Buyer Persona and Sales Call Plan: there's a surprising connection.
We'll round out our look at Buyer Personas with a recent realization expert Tony Zambito had on the topic. He was helping the top sales boss for an Inc. 500 firm. They were discussing Tony's article on the difference between Buyer Personas and Buyer Profiles, which we previously reviewed here. The VP Sales exclaimed: "[The Buyer Persona] looked exactly like our sales call plan!"
Buyer Persona and Sales Call Plan - The Connection
If your goal is to become your client's trusted advisor, you really do have to get inside their head. Their preferences, beliefs, emotional values, hidden agends and more are all things you need to unearth and bring to the light. Zambito shares how qualitative research can be extremely valuable in improving sales results, because it brings the additional dimension of those concepts which are hard to measure with traditional data gathering.
Now here's where Tony turns the VP Sales' idea about buyer persona and sales call plan around in his article. He first lists many of the tools salespeople are using today to become trusted advisors or partners in their customers' eyes:
- Customer success criteria
- Pain points
- Buying process
- Decision/Buying criteria
- Needs assessment
- Probing/Intelligent questioning.
Zambito's Warning About Your Buyer Persona and Sales Call Plan
Zambito then declares these aren't enough. If you know Dan Ariely of Predictibly Irrational fame, you'll recall Dan explaining we don't know our preferences that well--but that's another article. And so the things buyers don't say:
- goals
- emotional values
- contextual situations
- scenarios
- attitudes
- perceptions
- beliefs
- story lines
--things Tony says can be uncovered by third party qualitative research--are the things that will take salespeople and their results beyond the tools listed above. Tools which are fast becoming commoditized thanks to easier access.
And so Zambito's final warning to us is NOT to let our buyer persona look like our sales call plan. It's fine the other way around. But if we concentrate on traditional sales intelligence gathering only for both our buyer persona and sales call plan, we'll miss all those qualitative factors. Those factors are what make up the buyer persona...and could very well be our special advantage on sales' cutting edge.
>> Jason Kanigan is a sales force developer. Was this review helpful to you? Please Like, Share or Comment to let others know--and sign up to receive new posts with the big red Follow button or the form in the sidebar. Thanks! <<
