Category: Digital Marketing

What is a B2B Buyer Persona?
Have you ever heard of the term, Buyer Persona? If you are in Marketing, Sales, or Business Development, you will inevitably come across this industry term in one way or another. Since this article is targeted more towards Business-to-Business Sales & Marketing, I will focus on answering the question this way – What is a B2B Buyer Persona?
A Buyer Persona is a breakdown representation of your “Ideal Customer”. On one hand, for Business-to-Consumer or “B2C” businesses, it could be a certain subset of the population. For example, your niche product or service can target “Female Firefighters between 30-35 who live in New York” or “Male High School English Teachers in Ohio”. There are many different ways to target a niche, and this micro-targeting has been compounded by big data analysis and marketing tools like Google & Facebook advertising.
On the other hand for B2B companies, a Buyer Persona can target the makeup of your ideal customer and how the organization works in a buying cycle. This can also be referred to as the ‘org chart’. Within a company, you can have different departments and employees with differing goals or objectives, obstacles or roadblocks, concerns or issues to overcome, and responsibilities to manage.
This Buyer Template should align with whatever your chosen sales methodology is. That is, who is the economic buyer, who has the specific need and/or pain, who is your champion, etc.
Note: You can check out more about different Sales Methodologies in this link if you’re interested in learning more.
The individual contributor of a specific role in your Ideal Customer can then be represented by a “Buyer Persona Template” in your sales playbooks. For most companies, each role should have a specific buyer template created for them.
What Are B2B Buyer Persona Templates Used For
The reason that we create “Buyer Personas” is to identify the different people that engage with the buying process (whether it is marketing, sales, support, etc), come up with a methodical approach on what their role is in the sales cycle, and identify how your company or service can help. Buyer Personas help by identifying certain targeted material or talking points to reduce that person or department’s concerns and identify ways to get them on your team. Next, we’ll go through a sample Buyer Persona template and each section that can be added to each one.

B2B Buyer Persona Template
Below is an example of a Buyer Persona Template:
You will see a few sections on this template. Let’s break them down and how they are relevant.
Name & Summary:
Giving a name & face to the buyer is a great mnemonic strategy to help easily recall who they are. You can use a naming convention like “Ivan the IT Manager” (like the cover photo) or “Celeste the CEO” for all personas you have identified that are involved or influence a buying cycle. Matching the first letter of their name with their title helps.
In addition, a summary section can give a brief overview of how the specific buyer profile interacts with the other personas in the company. Does Ivan report directly to Celeste, or is there a CIO or Director of IT? If that other person is involved in the process, you’ll want to create a Buyer Persona for them as well.
Responsibilities & Concerns:
What does Ivan do at the company, and what does he care about? For example, he could be the owner of the business tools and provide helpdesk support to the organization. If your product is a software service, he can potentially be the owner of your tool. His concerns may be how easy it is to provide end user support and administration.
Goals & Obstacles to Reaching Goals:
What are the goals and obstacles that this person faces in their day to day? If it is a CFO, they are tasked with staying on budget. Their obstacles could be unpredictable costs & trying to predict future events that can financially impact the business (a slow down in manufacturing, oil prices increasing, etc). How can your service provide an ROI for them?
Sales Cycle Role:
At what stage in the sales cycle do they get involved, and what is their role in the Sales Cycle? Are the people in these roles the end users, decision makers, economic or technical buyers, etc. In other words, the goal is to share how you want to message your service to them.
How your company helps:
How does your company help in the day to day or overall strategy to the organization? If you sell software that enables collaboration like Slack, you can highlight a single repository of data that could be lost in emails. For a software engineer, this can be remote communication with the team. For a CEO, this can be a great place to share announcements with the company. IT could like the ease of setup and administration.
Other Information
In this section, you want to include any key features, the sales challenges to overcome, and how to win them over.
1. “Key features” include key areas of your product or service that can help the specific role.
2. “Challenges to the Sale” can be competing priorities, budget concerns, etc.
3. “For how to win them over”, highlight how can your service provide an edge over the competition, create an efficient process, pass audits, etc.
Buyer Persona Example Titles:
Depending on the makeup of your Ideal Customer, and the organization of specific roles, you could create personas for these different roles or people that roll up to these individual departments:
1. CEO –
The CEO is the head of the organization. What sort of things would they care about? Most likely how effective their company is running – profitability, their compensation, their market size, etc.
2. CFO / Finance –
The finance department falls under this team. Can be responsible for Accounts Payable / Accounts Receivable, Collections, Financial Planning & Analysis, etc.
3. CTO / Engineering –
Under the CTO is the Engineering team. There can be multiple different roles, system engineering, product management, engineering lead, etc.
4. CIO / Information Technology –
Roles that roll up to the CIO could be the IT Manager or admins of your tool. Could also be responsible for security.
5. COO / Operations –
Operations typically has responsibility over Supply Chain, business reporting, etc.
6. CMO / Marketing –
Responsibilities can include inbound and outbound marketing, demand generation, digital marketing (pay per click advertising), the website, etc.
7. CSO/CRO / Sales –
The Sales Team can report to a Chief Sales Officer or Cheif Revenue officer.
8. CCO / Customer Success –
With the advent of B2B recurring software models, customer success has become more and more important. They care about customer satisfaction and reducing customer churn.
Hope this article has provided an overview of what a Buyer Persona is and used for! Let me know what you think about this article in the comments below.
May 19, 2020
Campaign Member First Associated Date/Time Field
Have you ever noticed the difference between the Member First Associated field on the Contact’s Campaign History Related list is a Date/Time field, but if you were to reference the Campaign Member’s First Associated Field on a report, it is just a date field? We want to be able to compare in a report which campaign member was first associated (read: Created) if they are on the same dates. This question came up today, and thought I’d quickly share how we solved this issue. (Thanks for the article idea, Michelle!). This post will show an easy way to run as report of the Campaign Member First Associated field as a Date/Time Field.
Before we begin, here is an example of the Campaign Member First Associated field on the Campaign History Related List that is a Date/Time field:
And here is the same Campaign Member First Associated Date field on a report that is only showing as a Date field:
This is very odd! Let’s quickly fix this by creating a new field. We’re going to look up the date/timestamp of the creation of this Campaign Member being associated with the Contact.
Note: This post is a follow up to the Campaign Member First Associated Timestamp article, where we go over that the Campaign Member First Associated Date is actually the “Created Date” of the Campaign Member associated with a Contact. If you’re confused why that is, check the article out.
How To Run a Report of the Campaign Member First Associated Field with Date/Time
In the above article, we know that the Campaign Member First Associated field is actually the ‘Created Date’ of the Campaign Member record associated to the Contact. The problem is that the Created Date is also not easily reference-able on a Campaign Member report for some reason. I don’t know why this is the case. To be able to run a report of the Date/Time field of the Campaign Member First Associated date, we need to create a formula field referencing the created date and displaying that as a date/time field.
Creating a Date/Time Formula Field for Campaign Member First Associated
First, let’s create the field. Select “New Field” from the Campaign Member object in Salesforce’s Setup. Let’s name it “Member First Assoc. Date”. Select the type to be Formula, and Date/Time as the output. The formula is simply the “Created Date” of the Campaign Member. In the Formula Editor, you can either look the field’s API up, or just type “CreatedDate”. Now, let’s check the syntax, and then save the field if there are no errors. On the next step, you can choose to add this to your Campaign Member Layout if you’d like. If you only want to have it available in reporting, there’s nothing you need to do to make it available. Last step is to save the field. You should now be greeted with a new field record that looks like the below screenshot:
Now, when you run a standard Campaign Member report, you will see that the Campaign Member First Assoc. Date is correctly pulling the Date/Time field. You can now run a report to compare different Campaign Members First Associated Date and view them as a Date/Time fields, seeing which Campaign Members were created first, even if created on the same day,:
I don’t know why this is one of the weird quirks of Salesforce, but believe it was a legacy feature. I hope this article helped you if you had the same confusion! As always, leave me a note in the comments below.
August 28, 2018
Account Based Scoring Methodology in Salesforce
Having a robust Account-Based Scoring Methodology in Salesforce can help you separate the wheat from the chaff in your prospect accounts. This will allow your sales team to quickly follow up on leads that might have a low lead score, by prioritizing the account fit in your target market.
Account based scoring is similar to Lead Scoring Methodologies, which are, in essence, just an individual score for a single person (in Salesforce as an email contact/name/etc). Key components of a Lead Score can be whether this ‘person’ is downloading content from your site, visiting key pages and/or many pages in one session, how frequently they visit, and other key factors.
NOTE: I will be sure to elaborate more about lead scoring best practices in another article in the future, so stay tuned!
Likewise, if you are able to discern what your target market Customer company looks like, you will also be able to score these accounts. Some key components are easy to find, and others, not so much. For example, things such as Location, Employee Size, Industry, and Revenue can help you zone in on which companies you are a best fit with. Some of these factors should be relatively easy to identify and locate the accurate information of. For example, if you are located in the SF Bay Area, and you are a service company, you may want to score an Account higher if they are within your service location. Similarly, if you sell analytical software for tracking visitors on ecommerce websites, knowing that your prospect’s industry is Ecommerce (they use Shopify/Bigcartel/Magento, or some other ecommerce software) would mean that they, more often than not, could be within your target demographic.
There is other data that may not be so easy to find out. For example, say you sell a bolt on plugin for users of Microsoft Outlook. Knowing that your prospect has that software as their corporate-mandated email service would most likely include them as a fit within your target market. There are multiple vendors who can provide this data [for a fee] that I have had experience working with, such as Builtwith, Datanyze, Hunter.io, and HGData.
The exercise of identifying key components of your target demographic will be left to another post. What is relevant here is that this data can also be included in an Account Based Scoring Model.
Creating an Account-Based Score in Salesforce
Creating an Account Based Score in Salesforce, in practice, is easy to implement. After you’ve identified the attributes of your target customer, you can then start tracking that data. You’ll first need to have fields that you can capture the relevant data in. Let’s create four sample fields in a hypothetical scenario, where each will have four picklist values as well:
A) An Industry field with picklist values of:
-Software
-Real Estate
-Distribution
-Service
B) An Employee Size field with picklist values of:
0-10
10-99
100-999
999+
C) A Location field with picklist values of:
-United States
-Mexico
-Canada
-Canada
D) A Revenue field with picklist values of:
-$0-$100k
-$100k-$1mm
-$1mm-$10mm
-$10mm +
NOTE: In practice, these fields may not be necessary. For example, you can use the selection of “Billing Country” within Salesforce or another CRM to build out the scoring formula field in the next section.
Account Based Scoring Best Practices
For best practices, and to get the correct score on your prospect Accounts, each of the above picklist values can have an associated score as well. Let’s say we’re going to figure out the Account score on a 0-100 point scale, and we decided to give equal weight to the four scores to each of the fields that are attributes of your scoring model. We would then have to decide the individual score of each picklist value in each field above. We can give each picklist value a score of “0-5”, because we’ll be using the Salesforce CASE function in a formula on a each field as a score.
To use the CASE Function to figure out the score of each picklist value, we’ll create four new fields: Industry Score, Employee Score, Location Score, & Revenue Score:
For the each of the attribute fields, we’ll create the associated scoring field in the same process. As an example, we’ll just create the Revenue Score field here. Create a new field on the Account Object, and set field type as a Formula. Have the field return a number. In our hypothetical company, let’s say that we have found success selling to companies in the $1 million to $10 million dollar range. For small companies, with found only some success to selling to them if they have revenue with less than $1 million, but not as much as the sweet spot. Let’s also say that we don’t sell to enterprise or small seed stage startups due to long sales cycles and churn rate, respectively. We’ll say the our sweet spot revenue is a ‘5’, and the secondary revenue figure is a ‘3’, while the rest would be 0 (or null). To create the Formula field, we’ll set it up like this:
CASE(Revenue__c,
“$1mm-$10mm”, 5,
“$100k-$1mm”, 3,
0)
What this formula does is look at the Revenue field (Revenue__c), through the case object, if it has the picklist value of “$1mm-$10mm”, it will return 5. If Revenue has a picklist value of “$100k-$1mm”, the Revenue Score will return 3. Now let’s save the formula. We don’t have to add this to any page layout. Do this for each of the other three scoring fields.
To bring this Account Score all together, we’ll create another Formula Field that sums up the four Account Scoring fields. Let’s called this field Account Score. Since we said our Account Score will be based on a 100 point scale, and each account score is given equal weight, we can create the account score formula as follows:
(Industry_Score__c + Employee_Score__c + Location_Score__c + Revenue_Score__c) * 5
What the above formula will do is sum the values from the CASE formulas in each of the “Score” Field. Again, these CASE formulas will return a number based off the picklist selections of the Account Based Scoring model we developed. Since each picklist value will be scored as a maximum value of 5, if we summed all four score fields at the highest score, they would equal (5 + 5 + 5 + 5) * 5, simplified to 20 * 5, or return the score of 100 in the Account Score formula field above. Any picklist value of the attribute fields with a score below 5 will fall along the spectrum of 0-100 points.
Once these fields are created for the account records, you can then add them to your Prospect and/or Customer page layout.
Congrats, you’ve successfully created an Account Based Scoring Methodology in Salesforce!
Let me know what factors you might have to identify your target customers in the comments below.
February 17, 2018