Guide to Crafting Buyer Persona Battlecards for Sales Excellence
Creating Buyer Personas is a common and necessary practice in go-to-market teams. It’s vital for everyone from the marketer to the seller to the product developer (and all in between) to know WHO you’re selling to, and why.
However, no matter the quality of research put behind them, more often the not, Buyer Persona aren’t leveraged as a valuable sales asset, and this is affecting sellers ability to influence buyers successfully.
“Only 27% of sales reps are considered effective at creating a value message that resonates with buyers across multiple personas.”
- Corporate Visions, 2019 Survey
Why aren’t sellers able to benefit from most Persona guides given to them? Well the answer is simple - they aren’t designed for sales effectiveness.
In this article, you’ll learn what to include (and not include) in your Buyer Persona Battlecards to make them an effective sales enablement resource.
DO THIS:
✔ Group Personas for easy field use: When creating Personas, remember that “less is more”. Avoid the temptation to create a separate profile for every possible job title, and instead think about how you can group similar people together as a common “archetype” for messaging simplicity. Some of the most common archetype structures are by authority influence (Decision Maker, Manager, Practitioner) and functional purpose (Revenue Operations). This helps inform sales messaging without overwhelming the sellers with too much information.
For instance, if you are selling into Marketing departments a software that is designed to help Demand Generation teams understand success of their lead campaigns, you might have Personas that span multiple teams and roles. Instead of having a ton of disparate profiles, think about grouping them when their motivations to buy overlap. Here’s an example of what this might look like:
✔ Make it real with Job Titles: While you don’t want to create a Persona profile for every possible job title, you DO want to make sure sellers know which real-world titles correlate to your Personas. This means providing an exhaustive, yet not overwhelming, list of the most common job titles that prospective customers would have within each battlecard. This will help sales reps identify and connect with the right decision makers and influencers when they are prospecting and getting buyer committee consensus. As well as understand how titles change and adjust across different business models, sizes, and potentially industries.
✔ Have impact with persona-specific messaging: Include easy talking points for common relevant customer challenges, and align them with product-value solutions. Frame these solutions as value messaging talk tracks rather than feature/function bullet points. This will help sales reps understand how to address each persona’s unique challenges and position the product as a true solution.
✔ Prove a point with Customer Stories: Include real customer examples of similar personas experiencing success with your product. This can be done through short excerpts from case studies OR by inputing quotes from customers of similar Persona Profile type. This will help sales reps understand, and effectively communicate how, the product has solved similar challenges for others as proof of value.
✔ Validate influence with Persona Buying Roles: Align personas with common purchasing roles such as: Evaluator, Champion, Influencer, Decision Maker, etc, so as to guide sellers on how to best leverage different personas in the selling process. A Persona Profile can be multiple of these potential roles based on certain scenarios. The objective here is to be as prescriptive as possible based on your companies data and past experiences.
✔ Bring impact with Persona Goals: Summarize each Personas’ key KPIs and success metrics they care most about and why they struggle to achieve them today. This will help sales reps understand the persona’s priorities and how to position the product as a valuable solution that resonates.
✔ Simplify Content Selling: Provide links to any Persona-specific marketing content that the Persona might find interesting and helpful for easy sales content sharing. This could include one-sheets, webinars, case studies, and other more.
DON’T DO THIS:
✘ Overwhelm with Multi-page cards: Keep each Persona Battlecard to a maximum of one-page (front and back printed). This makes them ready to use in real-time and creates visual clarity for easy reading. That means everything mentioned in the “DO THIS” list (plus what isn’t listed there that you decide ti include), must fit on ONE sheet. Choose wisely.
✘ Distract with irrelevant profiles: Be picky with the Battlecards you create for sellers. They should only focus their energies on the people that are most commonly involved in the selling cycle. As an example, don’t create battlecards for low-authority or influential personas that aren’t included in buyer committees (even if they are final end-users or outside contract influencers). This avoids information fatigue and rep confusion.
✘ Overload “background information”: In classic Marketing generated battlecards its common to include information such as average age, educational background, common hobbies, and more. This is helpful for doing initial trainings on Personas as it helps create context. However, for battlecards - whose sole purpose is to be a field tool - it takes up takes up valuable page real estate and honestly is useless in practice.
✘ Reinforce poor communication: Avoid using “marketing speak” and make the value statements in the battlecards sound natural for a real-world sales conversation. This will help sales reps sound more authentic and trustworthy when communicating with customers. Marketing value messaging is amazingly helpful in assets like a website or some Marketing content, but for most Sales use, it’s best to communicate simply.
—
By following these tips, you can create effective buyer persona battlecards that your sales reps will find useful and practical in the field. Remember to keep it simple, relevant, and value-driven.
Need help creating your Buyer Personas or turning your existing research into valuable sales assets? Contact GTM Enabler for a free consultant!
GTM Enabler provides emerging B2B software companies with highly customized Revenue Enablement services, covering: strategy, content, training, and more. With GTM Enabler's expertise, clients experience increased win rates, shorter sales cycles, and better go-to-market operations. Choose GTM Enabler as your trusted partner for accelerated business growth.