I was recently interviewed by AllBusiness.com about the idea of Handicapping Target Markets. Handicapping in this sense is about how to use personas to increase the relevance of your nurturing campaigns to cull more ideal customers from your pipeline—as well as shorten sales cycles.
In the podcast I talk about:
- How a handicapping approach works -
- Circumstances - the trigger events that create need for what you sell
- Characteristics - the traits like roles, responsibilities and influencers that dictate your buyers' behavior and what they need to build a business case to buy.
- Handicapping as a group process involving salespeople and customers.
- Defining personas
- What kinds of questions you need to answer from the buyers' perspective to create content with higher relevance.
- Examples of persona-driven outcomes
- And more...
I also delve into this subject extensively in my new book, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale. I present the idea of extending the persona into the creation of buyer synopses, which is essentially the combination of personas with a targeted problem-to-solution scenario. The outcome of this work is producing the insights that help marketers develop highly relevant content for progressive nurturing programs.
You can also download two chapters of the book here.
