How to Train New B2B Sales Reps with Target Buyer Personas

Revenue Blog > How to Train New B2B Sales Reps with Target Buyer Personas

3 min readDecember 1, 2020

For decades, marketers have been successfully using buyer personas to laser-target potential customers. Now, B2B sales leaders are starting to become wise to the power of personas. To help your team get started using personas, we’re sharing PowerPoint deck with target buyer persona templates. Feel free to use it to help your sales development reps (SDRs) do a much better job of targeting ideal leads and transforming them into customers.

Training reps to tailor-fit their messaging to suit specific buyer personas can provide your team with a powerful advantage. Let’s imagine that you sell a marketing automation solution. You may find yourself routinely selling to marketing managers, CMOs and operations/IT. The same product can (and should) be sold differently to different prospects.

For example, a marketing manager might care a lot more about automating routine tasks, while a CMO might be more driven by the ability to create more accurate marketing ROI reports. A CIO might be far more concerned with data security and ease of implementation. Buyer personas are a great way to coach your reps to deliver more targeted messages.

Here are a few tips that you can use to train train new reps to use buyer personas to drive more meetings, opportunities and revenue.

Use Cheat Sheets

It’s really important, especially at first, to ensure that new reps have access to a cheat sheet while targeting leads and making sales calls. You can use our new persona templates to provide reps with a wealth of information about various roles. Some of the most salient information that B2B reps need to be aware of when taking a persona-based approach is a prospect’s:

Role description
Company details (including funding history, size and industry)
Tools and applications
Common success metrics
Common objections
Frequently asked questions

Using our templates will empower new reps to do a better job of providing prospects with solutions.

Have New SDRs Start with A Single Persona

Taking on a new sales development role can be overwhelming. But using personas can help SDRs ramp much quicker. Start by introducing new reps to only one persona. This can help them learn how to target and sell to one type of buyer before moving on to another persona. This is extremely important, since each persona type demands differentiated messaging that speaks specifically to their desires.

Map Job Titles to a Persona

There isn’t a one-to-one correlation between buyer personas and job titles. In fact, there may be a wealth of job titles that can easily fit within a single persona. That’s why it’s so important to ensure that new SDRs know which job titles fit which target persona. As an example, depending on the solution, a marketing manager persona could be applied to a wide variety of job titles including: