Before you go to market, you gotta know your Buyer Personas.  You know, what your B2B buyer looks like.

I’ll bet you have something like this written down somewhere, if you’ve hired full-time marketers at your company:

  • Avatar: HR Heather
  • Company Size: 500 – 5,000 employees
  • 5+ open job postings
  • 15%+ y/y employee growth
  • Located in United States, especially large metro areas, but has international locations too
  • Mostly Director/VP/CxO of HR/Recruiting

…etc.

And that’s all great!  Now, how do you take this concept and apply it cleanly to outbound prospecting?

How should your sales development team go after the VP HR of a 520-person company differently than the Recruiting Manager at a 4,200-person company?

Getting Granular with a Persona Matrix

In reality, your total customer segment can probably be distilled into a number of separate buyer personas, each of which should be spoken to differently when prospecting.  My preference is to map this out in a simple spreadsheet, which your team can then review and approve.  Your lead generation team will love it.  You can also use this to easily set up your sales acceleration platform of choice, like Nova, which has a feature specifically for this.  Other common choices include Outreach.io or Salesloft.

Here’s a screenshot of what that looks like (heavily simplified):

An example buyer persona matrix for a company selling to HR, where the CEO and operations teams are also influencers, or even sometimes direct decision-makers. This is a totally fictitious persona matrix and isn’t taken from an actual company, but it’s plausible based on what I usually come across.

Your complete persona is going to be much more granular and detailed than this.  But this is the high level: this is basically what you can give to your lead generation team, when you need them to generate lists of Accounts and Contacts you want to go after.

Writing Persona-Specific Sales Emails

Now, your job is to speak to each of these personas differently.  Instead of writing a single outreach sequence, you’re going to write 6.  Or, at least, you’ll configure your sales acceleration tool to automatically frame the introductory credibility statement and the value proposition differently, based on who you’re reaching out to.

For example, maybe the CEO and CHRO always care about getting interviewing & hiring done more quickly, though the CHRO also cares about compliance, whereas the Director of HR mostly is concerned about workplace culture fit when it comes to new hires.  The HR Manager and Talent Manager just want their day-to-day lives to be easier, and may be willing to refer you to the decision-maker if shown a compelling value proposition.

This means you need to write a value proposition related to:

  1. Decreasing time to hire
  2. Ensuring hiring process legal compliance
  3. Improving culture fit
  4. How front-line managers can save time

Then, you have to set it up so that you’re delivering the right value statements to the right audience with your software.

What’s the result of all this?

You’re delivering a relevant message to the right person! You’re one step closer to achieving personalization at scale!

If this sounds complicated and you want help making it happen, reach out to us and we’ll lend a hand.