Is Buyer Persona Research Worth the Investment?
Many companies are sensitive to the cost of the in-depth voice of customer research needed for effective buyer personas. But the results can pay dividends almost immediately, especially if we brief your sales team and provide sales messaging as part of the package.
Sales teams can immediately put the insights to work in their next sales calls by asking better discovery questions and using your customers’ own language to explain your value proposition. We often see shifts in sales results in the first week after a sales briefing meeting.
For example, we recently did buyer personas for a fintech startup that sells risk management services to commercial real estate asset managers.
In our research, we learned that these asset managers were finding our client’s service highly valuable. But the way they articulated the value was different than our client’s messaging. We also uncovered several areas for cross-selling and up-selling in existing customers. Our client had been selling their service as one-off orders, but the research suggested an appetite for ongoing subscriptions, which could dramatically increase the fintech’s recurring revenue.
We used the voice of the customer to create new sales messaging and better articulate the value proposition. Then we briefed the CEO and sales team on our research findings.
A few days after the briefing, the CEO met with an existing client. Using the new messaging and insights from the research, she pitched an annual subscription. The client agreed. This first sales call nearly tripled the annual revenue from that client. It also delivered an immediate 200% ROI on the cost of the buyer persona research.
The CEO told us, “The buyer persona interviews gave me ammunition for this client renewal meeting. I wouldn’t have been so aggressive without the persona research.”
The firm is now in the process of converting all their clients to subscriptions. The CEO says, “Because of the persona interviews, we realized how much our clients need our product. So instead of selling one-off reports, we converted everything to subscription pricing this year. This creates an annuity stream of recurring revenues, which we really didn’t have before.”
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Read more about creating buyer personas:
Brand Messaging Without Personas Wastes Time with Ardath Albee, Episode 014