How to Do Persona Personalization that Drives Greater Conversions
TL;DR: Persona-level personalization is essential to drive conversion of meetings, deals and renewals. Outlined below is how it should be done for a discovery meeting and a way for you as a manager to review if your team is doing it well.
Every business today deals with a variety of unique buyer personas that you must engage with. We all agree that these buyers look through their own unique lenses when it comes to their company and your product or solution. As a result, it is essential to personalize their experiences in order to get successful outcomes in terms of meeting conversion, wins and renewals. If you are not sold on the need for personalization, read more in this post from Elizabeth “all the words” Italiano found here.
If you do agree with the need for buyer persona personalization, then it begs a few critical questions:
- How do you teach your team to understand buyer personas and how they speak to them?
- How well does your team personalize interactions today (emails, decks, proposals etc.)?
- What lessons and optimizations has your team made in the last quarter?
If you don’t have strong answers to these questions, don’t worry it is a common gap we see with many of our clients. The goal for this post is to provide some guidance on what you can do right now to better personalize experience and improve your results.
Outlined below of meeting specific checklists on how to personalize every interaction to the buyer persons you are engaging with. As a leader you can use this as a template to review the preparation or work product that will be customer facing. We need to make every interaction count, so here is how to do that.
Initial Discovery Call
Preparation:
Review the preparation your reps do in advance of the discovery meeting
- Was an email outlining recommended topics for this persona and a request to validate their objectives for the call sent?
- Were the confirmed topics and objectives of all attendees added to the agenda of the meeting invite?
- Was individual personal research done on the attendees of the meeting and used to craft persona-specific discovery questions?
Execution:
Review the execution in Gong or call recording technology to see if this is done
- Did the rep engage each attendee with role specific questions?
- Did the rep use persona specific understanding and industry trends for that role to frame questions?
- Did then rep use the context and answers given to connect to how or where your solution can add value?
- Example: “Jill you mentioned automating this process is a key driver for this evaluation. That is often a key benefit other manufacturers experience using our solution, by automating manual tasks we have proven to drive a 5% decrease in cost like we have done with ABC company, a case study I can share after this call.”
Follow up:
Review the follow up to the discovery meeting to see how the rep uses the information gathered in the call to further engage and drive the next step
- Did the rep send a follow up email to the meeting summarizing the key learnings and highlighting the specific areas of interest where your solution can help, quote or reference key individuals comments from the meeting?
- Did the rep send a timestamped recording from the call focused on their pains to support the contact sharing with other stakeholders from the buying committee?
- Did the rep gain an understanding of the buying process and use the follow up to clearly outline their desired next step?
The specifics would of course be different, but we would strongly recommend this same process be done for the following key meetings:
- Deeper Discovery
- Demo
- Proposal
- Business Case/ROI
We all are facing the same economic headwinds during this slowdown being felt across the SaaS industry and the economy at large. We need to try everything we can to showcase our understanding of the buyer to combat the challenges of getting money out of companies right now. Our hope is these recommendations and an increase in customer centricity will lead to incremental improvement as you optimize your team’s execution and help drive performance when we need it most. Stay focused on what your buyer cares about and why your solution will make a difference to them and the results will follow.
