7 Things B2B Sales Managers Need to Target Ideal Prospects

One of the best ways to enable your SDRs is by using target buyer personas. Think of target buyer personas as an awesome cheat sheet that your reps can use to target better leads and create more opportunities. Sure, buyer personas are nothing new. But while marketers have used personas for decades, we think that the persona model can be tweaked to specifically support B2B sales.

While B2C personas might put emphasis on factors like gender and annual income, B2B buyer personas can help reps focus on common factors that ideal prospects share such as job role, company size, industry, common objections and more.

A page from our free target buyer persona template.

To help your sales team target your ideal B2B sales leads, we’ve created a new target buyer persona template that’s tailor made for B2B sales teams. Ready to leverage personas to sell more? Here are seven of the most important things you should identify about your target customers.

Industry

Start by making a list of the industries you sell into the most. Look for trends. Are most of your customers from technology companies? Healthcare? Agencies? If you use an industry field in Salesforce, you can easily run a report on closed/won opportunities by industry.

Company Size/Stage

Companies at different stages are going to usually have different budgets and different needs. Your offering is likely to resonate best with customers at a particular stage. For example, if you sell a lightweight CRM, you may find that your sweet spot is companies with less than 20 employees. Bigger companies are far more likely to use a more established vendor like Salesforce or SAP. Knowing your ideal company size(s) is integral to targeting ideal leads.

You may also discover that your sales team frequently closes deals with companies that have recently completed a funding round. This makes sense since recent funding often correlates with budget. Reps can glean a company’s funding history from sites like Crunchbase or leverage tools like Datanyze to specifically target companies that have recently received funding.

Common Roles

After discovering the types of companies you should be targeting, it’s important to look for common roles at those companies that you sell into. These roles might include initial deal sponsors as well as final decision makers. As an example, if you sell a content management system for marketers, you may find yourself frequently selling to content managers, marketing operations managers and heads of marketing. It’s important to create a target persona for each of these roles.

Job Titles

It’s vital to ensure that reps are aware of all possible job titles that can be mapped to a persona (since job titles can vary greatly from organization). You may find that a content manager, marketing manager, marketing operations manager and content marketing manager all have roughly the same goals, challenges and potential objections.

Goals

After identifying which job titles to target, it’s imperative to understand what goals particular personas are looking to accomplish. Predetermining success criteria is the best way to ensure that reps’ messaging is on point the moment a conversation begins. As an example, if you know that content managers are concerned with improving productivity, you can lead with a value proposition about how much time your offering could potentially save her each day.

Common Questions/Objections

Prospects in a particular role might frequently ask similar questions or raise similar objections. You might find that marketing operations managers frequently ask about implementation timeframe and integration points with other technology. They may commonly be concerned that an implementation will disrupt workflow. Reps need to be prepared with answers to common questions and ways to overcome objections (when appropriate).

Technology

Are you selling software? Whether your product can or must integrate with a particular platform (Salesforce, GMail, iOS etc.), it pays to seek out customers using compatible tech. Everyone wants to buy tools that work well with our existing technology. There are various solutions that can help you identify whether prospects are using a particular technology.

Ready to target your most sales ready leads? Our target buyer persona template will help your sales team target better leads and accelerate sales cycles.