NEEDS A FORM TO GET THE BPW
Understand who your prospects and customers really are and the message or communication each should receive using Buyer Personas.
The Best Buyer Persona Tool for Distributors
My years of working with distributors have allowed me to get to know your customers well, and I’ve used that knowledge to create The Buyer Persona Worksheet for Distributors™ (BPW). It shows distributors how to dig into and uncover the crux of customers’ challenges — information you can then use to identify how best to help customers with their challenges without appearing too salesy.
Completed BPWs help eliminate the blurred lines between customer categories — those fuzzy areas that lead to overgeneralizations in your sales and marketing materials. Your salespeople already know the subtleties between customer categories, but it’s likely that the rest of your company, including your marketing team, does not.
How Many Customer Segments Do You Have?
Let’s say you sell to small residential builders and small commercial builders as well as to large residential builders and large commercial builders. This means we’re talking about four different categories—small residential, large residential, small commercial, and large commercial.
Your salespeople know the conversations they should have with each of these customers, and in all likelihood, each conversation will be both similar and different. This is because each category has similar needs, and each has different needs.
Why Buyer Persona Worksheets are Necessary
Because your salesperson knows those similarities and differences and a marketing team usually does not, use the buyer persona creation exercise to capture and document those similarities and differences. Then, your marketing team can incorporate that information into your sales and marketing messages to better target the customers and prospects who see these messages.
Why Buyer Persona Worksheets are Invaluable
Your completed BPWs will become the guiding force behind every piece of content you create. They’re instrumental in dictating your content’s topics and formats as well as how you should promote your materials, where you’ll promote them, which target audience you’ll promote to, and, most importantly, when to promote each piece of content.
Another benefit you’ll gain from the buyer persona creation process is that it will allow your salespeople to share their knowledge about your customers with your marketing team and the rest of your company. Executives often assume their employees know their customers well, but, based on my experience, this is not always the case.
Using BPWs, you’ll capture the information your salespeople know so your marketing team can create your sales and marketing collateral with more powerful messaging. The information your salespeople share through the BPW process will also help shape how the rest of your company serves your customers.
Demonstrating Value to Your Customers
Your Buyer Persona Worksheets will help you stay focused on bringing actual value to your customers. Value, of course, can take more than one form. Value could be a resource you share, a solution you sell, a discount on a product you know the customer wants, or any other offer in the form of assistance.
For customers to recognize value, it has to be presented in a way that speaks directly to them and is explicitly for their benefit.
It’s best not to assume a customer will recognize why a product or solution you offer is valuable to them. What’s clear to you is seldom as clear in your marketing, and you don’t want to risk losing the impact of your message.
Rather, your messaging should make it abundantly clear why what you’re offering is explicitly for the reader of the message.
Clear Statements are the Most Effective:
“We’re here to help you by offering you X;”
“This is why X is of value to you”; or
“By offering you X, we’re helping you in a way our competitors can’t. Here’s how.”
By including the ‘here’s how’ portion of the message, it will be much clearer to your customers and prospects that you understand them and are there to help them.
Now it’s your turn! Download a free copy of our super-powered, for distributors only, Buyer Persona Worksheet, and start segmenting your audience right away!
If you’d like additional information or need to ask a question, please get in touch with me at Susan@SusanMerlo.com. I’m here to help in any way I can.