It’s easy for businesses to get lost in phrases like “revenue,” “return on investment,” “cost per acquisition,” and the like. But just as high on the list of priorities is aligning internal teams around our end goal: acquiring and retaining customers. And we need to remember to begin not only where we want to end (with a conversion), but with the customer’s end in mind as well (having their needs met).
Taking a step back to identify your customer personas and align marketing, sales, and support teams to work toward those personas in tandem is proven to drive more business. In fact, 81% of companies with strong customer experience competencies outperform their competitors (Peppers & Rogers Group).
Always Begin at the End: With the Customer
First things first as you begin the process of building personas: ask yourself “What is it that my customers need or are challenged by?” Then as you begin to map out these different needs and the way your business can solve them, you’ll begin to identify similarities. These trends are the foundation of your personas.
Keep in mind that creating personas is about more than simply segmenting your audience by geography and demographics – even though those are still key pieces of information. It helps craft a well-rounded profile of your customers. The key is to dig deeper in order to add more than just demographics. For example, when marketing works with sales and support teams to interview customers it helps marketers get into the mind of the customer and build a deeper understanding of who they are and what influenced their customer journey.
Developing Personas to Proactively Help Customers
When you begin at the end while developing personas, it allows businesses to proactively help customers. As I mentioned, it’s easy to get stuck in a reactive mindset where we’re only focused on our bottom line. We end up too focused on creating campaigns to push that line just a little bit further. While this can lead to short-term success, aligning campaigns and initiatives with personas is proven to lead to higher conversion rates. Aberdeen Group reports that marketers who use personas and map content to the buyer’s journey saw 73% higher conversions. Get out in front of your customers to help them – before they even know they need it and before they commit to any decisions.
Align Marketing and Sales Initiatives to Personas
You not only want to work with your sales team when developing personas, but also to align initiatives around the personas you’ve established together. If the marketing team is working on a branding campaign, they can tailor their messaging to different audiences to align with established personas. And if sales is pushing a special offer to loyal customers, they will know how to tailor that offer depending on which persona different loyal customers fit. By using the personas you’ve created as you craft various campaigns, promotions, and offers, you’ve built structures that help streamline these initiatives. You’re targeting the right customers at the right time with the right message – and driving more business.
Sales and Support: Ears to the Ground
Who else in your company is constantly in contact with customers besides sales and support? These teams are already hearing how prospects travel through the sales process and receive customer feedback, and they likely share it within their teams for best practices. Building personas is an ongoing process, and it helps to work with marketing to discuss and analyze these insights. Marketing can then identify how well they’ve developed the personas, where adjustments should be made, and can help refine how the company aligns initiatives around personas.
The Right Analytics to Measure ROI
You know as well as I do that marketing and sales tend to battle it out to claim credit for driving the leads, opportunities, and revenue that come into your business. But as you align your business more and more around personas, your ROI measurement must also support that alignment. A move towards a more multi-touch attribution model and away from last-touch will help map out how your persona groups engage with your business throughout the entire customer journey – not just what drove the conversion.
Check out our infographic on The Business of Conversation to learn how businesses are using call analytics to enhance alignment between marketing, sales, and support teams.
