A Sales Manager’s Priority: Developing Key Account Buyer Personas

Your clients’ situations and buying behaviors are anything but static. That’s why it’s critical for you to develop, maintain, and update your buyer personas, especially for your key accounts.

“When it comes to Key Accounts, you need detailed personas down to the individual level (i.e. Bill Smith, SVP of Applications) not just a title (i.e. VP of Operations, SVP of IT Applications) level persona,” writes John Staples, principal at Sales Benchmark Index. In this post for the Sales Force Effectiveness Blog, Staples provides a list of minimum requirements for individual buyer personas as well as an explanation of what you need to have in place in order to complete these requirements successfully.

Among the pieces of information Staples lists as necessary to build a complete individual buyer persona are background, responsibilities, current focus, goals, buyer knowledge, and buyer patterns. “Whenever new players enter into the buying team, a detailed persona is essential to successfully defend, cross sell, and up-sell within your Key Accounts,” Staples writes.