What Is a SaaS Buyer Persona?

Before you start any sales process, you want to know who you're selling to.

This is true no matter what you're selling, from clothes to software.

As part of preparing your go to market strategy, you do research into your target market and define your customer profile.

The next step? Making a buyer persona to help you define your target audience even better.

And in the world of SaaS, where we operate here at SalesPipe, you want to specifically make a SaaS buyer persona.

A buyer persona is a representation of your company's ideal customer.

If you've been preparing your strategy correctly, you've done the research into the industry and the roles your product or service would fit best. You know whose problems you are looking to solve and where to find them.

You can even take it further and work with multiple ideal customer profiles or ICPs. After all, it is possible your product or service solves many problems and you can approach a variety of audiences. And the corresponding messaging should always reflect this as well by being varied and distinct according to the audience you are focusing on.

A buyer persona takes this ICP and then helps craft your ideal customer. Often they will be given a fictitious name, picture, and basic demographic information such as age, gender, occupation, and psychographic information, such as values, interests, and goals.

The idea is that by crafting this persona and utilizing this information the messaging is even more pointed and reflective of the values and issues your prospects have.

A SaaS buyer persona takes it one step forward.

It is not limited to age group, demographics, likes, and dislikes. The goal is to understand how a customer thinks, feels, and behaves. This helps reveal what they want from your product or service so that you can understand your potential buyer's mindset and motivation, and focuses on how your SaaS would fit their needs.

SaaS buyer personas are very beneficial for SaaS companies, as they keep companies focused on customer priorities and not their own when it comes to outreach. This means your sales outreach comes across as a lot more organic and relevant, making it far more likely to lead to a positive interaction with the prospect.

Additionally, SaaS buyer personas help companies:

The effectiveness of any marketing or sales outreach campaign will significantly increase thanks to SaaS buyer personas. Costs are reduced as you will be aware of what works for specific personas in terms of outreach, and you will not be spending on figuring it out once again. You'll have your winning formula ready to go.

The content of your campaigns will become relevant and specific, increasing your chances of converting. As you've done your research into their pain points and additionally understand your buyer's mindset, the content becomes specific to their needs. This increases your chances of converting prospects into buying customers, as you demonstrate you know their industry and their problems.

You will find your business communication is heavily improved by utilizing buyer personas. After all, you know what they like and what they want. Communicating becomes easier, and you can improve loyalty and upsell more. After all, you've spent time understanding what your customers want, so communicating with them is easier than ever.

As communication is easier, so is customer engagement. It makes it easy to address customers' concerns and help them. Multiple needs and customers can be addressed as you've established buyer personas, and you are able to address various needs. You are not limited to the customers you can help, and your solutions fit several buyer personas.

Thanks to your SaaS buyer persona, you will be more aware of your customer's needs. Your product or service can be changed accordingly, thereby increasing your customer retention and your chances of success with other, similar prospects. The more user-friendly your product or service becomes, the more you are responding to your customers and prospects' needs.

Now that you know the benefits of creating a buyer persona, let's go over how to create one.

And remember, the closest to reality the better. You want it to be based on real-world data and strategic goals to have the most impact on your strategy.

We can't stress this enough - the key to your SaaS buyer persona working is doing thorough audience research.

You should be finding out about your existing customers, the audience your competitors are targeting, and your social audience. Through social media analytics, your customer database, and tools such as Google Analytics, you can narrow it down even further to include:

• Age
• Location
• Language
• Interests
• Challenges
• Stage of life
• Spending power and patterns
• Business size and those in charge of decision making

These are all key components of your buyer persona that you will need to compile to build it.

As part of your research, you want to chat with your existing customers to learn more about their goals and pain points. Speaking with them, you will be able to understand how your product or service fits into their needs.

Based on this, you can then match their needs and find similar prospects that you will be able to help as you've already helped your customers.

You can then use the above information to begin thinking beyond the simple features of your product or service, and delve into the true benefits of what you can offer your prospects.

How does your offer ensure your prospect's life will be easier?

And from this, you will then craft the relevant messaging that will resonate with your prospect and gain you their trust and attention.

Having done all of your research, you can now start looking for points in common. The more similarities you find, you can then begin to segment your audience accordingly.

You give your buyer persona a name, job title, home and further defining characteristics to flesh it out. The goal is to make it as realistic as possible.

For example, for SalesPipe, our buyer persona could be SaaS Founder Ben. He's 35, lives in Seattle, is a fan of remote work, travels twice a year to hiking-focused destinations to work remotely from, and boxes in his spare time. The information is very similar to a dating profile.

This buyer persona is the identification of a core audience of 30-year-old SaaS Founders who enjoy the outdoors. That would be the audience segmentation, but as we can see, the persona offers a description that is a lot more detailed and specific. You humanize your prospect, which helps you connect with them when it's time to craft your messaging and reach out to them.

You also want to be sure to describe who each persona is currently and who they aim to be. This helps you envision how your product or service will be useful for them in the long term, and it helps you strategize how to accomplish this goal.

A SaaS buyer persona is a must for any company figuring out its sales strategy, especially if they are offering SaaS.

Without it, it is very easy to lose track of your customer's needs and focus only on your goals, which is detrimental to those very same goals in the end.

Make sure you read through the steps and have one made before you start your outreach if you want to be successful.

And, if you're in need of top-notch SDRs to help you connect with your buyer persona, be sure to get in touch with us!