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Writer's pictureKirk Enright

How To Create A Simple Sales Playbook From A Buyer Persona or ICP

First, why?


In my experience, the benefit to creating and using buyer personas is that they help get everyone on your team on the same page, moving in the same direction, heading toward the same goal.


In other words, instead of everyone being all over the place, you get:

  1. Focus

  2. Alignment

  3. Direction

(If you've ever worked with or for an organization that isn't focused, aligned and moving in the same direction, you understand what a big deal that can be.)


By creating sales playbooks from your buyer personas, you're really just extending those benefits across more of your process, which helps with trust and believability, too, because everybody is now speaking with the same voice.


(If you've ever worked with or for an organization that didn't do that, you understand what a big deal that can be, too.)


The goal is really just to connect the dots between your buyer (their needs, drives, motivations, etc.) and the different stages of the sales process (e.g. contacting, nurturing, presenting, negotiating and closing) so you know what to do, what to expect, and how to move them along.


Our persona builder does this automatically as part of the core persona/ICP generation process, but you can do the work on your own instead by putting yourself in your buyer's shoes and asking yourself a few simple questions:

  • Is my buyer the type of person I can close quickly or should I expect a more drawn-out process?

  • How should I make first contact?

  • What sort of resistance am I likely to encounter? Will they need to consider lots of different options?

  • How do they make decisions? Head? Heart? Gut?

  • What kind of relationship will I have to establish with them before they'll trust me enough to buy?

  • How should I pitch?

  • Will they respond to pressure?

  • Are their decisions final?

Once you understand the answers to these questions, you can package everything together to create a simple sales playbook that any of your SDRs can follow.


Here's an example:



You can obviously take sales playbooks much, much further, but for most companies just having something simple provides enough consistency to make a noticeable difference.





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