Three Buyer Personas Your GTM Messaging Strategy Should Address

Your opportunities, especially at the enterprise level, are rarely ever sold to a single decision-maker. Top-performing organizations have go-to-market teams that successfully  navigate buying committees of multiple stakeholders, as well as the parties who influence them, to sell deals at a high value.

The best revenue teams have the cross-functional credibility and willingness to have multi-faceted sales conversations that drive a collective “YES” from all stakeholders. They build widespread agreement on positive business outcomes, success metrics, and the requirements needed to get there. This agreement helps to drive the urgency of solving the customer’s business challenges. The key to driving this kind of unanimous support for your solution in all purchase, subscription, or renewal processes is to coach your revenue team to identify, early and accurately, certain archetypes in the sales process. We call this charting the buyer landscape.

No matter what, your revenue team still has to address three core criteria of every buying decision: revenue, cost, and risk. However, customizing messaging based on the priorities, objections, and desired outcomes of key deal influencers will help them drive greater urgency and commitment. Let’s explore three buyer personas that your revenue team should be prepared to sell to and how you can best enable them for these conversations.

The Economic Buyer

The primary question to answer when selling to the Economic Buyer is: Why should we do this now?

The Economic Buyer is the person (or people) who has the power to allocate budget to your deal. Many incorrectly assume that the CFO is automatically the EB. In reality, the economic buyer is the person with the discretion to manipulate budgets to the purchase of your solution. This may be the head of a department or another C-level leader depending on the problem you solve; this is why qualification to uncover the power dynamics of the buyer organization is so crucial to identifying the Economic Buyer.

When your team has not successfully influenced the Economic Buyer, objections may sound like:

• • It’s too expensive/We don’t have the budget for this right now
  • Maybe next quarter/year
  • We decided to solve the business problem internally

The key to driving urgency with the economic buyer is to demonstrate clear, measurable business value of your solution tied to the most pressing business issue. Equip your team to gain emphatic buy-in from the Economic Buyer by enabling these critical skills:

• • Discovery conversations that uncover urgent business problems and desired outcomes
  • Use of a messaging framework for communicating the value and differentiation of your solution in terms of the desired outcomes
  • Skillful use of proof points and metrics to demonstrate tangible value on a clear timeline

Dig deeper on strategies for enabling the economic buyer conversation across your entire revenue team.

The Technical Buyer

The primary question to answer when selling to the Technical Buyer is: Why should we do this with you?

Although the Economic Buyer has financial authority over the deal, they are unlikely to move forward if the Technical Buyer's requirements are not satisfied. The Technical Buyer may be an IT leader if you sell a complex technical solution, or they may be any subject matter expert on the problem your solution solves.

When your team has not successfully influenced the Technical Buyer, objections may sound like:

• • You don’t have a feature that we want
  • We don’t see the value of your extra features and chose a cheaper competitor

The key to gaining support from the Technical Buyer is to influence the solution requirements from the start of the deal. Ensure that your differentiators are front and center and core to the value you provide. If you know that your solution has a CRM integration that the competitor doesn’t, prepare your team with case studies that emphasize the impact that integration has on adoption and results.

We often discourage the “features and functions” approach to selling, but the Technical Buyer is tuned in to features and functions. However, it’s important to ensure your team takes a value approach to the technical sales conversation. Start by enabling these skills with your customer-facing teams:

• • Negotiation of your value and differentiation that begins early in the sales process to influence solution requirements of the TB
  • The ability to tie proof points and results to specific features that align with your differentiation
  • Alignment across all customer-facing roles - i.e. Marketing, Sales Development, Sales Engineers, Account Executives, and Customer Success - on the key value drivers of your solution to ensure consistency across the buyer’s journey

Read more on the impact of achieving alignment between customer-facing functions.

The Implementation Owner

The primary question to answer when selling to the Implementation Owner is: How can we ensure successful outcomes?

The Economic Buyer wants to see a return on their investment, and they know that successful implementation is key to driving results. They’ll look for the approval of the Implementation Owner before signing off on a deal. Therefore, it’s critical that your team is aligned on a clearly outlined strategy for gaining buy-in from the Implementation Owner.

When your team has not successfully influenced the Implementation Owner, objections may sound like:

• • We’re concerned about the timeline to see results
  • We don’t think people would utilize it/ it would disrupt current processes
  • We’ve tried something like this before and didn’t see impact

The key to gaining support from the Implementation Owner is to align your implementation plan to their current processes. Too often, sales teams view the deal signing as their end goal and neglect to provide a detailed plan for post-sale implementation. This is where a cross-functional approach to the sales conversation becomes such a game-changer. Enable and encourage these key activities with your revenue team to gain buy-in from Implementation Owners:

• • Deep discovery into the buyer’s current processes and tools to highlight where your solution can improve and draft in rather than outright replace current behaviors
  • Collaboration with Customer Success and/or Account Management teams to define a post-sale implementation plan with an outcome focus and clear metrics for success
  • Visibility of internal post-sale account owners in the sales process to improve hand-offs and generate trust with the buyer’s Implementation Owner

Drive More Urgency with Buyers

The ability to navigate multi-influencer buying committees is critical to driving urgency and closing deals on the timeline needed to meet your revenue goals. Today’s elite leaders enable their cross-functional go-to-market teams to create and capture value with decision-makers at every stage of the sales process. We’re sharing strategies to implement these results with your team in our upcoming webinar discussion with Brian Walsh, veteran sales leader and Force Management facilitator. Sign up to join us.