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Sales are the engine of your business, and the ability to make sales hinges on the value you provide to your customer. But who is your customer? And what does value actually mean?

First of all, there is no generic "customer."

There is Michelle, the CFO with three kids, who enjoys attending industry seminars and networking events. There is Greg, the managing director, who has a golfing obsession and who dreams of one day attending the Masters Tournament. There is Natalie, the CTO, who comes from a rich startup background and lives and breathes tech in both her personal and her professional lives.

All of those customers have distinct backgrounds, personalities, and interests. The combination of attributes of each of them shapes how effectively a given marketing message will resonate with them and when their personal buying drivers will be activated.

If you think about customers through a one-size-fits-all prism, you run the risk of diluting the nuances that can make the difference between people buying—and not.

Now, more than ever, traditional assumptions you might have held about your customers may be obsolete. Following COVID, there are new realities that everyone must contend with, and those apply especially to your customers. Your customers may carry new pain points that need to be addressed. They may possess new value drivers that need to be considered. They may act according to new behaviors and preferences that need to be recognized.

Building a richer understanding of your customers is the logical starting point for navigating through the challenges of the pandemic. (And it's exactly what I did at my business, Ringcommend, when attempting to overcome those challenges.)

That richer understanding is best achieved by creating buyer personas: avatars of your target customers that help to conceptualize them as real human beings with individualized needs and wants.

Buyer personas flip your modus operandi—from working backward to fit your business's offering onto customer needs, to working forward from your customer's needs to develop aligned offerings.

Buyer personas help you to better understand your customers—their pain points, wants, and needs. They enable you to make better decisions that cascade through all functions of your business.

So, how do you build buyer personas to better understand current and potential customers whose behaviors and attitudes have changed as a result of COVID?

Understand the attributes you want to capture

Your goal in developing buyer personas is to build a composite 360-degree snapshot of each of your target customer profiles. Such illustrative avatars should feel as "real" as possible. What is each person's professional background? What motivates his or her purchasing decisions? Where does each persona sit in the corporate hierarchy?

Use your personas to illuminate key demographic, psychographic, and behavioral attributes, such as these:

  • Beliefs
  • Background
  • Frustrations
  • Goals
  • Hobbies
  • Interests
  • Personality
  • Predispositions
  • Preferences
  • Work ethic

Build multiple personas for different customer profiles

Because it's unlikely you have only one type of buyer, it makes sense to segment your customers into different customer profiles. Without going overboard, your personas should be individualized to capture unique attributes that indicate the personal buying drivers of each segment.

To ensure that your buyer personas maintain relevance and utility, limit development to the smallest number of personas that still capture the diversity of your customer profiles.

Conduct customer interviews

The easiest way to develop buyer personas that mirror your real-life customers is to speak with your real-life customers!

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How to Use Buyer Personas to Understand Your Customers in a Post-COVID World

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Evian Gutman

Evian Gutman is the founder and CEO of Ringcommend and the author of Coming Back From COVID. Previously, he was a management consultant and the head of digital marketing for a global B2B sales consulting firm.

LinkedIn: Evian Gutman