The 4 Types of SaaS Buyer Personas & Examples

A buyer persona is a detailed representation of your ideal customer.

How are they different from a customer profile?

Well, they're comprised of the same demographic information, such as age, gender, and occupation. But they also include psychographic details - their values, interests, and goals. They're often given a name and further developed as real, potential customers that might exist.

Buyer personas help companies understand how their potential customers think, feel, and behave. To understand what motivates the decision to buy.

They are instrumental in helping you as a business owner or company leader determines the best sales strategies. After all, the more you know about your customer, the easier it is to understand how your product or service should be sold to them.

Because then you can start to analyze the type of buyers you will come into contact with even closer, and learn how to approach them best.

In this article, we'll be going over the four types of buyer personas in SaaS, since it's our area of expertise, and provide some examples to further help you understand.

Let's get started.

The first type of buyer persona is the spontaneous buyer.

They enjoy moving things along and finding simple solutions to their problems. What they need from you is confirmation that you can provide what they need and that you can do it quickly.

There is no need to provide these buyers with additional information, case studies, or exact data points. They just need to trust you enough that you can provide what they need in the shortest time frame, and they're in.

And honestly, for this type of buyer, about 50% of it is them liking you as a salesperson or individual. They tend to be led by their emotions, after all.

But let's get a closer look at what we might be talking about with an example buyer persona:

Job title

• Head of Growth

Company details

• B2B SaaS with 15-50 employees
• In the growth stage

Age

• 28-36

Team collaboration

• Collaborates with Sales, Marketing, and Growth teams to produce Sales & Marketing materials and come up with a strategy to sell

Responsibilities

• Increase the company's revenue
• Gain new customers and develop strategies for retention
• Increase brand awareness
• Develop scalable sales strategies

Reports to

• An executive (CEO)

Biggest frustration

• Jeff's issue is that they need to come up with and scale a reusable sales process. They have the bones of one from the first few clients, but now it's time to grow more. But his team is spending too much time on certain tasks, preventing them from seeing the bigger picture and developing a strategy.

What he needs

• Jeff needs a sales automation tool that can integrate with the existing CRM software they've been using to cut down on certain administrative tasks for his sales team so they can focus their efforts on building their pipeline faster. It should not be too expensive, as they are still growing, but should have enough space at its price for a few sales reps to use. Given the immediacy of the need, he is much more likely to be a spontaneous buyer looking for something he already knows.

In contrast to the above, a methodical buyer persona will want more details.

They'll want to understand how your process works and want any evidence that demonstrates that your product or service can do exactly what you are saying it can for them. Here is where you will want to bring all of your social proof, data points, case studies, referrals, white papers - anything that demonstrates your ability to deliver on your promises.

Be prepared for this type of buyer to be incredibly slow and logical. They will be taking their time to digest all of the material before making a decision.

As you can imagine, they are one of the most difficult personas to convert into a customer, and it will be a long road before you arrive at the sale.

Job title

• Head of Customer Experience

Company details

• B2B and B2C with 1000+ employees

Age

• 30-40

Team collaboration

• He oversees customer service, customer experience, customer success, partner management, and contact center ventures

Responsibilities

• Lower customer churn
• Ensure that customer concerns are addressed in a timely way
• Lower high turn over of employees
• Improve company image

Biggest frustration

• Harry is having problems understanding customer concerns as well as employee concerns. While they have several communication channels with customers, it's unclear what issues are constantly addressed versus what works well. There is also a high employee turnover in the customer service team that he would like to fix. He needs to understand better the data that he currently has.

What he needs

• Harry needs a conversational AI tool to provide all the data, already pointing out common keywords that may indicate a recurring issue. He will need to study all of the examples and how the tool will integrate with their existing channels and technology, as well as read up on AI, in order to be convinced, but he would benefit greatly from this tool.

A humanistic buyer is someone who is led by their emotions, like the spontaneous buyer.

Unlike the spontaneous buyer, they will not buy quickly. Instead, their emotions will slow them down.

As they tend to be an empathetic, people-centered individual, this type of buyer will be a long courtship. They seek value and a long-lasting relationship when they buy from a company, so both of you have to be ready to sign up for a very long relationship when approaching this persona.

Trying to rush them will not go in your favor, so, as with the methodical buyer, it is an exercise in patience and discovering if you'll be a good fit for each other.

Job title

• CTO/Head of IT

Company details

• B2B SaaS with 50+ employees

Age

• 35-50

Team collaboration

• Works with teams across the company, for this particular issue, HR

Responsibilities

• In charge of how technology is used in the company
• Ensuring that the technology in use meets the company's short and long-term needs
• Onboarding new members of the IT team
• Finding innovative ways to improve the IT team's performance

Reports to

• Fellow executives, the Board

Biggest frustration

• Jasmine is having issues with retaining her team. And when they do stay on, she's finding that there is much confusion regarding the responsibilities of each role. She's found that other teams are experiencing something similar, so she believes a new onboarding process will help fix this.

What he needs

• Jasmine needs a tool to help her save time, create excitement, and address the issues her engineers experience during the onboarding process. She needs to believe in the people creating the tool and is working with her company's HR department to find the best solution they can work with for a number of years. Finding the right partner to make the onboarding experience smooth across the board will be a slow process, but it will be worth it

The final buyer type of the competitive buyer.

Like the spontaneous buyer, they will be quick to make their decisions. But this is not always a good thing.

They're more logical and far more likely to compare you to others. They'll be studying you closely to determine what makes you better than your competitors and what sets you apart.

While they will be fast in their decision to buy, this means they will also be fast in their decision to discard. This is why you need to have your value proposition ready to go: set yourself apart and name-drop the competitors that can't do what you do.

Without that, you will not be able to rise above the noise and convince this buyer.

Job title

• Director of Digital Marketing

Age range

• 24-32

Company details

• B2B with 15-30 employees.

Reports to

• Chief Marketing Officer/Head of Growth

Responsibilities

• Ensuring the digital marketing strategy is running across all channels
• Helping her team get as much relevant content ready as possible
• Coordinate all digital marketing strategies for the brand

Biggest frustration

• Jane's team is not large, and they're running into issues posting to social media networks in a timely manner. Jumping from platform to platform with different passwords is not ideal, especially if they want to post at certain times. Additionally, what they want to post gets shuffled around a lot as it's planned out on a board in their office, or in people's calendars, but not centralized anywhere. This makes the brand image suffer and confuses the audience.

What she needs

• Jane knows a lot of social media management software is out there, so she wants to quickly determine which one will work best for their needs. She needs a user-friendly platform that will grant her team enough seats, allow them to schedule and plan out the posts a week or a month ahead of time, and not lead them to need to use multiple accounts. Additionally, she will be looking for advanced analytic features and customizable reports that she can take to her CMO to understand what is working and why. Ideally, it should not be more than $100 per month.

Understanding the four types of buyer personas and how you might come across via examples them will help you know how to react when faced with them.

After all, you can't use the same approach on a competitive buyer as on a humanistic buyer - you'd be losing out on a client quite fast.

Need some help in your sales efforts to identify these personas correctly to close deals?

SalesPipe has the outsourced SDRs you're looking for - feel free to get in touch.