Today's executives, particularly in sales and marketing, are facing increasing pressure to come up with game plans to engage the buyer. The challenge post-Great Recession is how to engage with buyers in meaningful ways to drive demand and top line revenue growth. Drawing up game plans, especially in the B2B space, is made more difficult by the evolving new channels of buyer engagements.
Buyer Persona Development Process = Game Plan
Sales and Marketing executives are continuously faced with having to come up with a new game plan or altering a game plan that constitute a series of strategies. The investigative customer insight and buyer persona development process can provide the means to help executives answer three major components of an overall game plan.
Where To Play
Figuring out where to play can be a perplexing proposition. It can have geographic implications. It can come to mean a sub segment of an overall market. Or it can mean a specific vertical market. The investigative process of gathering customer and buyer insights can yield a compass on where to play. Take the case of FedEx right now. They recently reported their first year-over-year profit increase in five quarters. In part due to insights that led them to focus on growth strategies for their commercial end of the business. Realizing that consumers would retract in spending, FedEx began to look at their commercial business as well as beef up their sales efforts in the manufacturing and distribution sub segments. A global business, FedEx also went into gear to think globally. FedEx spotted opportunities in the Asia market and put in place growth strategies to grow their commercial business presence in Asia. By figuring out where to play, FedEx is weathering the storm and is proving once again to be a bellwether of recovery.
How To Play
Just getting to the playing field oftentimes is not sufficient in of itself. Once there, sales and marketing executives have the challenge of determining how to play. The investigative process of identifying target buyer personas can illuminate how an organization can best play in the market. Let's take the case of the Que proReader from Plastic Logic. This past Christmas shopping season saw a push for eReaders on a mass scale for the first time. The Kindle faced new competition from the Barnes & Nobles Nook and the Sony Reader. Plastic
Logic decided that where to play and how to play was to design and market their eReader for business. Making a much larger eReader and optimizing it to fit the business world of reading PDF, Word, and Excel documents for business meetings and transactions. In addition, Plastic Logic optimized the Que for magazines and newspapers- knowing that business customers would find this appealing.
How To Win
The dividends paid back from going deep in the investigative process can yield insight into how to win in a specific market. By attaining the deep understanding of how and why people and businesses buy, sales and marketing executives can put into place strategies that provide an edge over competitors. Much like a football team that has a balanced game plan between running and passing plays. After studying reels and reels of film on their opponent that showed a weakness in pass defense over the middle of the field, coaches then map a game plan to call more passing plays and routes over the middle of the field. Determining how to win has strategy relevance to pricing, selling structure, content marketing, and etc. Let's take the case of HP and IBM as they battle it out in the midmarket space. Each is investing significant dollars in their marketing and demand generation programs to attract medium sized businesses. In addition, both are recognizing that how to win is through their channel partners. So each organization is making considerable investment in leading with partner-led solutions backed up by their own sales and marketing efforts.
Sales and Marketing executives who make the investment in gathering customer and buyer insight through a buyer persona development process - with rigor and precision - can develop an overall game plan that gives them the edge in knowing where to play, how to play, and how to win. Three components of a game plan that increase the odds of winning in today's highly competitive marketplaces.
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