buyer having the closest relevance to your solution offering. Therefore, it’s critical that you know who you want to target, and how you want to personalize the communication based on the job function and target profile.
For example, if you’re offering a CRM solution, your buyer persona could be VP/Director of Sales, Marketing, Customer Success or the COO. As they are the closest users of your solution, they play the role of a decision maker and you can emphasize in your communication about how your CRM solution can help get better results or ROI. Unless you’re involving the right buyer persona at the right time, the sales cycle could end you being too tedious and lengthy, with lower conversions.
But, identifying buyer personas in B2B businesses can be a bit tricky. In an organization, two different roles can have a similar set of responsibilities, therefore the challenges are also similar. If you’re too focused on one buyer persona, chances are you’re limiting your reach.
For example, Sales Development Representatives (SDR) and Business Development Representatives (BDR), are technically different roles. However, both could be classified as “Entry Level Sales” personas.
Similarly, personas play a different role when buying a product or availing a service.
There are Initiators who initiate the discussions, and possibly the end users of your product or service, like an SDR or BDR. There are Influencers who do not participate in direct discussions with your sales team. However, they influence the deal in group meetings. And, there are Decision Makers who approve the deal, based on the evaluation and feedback shared by initiators and influencers.
In a nutshell, B2B sales deals are usually multi-threaded. In other words, more than one stakeholder is engaged in the sales process. Having a multi-threading approach, where you develop relationships with multiple stakeholders on the purchasing side, is the first key step towards improving conversions.
Let’s go back to the CRM solution example to understand how multi-threading works. While you personalize the communication for the decision makers by telling them how your solution can give them a better ROI, through better productivity and efficiency, for influencers and end users, you can communicate about the value of the solution, its capability, benefits and ease of use.
Using this multi-threading approach of targeting different buyer personas within the same organization, you can engage with and involve different stakeholders for deal closure.
Personalized messaging with deep insights is essential
As part of the prospecting exercise, identifying buyer personas gives a good understanding of the profile of customers you want to target with the ability to bring in the application of your solution to the respective function. But, with just the buyer persona insights, the outreach or communication by your team would be generic in nature with minimal personalisation.
Having more insights can help fine-tune the targeting further, to narrow down on the prospects that closely align with your ICP.
How does technographics data add more value?
Technographics is tech stack information about a company. While firmographic data gives more details about the company and the people working it, technographic data is specifically about the company’s technological investments.
For example, what technology tools are your prospects using? How is the usage status - is it high, medium or low? How is overall IT spend?
Finding out technographic data for an account is not easy, because there is a lot of data, and structuring them in an easily understandable and consumable format makes it even more challenging. Sales intelligence tools like Enlyft use AI and machine learning models to index data from different sources like social media, forums, job postings and more.
With Enlyft’s Technographics data, InVerbis, a process mining platform that focuses on niche technologies in specific industries, was able to discover their Total Addressable Market (TAM) and Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) for effective targeting. With Enlyft, they were able to cut down the number of hours they were putting behind research, and focused more on going after organizations and buyer personas they wanted to specifically target. To read more on the Inverbis experience, click here.
For SaaS companies, tech insights about a company give an understanding of their tech stack. This enables your sales team to filter prospects that use tools aligning with your solution, enabling superior targeting. It also helps your sales team to identify prospects that are already using a tool which integrates with yours. They can prioritize these prospects over others, and close deals faster.
Narrowing down on the right prospects is tough when you only know the buyer personas of your target accounts. .. There is a need for deeper insights that can help prioritize high quality prospects and enable your sales team to pick one prospect over the others.
Technographics + Buyer Persona - how does the combination add more precision to the prospecting process?
Knowing the buyer persona is knowing “who” are your prospects. Knowing the technographics of a company provides insights on “what” you want to communicate to them. Therefore, combining these insights for sales prospecting is pursuing the right prospects with more clarity, personalization, and putting together promotions, partnerships or incentives that make sense to their technological environment. This data-driven structured approach translates into sharper targeting, better response, and higher probability of converting prospects into customers.
Let us wrap this up with an example of how buyer persona and technographics play together.
Let’s say, your business offers a social media automation solution that can plan, create and track campaigns on different channels with minimum human intervention. Your target personas are social media marketers, marketing managers, and VP or head of marketing in SaaS companies.
With this information, you can customize your message according to their pain points. But, this would be a generic approach, and not personalized enough to align with the respective target profiles. With technographic information of the company, you can gain knowledge about the software solutions and tools they currently use.
Let’s consider another use-case - Your prospect uses a CRM that has a tight integration with your social media tool. The plus point is that your tool not just pushes the account information through the interactions that happen on your social media channel to your CRM system, but also summarizes it using AI. Your sales team can use this information in their CRM to communicate with the accounts, and build a connection with them instantly for prospecting.
Using these insights, you can add the key aspects to your communication, bringing about the benefits of your solution, automation or integration capabilities, etc. that could simplify processes for your prospects and add immense value.
To summarize, in B2B business, knowing the buyer personas you want to target plays a crucial role. But, to make your sales prospecting more powerful and targeted, adding technographic insights with buyer persona is the key. You can not only personalize your communication, but also add immense value through appropriate solutioning , thereby highly improving the chances of closing more deals.