Objective:
You will create a buyer persona for the company they have selected in this class, as well as create a
value proposition for that persona. You will find out as much as they can about the company and its
offerings and create that persona and value proposition, using the workshop materials provided here.
I will provide you with more details when I assign it
Here is the Instructions and also I will upload another file were you should put
the project
Buyer Personas
Creating a Buyer Persona is a necessary exercise to understand the basic, underlying needs of
a target market. Review the following and use the following template to create a Buyer Persona
for the company you have chosen. You can print out the template as many times as you like for
practice, but use fill out your final template using Microsoft Word.
What is a Buyer Persona?
A Buyer Persona is a written characterization of the preferences, behaviors, and attitudes of
typical buyer of your company’s offerings. Think of a Buyer Persona as a profile of a type of
buyer.
A Buyer Persona is not a:
• Real person – it is a composite of real people who have been researched but are represented
as a fictitious individual.
• Complete picture of your total potential audience. It represents an audience that shares
important characteristics that relate to a sale.
• Guarantee of sales success by itself.
• Sole driver of an aligned, robust Marketing and Sales program
A Buyer Persona can be comprised of an aggregate of facts about a type of buyer or actual
observed events by the selling team over time. It generally reflects buyer types most commonly
encountered: Economic, Key Influencers, and End Users. They can be used as a baseline for
defining who your audiences are. Buyer personas encapsulate your business' knowledge and
understanding about the types of people marketing and sales speak to in the sales process.
The main reasons why we find the creation and use of buyer personas particularly valuable:
• Buyer Personas take the focus off of you, your product, and your business and place it
properly on them. After all, they like it that way.
• Buyer Personas gives you your prospect’s frame of mind and insight to their company, its
issues, and their personal “hot buttons.” They foster empathy in you for them.
• Buyer personas help you identify content that will resonate with your prospect. Instead of using
the same tools hoping they’ll work someday, you can be more “surgical.”
• In the age of social media, anyone in your organization could engage with prospects, so you
want everyone to be interacting with them based on the same information.
• Personas help new employees “get up to speed” on what your organization does.
In the B2B world, a Buyer Persona has a corresponding organizational profile, which should be
based on the type of businesses that have led to the highest sales success in the past. Your
company should determine the minimum number of attributes that distinguish these businesses
from others (size, location, vertical, product/service consumption rates, etc.) Remember, Buyer
Personas can offer insight into the unarticulated and the not-so-obvious, so you don’t want to
neglect too many details.
Generally, if you sell multiple products or services with different audiences, you’ll need personas
for each of these. Specific personas are needed for each of these groups because you want to
engage with them differently. Different personas enter the buying process at different times, and
they care about different things.
But for this Project, you just need to create one.
Steps to creating a Buyer Persona
1. Identify the buyer types that are the key to decision makers in your target market.
2. Identify the organization types that constitute your target market.
3. Identify defining profile attributes (job title, functional role, preferred contact method, etc.)
4. Put in more specific details to make your persona human, such as lifestyle preferences,
goals, and anything else that you think is important to them.
Here’s more of the type of information that you need to distill into the Buyer Persona:
How do they like to access information?
• Do they attend events? In-person or online?
• How do they consume content - Do they subscribe to audio, visual, etc.?
• Do they access content online or via a mobile device?
• Do they get most of their information during work hours or at home?
• Do they get their information through word-of-mouth from their community?
• Does advertising play a role in raising their awareness or influencing them?
What topics interest them?
• What content are they consuming?
• Why are they consuming that content?
• What format is their preferred content in?
• Is the content they need to make a buying decision different from their primary interests?
How much information do they want to receive?
• How often are they exposed to new content/information?
• How often do they log on to social networks? Which ones?
• Do they attend events frequently?
• How much content do they consume at different stages of their buying process? Do they need
more at the early, mid or later stages of buying?
Who or what influences them?
• Where do they like to get content?
• Who do they get their content from? Industry analysts, vendors, thought leaders, peers?
• How does the format of content they consume change throughout the buying process?
• Are there internal/external influences in the kind of content they choose to consume? (Does an
internal event trigger certain content consumption? Does the community itself drive the content
needs/expectations of individuals?)
How do they like to be dealt with?
• A systematic prospect likes the logical approach – Do they need organization and detail? Do
they want to know how your solution does what it does?
• A rash prospect takes the active approach – Do they care about the here and now? Do they
want you to address their immediate needs?
• A relational prospect likes the relationship approach – Do they value the quality of the
relationship? Do they want to be part of a community of your users?
• An achieving prospect takes the goal-oriented approach – Are the “explorers” who need to
seek and understand? Do they want to feel like they are advancing rather than just solving a
problem?
If the Buyer Persona does not generate regard, identification or judgment from your intuition,
in all likelihood it is too generic and you need to get a more specific regarding the attributes.
Now let’s use the examples and templates on the next page to create a Buyer Persona for your
selected company. Keep in mind that as you think about this, you are probably using anecdotal
information and memory. Don’t focus just on one prospect of customer your company may have
dealt with in the past, but pick a few and find common attributes. Also remember that in the
future it will behoove you to conduct research on the customers to truly understand their pain
points, motivators, and validators.
One last thing – if there are cultural differences between you and a significant number of prospects,
make the effort to understand that culture better. It’s one thing to make assumptions about a person
who seems very much like yourself, but it is very hard to make safe assumptions about someone from
another culture without falling into a trap of stereotyping based on your own cultural biases.
Example Buyer Persona:
B. Value Propositions
Creating a Value Proposition is also a necessary exercise to understand the basic, underlying
needs of a target market. Review the following and use the following template to create a Value
Proposition for the Buyer Persona you have created. You can print out the template as many
times as you like for practice, but use fill out your final template using Microsoft Word.
Buyer Personas are a necessary exercise understand the basic, underlying needs of a target
mar
What is a Value Proposition?
A Value Proposition is a carefully crafted, clear, and simple statement that reflects the essence
of the value a business will provide to a certain target market.
It is the combination of end-result benefits and price that provides superior value to the target
client and is economically profitable.
What is not a Value Proposition:
• Corporate positioning
• An “elevator pitch”
• Discounting
• Technology
• A feature set
• A “Me Too” explanation
A great Value Proposition answers
• WHO is the target customer?
• WHAT are the critical customer needs?
• HOW do we uniquely fulfill these needs?
• WHY will customers buy from you?
Example Value Proposition