Buyer Research
Defining "who" is the FIT
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Last week I spoke about being casual in order to sell. Lenny from Lenny’s Newsletter and April Dunford nail it perfectly:
“Calm Confidence”
Being able to know WHO is the fit.
Credit: Lenny Rachitsky and April Dunford
The only way to do that is to know “who” it is that will have challenges that your product can solve.
Everyone’s inbox is being cluttered with volume and generic messaging. The only way to stand out is by ruthlessly focusing on “who” is the right FIT for your product.
The way to do that is through buyer research.
Credit: BowTiedSalesGuy
Today I’m going to touch upon a few things that I’ve done in order to get super specific around who is the right fit, while leveraging that ideal customer profile (ICP) as a lever to help create consistency. Lean on this lever while experimenting and learning more about other profiles in different verticals or segments that might yield the same output.
I’ve touched upon getting a prospect’s trust by doing deeper research. A great resource for this is none other than BowTiedSystems.
Credit: BowTiedSystems
I won’t dive into the aspect of signals and intent, although important, are meaningless if you don’t have your ICP down. I’ve also written about signals and intent in a previous post about email volume which you can find here.
Today I’ll walk through how I would approach buyer research to give me an idea on how to expand upon tactics within my prospecting. If there’s anything you take away from today, it’s that PATTERN matching is your best friend.
“I don’t trust words, I even question actions. But I never doubt patterns.”
Traction
Organization
Personas
Traction
If you’re at a startup, or larger org that has some data - DON’T reinvent the wheel. Go with what is already working and expand upon it. If you don’t have data, then ask yourself - what is the path of least resistance?
Shorter sales cycles
What were the segment/types of companies getting to a signature fastest?
Competitors
Which profiles are already buying? Nobody likes being left out, especially in business.
Think about verticals and niches within verticals, they probably all experience the same type of pain which led them to buy your product in the first place. This goes double for personas.
Segment
As a general rule of thumb, enterprise probably isn’t the lowest hanging fruit. Sales cycles are almost always too long, even if they come with a larger price tag.
What size of companies in SMB or MM are already buying? Not only are sales cycles faster in this segment, but you have less decision makers (which helps you hone in on a strong ICP profile), less legal, less resources, and ultimately a faster path to cash.
Organization
Once you start crafting out where you see traction, what are the similar characteristics that you see in the org?
Structure
The first is, are these orgs typically centralized or distributed? ie Is there a central IT or marketing team? Or do different business units have the autonomy to make decision on their own?
10k
You can use ChatGPT plugins to quickly analyze 10k’s.
For the purpose of this exercise, you don’t need to get too deep. If you check out section 7, you’ll get a glimpse of what executives are talking about.
Find similarities of companies within a given industry and what executives are talking about. You can use that type of language in outreach.
Executive interviews
It’s amazing the information you can find from executive interviews and how it correlates to multiple companies with a given industry.
These are talking points to drive conversations that if one exec is concerned or thinking about, so are others, undoubtedly. If an executive is talking about it, it will most likely the focus of an org.
Personas
Outline the functions, challenges, and pains of a persona along with what they’re dealing with on a day to day. Most importantly, get a sense of the emotions they are going through with it as well.
Kyle Asay did a really good breakdown of this. I’ve also provided a simply prompt below which you can build upon.
Credit: Kyle Asay
The prompt below took me 15 seconds … literally. You can modify and play around with the prompt but you can see how easy it is to expand on each column or row. That way you can build on each persona.
Cross reference this with existing data your organization might have!
Layer this on with prospecting and start searching for signals and intent. Your buyer profile is one of the most important aspects of your sales cycle. It paints a clear picture of “who” is the right fit, and this provides you the confidence of when to walk away.
It also allows you the confidence to use levers on your sales process, without stressing out on how to get to your number.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out or set up some time.
Thanks again for reading and see you all next week.
-Andrew K