B2C marketing organisations have used the idea of "buyer personas" with great success for several years. More recently, a growing number of today's most successful B2B sales and marketing organisations have come to recognise the power of this approach - also known as "Key Stakeholder Profiles".
These buyer personas - or, in our case, stakeholder profiles - seek to establish archetypes for the key roles that usually most important in the B2B buying decision process and to synthesise their likely issues, concerns and motivations - as well as understanding where the typical stakeholder is likely to turn when they are seeking advice or information.
Identifying where key stakeholders are likely to turn to for advice is extremely important. In an age when buyers tend to defer contacting vendors until they have completed their research, getting found in the places where the prospect is likely to look when they go searching for information about a particular issue, circumstance or problem has become incredibly important.
Put simply, if you can’t identify with the key stakeholders in the buying decision process, and if you can’t anticipate how or where they are likely to gather and process information, you’re likely to remain unaware of sales opportunities that you could have participated in - and you’ll diminish your chances of winning in the deals you are aware of.
We work with clients to help them identify the key stakeholder types that are most likely to get involved in the buying decision process. We help them to research their typical roles, issues, concerns and motivations. We’ll often validate our hypotheses through a series of voice of the customer interviews. And we’ll distil the learning into simple, actionable key stakeholder profiles that can be used throughout the sales and marketing organisation.
Take the Next Step
We would be pleased to share what we’ve learned from helping high-growth-potential organisations to develop their “key stakeholder” profiles as part of a balanced programme of sales and marketing performance improvement. As a first step, you may find it useful to download our guide to "Ideal Customer and Key Stakeholder Profiles".
As soon as you are ready to learn more, please email us at stakeholder@inflexion-point.com, or call us on +44 (0) 118 975 0595. We look forward to discovering whether we might be able to help your organisation to improve its performance in this critical area.