No more silos
A MarketOne white paper written for web
Right Person: Who do I target within each account?
Key levers:
- Ideal buyer personas
- Buying groups
- Contact database
Once your target accounts are selected, you can drill down to find the right contacts by creating personas, building buyer groups and identifying decision makers, project owners and influencers.
Look at your existing customers and past sales efforts, won or lost, to understand who is involved in making the important buying decisions. Find visible titles (job titles) and embedded (role and responsibility).
Buyer personas can help with this and are a good way for marketing to hone the content and messaging and for sales and services to understand the kind of questions they need to field and to allocate resources and time effectively. Curate several semi-fictional buyer personas based, not on job titles, but on the goals, challenges and motivators that your offering can fix.
Bear in mind that 94% of B2B businesses sell to groups of three or more individuals [Forrester], so any contact development should include personas that reflect typical buying groups, including both decision makers and decision influencers. Consider that different members of the group may be involved at different stages of the purchase journey. Finally, build and expand your contact database.
- 1. Crawl
- All you need to start is a list of contacts with suitable job titles within your target accounts. Tools include Google and widely available business data such as Dun & Bradstreet reports.
- 2. Walk
- Add in personas and embedded titles. Use persona information to define / influence your messaging. Use tools such as D&B, ZoomInfo, Lusha and LinkedIn to find and research who to contact.
- 3. Run
- Broaden further to cover whole buying groups. Look beyond your final customer to all the people involved in agreeing the sale. Use all the tools in ‘Walk’ but call to verify that contacts are correct.