The 6 Buyer Personas and how to train your team to sell to them

The 6 Buyer Personas and how to train your team to sell to them
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional, generalized representation of your ideal and potential customers, based on market research and data. Personas help us all – in marketing, sales, product, and services. Thay are most useful for salespeople to
  • Target the right audience
  • Deliver a tailored message to customers
  • Address and meet specific needs of customers
  • And for sales followup
A persona uncovers customers’ goals, motivations, behaviors, values and pain points. It is extremely important that your sales team deeply understands each buyer persona that is relevant to your business and knows how to sell to them. Now that we have established how important buyer personas are for your business, here are a few million dollar questions: Do you know who your business’s buyer personas are? How much exactly do you know about them? How do you plan on training your team to sell to each of the persona types? From our experience of working with lots of salespeople, we have listed down six distinct buyer personas that sales reps usually experience. You will be able to identify these personas by their name and help your team plan their sales actions so that they win a sale from them. Check them out below:

1. Decisive Dona

Decisive Dona is directive. She solves problems in a decisive, active and assertive manner. She’s proactive, results driven and wants to win.

How to prepare your team: Train your team to be decisive as well while dealing with this prospect. They should be able to demonstrate willingness to take some risks on their end that can help the prospect succeed. They don’t have to worry too much about conflict that may arise with Dona – it doesn’t bother her, and she may even thrive on it.

2. Collaborative claire

Collaborative claire is the yin to Decisive Dona’s yang. Collaborative claire likes to solve problems with other people. She’s deliberative, tactful, diplomatic, and adaptable. In a world where people can be pretty blunt, it’s likely you’ll find her to be respectful of you and everyone else.

How to prepare your team: While selling to claire, it’s important to keep in mind how important consensus building will be to her. Your team has to work with her closely to understand and include all of the various buying influences. Ask them to facilitate discussions to draw out claire’s and everyone else’s thoughts, needs, and questions. It might take a while to close the deal. So, train your reps to be patient with this client. If they need to push back, ask them to do it tactfully. She will be ready to buy when everybody in her team is onboard with her.

3. Relationship Rhea

Relationship Rhea is interactive. Social interaction and engagement are important to her. She’s enthusiastic, a creative problem solver, a team player, and (of course) a relationship-builder. She likes the big picture, and she’s not shy about taking up a lot of air time in discussions. A question or two will really get her going.

How to prepare your team: If your team is selling to Rhea, they might want to keep technical details to a minimum. Train your staff to pay attention to her ideas, and share her enthusiasm while conversing with her. Rhea probably weaves fairly seamlessly between talking about business and personal matters. One might find the talk about her recent vacation or her son’s basketball team going on for a bit. When discussing ideas, your reps should keep in mind not to overdo being the “voice of reason” or reality. Because what they might see as realism, she’ll see as a downer.

4. Skeptical Stanley

Skeptical Stanley is the yin to Relationship Rhea’s yang. Stanley is introspective. He’s a reserved critical thinker. Skeptical Stanley won’t embellish and doesn’t want you to do so either. It takes a while for Stanley to develop trust with people, which can be great for a salesperson if she puts in the time and effort.

How to prepare your team: Skeptical Stanley might not be super comfortable on the phone, and prefers email to communicate. Advise your team to not be unnerved by lack of gestures or “feedback”. He tends not to be demonstrative one way or the other. With a client like this, sales reps should not try to be too personal or friendly too fast. And know that Stanley might not share much at meetings, but they still need to make sure his needs are met. Advise them to ask Stanley if they have answered all his questions at the end of every meeting. Train your team with all the information necessary, so that they can immediately and accurately answer all the questions of this client. This will help in gaining the trust and confidence of the client and ultimately lead him to close the deal.

5. Analytical Albert

Past success is an indicator of future success. This doesn’t mean Albert won’t lead the pack and do something new, it just takes a lot of processing for him to take a leap of faith. Albert’s cautious. He follows rules, procedures, and established standards. He’s a comprehensive problem solver because he examines from all the different angles.

How your team can prepare: If your team is selling to Analytical Albert, train them to go prepared with all the data that will help him make a decision. Appropriate details will be important. At some point, because he can sometimes leave the data gate open longer than it needs to be, your sales reps might need to push back. But they should also take special care not to criticize as he might take that more personally than most. Advise your employees to not push him too hard before he completes his analysis.

6. Innovative Izzy

Innovator Izzy is the yin to Analytical Albert’s yang. When it comes to rules, procedures, and how things were done before, Izzy couldn’t care less. While Albert might say, “Past success is an indicator of future success.” Izzy would say, “What got us here won’t get us there.” Innovator Izzy develops ideas and strategies independent of rules. She’s informal and solves problems creatively. Boundaries are for testing, pushing, and crossing…that’s what Izzy says.

How your team can prepare: If your team is going to sell to Innovator Izzy, it’s best that they brainstorm with her. Stoke ideas for new ways of doing things. Advise your reps to help her set an agenda and then allow it to be client’s agenda.This drives Izzy to buy from them in order to fulfil her newly developed agenda. Salespeople should keep the creative talk moving forward while conversing with this client. Izzy shouldn’t get the sense that she, personally, will have to do much detail work if she buys from your reps as details put her off. Instead, they can show how working with them will bring her ideas to reality.

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