Buyers Insights: Testing Your Buyer Personas

At OpenView, we talk extensively about building buyer personas and the research methods required to build them. This week, I want to talk about how to apply them in practice and establish a process for testing and tweaking them as necessary. After all, a buyer persona is only as good as the data behind it, and it is important to check whether the conclusions you have made actually play out in practice.
The front lines of any implementation of your buyer persona research are your sales and business development reps (BDRs). They can tell you first hand what is working and what is not. They are key players in assessing whether your personas, messaging, and ideas around the buying process are in fact correct. In addition, they can identify potential gaps in the research you’ve done and suggest potential revisions.

3 Key Questions to Ask Your Sales and BDR Teams

1. Are the job titles that we’ve indicated the right ones? Are you getting referred to someone else?
2. How well do the pain points we’ve listed resonate with the prospects? Are there any additional pain points that we have failed to consider?
3. Are there more granular steps to the buying process that can impact the messaging and sales approach?

The feedback you will receive will give you some hard data to assess whether your personas, messaging, and predicted buying process are the correct ones, or whether you need to iterate. Remember — no market is ever fully static, and roles can change over time. In addition, the pain points and messaging will also have to be revised to reflect the changing market conditions and your buyers’ evolving individual needs.
In addition to soliciting feedback from your sales and BDR teams, check in with your customers that you have a strong relationship with. They can tell you first hand about their competitive landscape and whether things are changing.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

For a complete walk-through of how to conduct buyer insights research from start to finish, download our free eBook, Buyer Insights Research: How to Understand Your Buyers So You can Eliminate the Guesswork.
Learn how to:

• Introduce a more customer-centric way of thinking across the organization
• Improve customer acquisition effectiveness
• Focus on the decision-makers within a target company and their key influencers
• Understand the subtle distinctions between different roles in the buying process
• Build a pipeline with more targeted and effective messaging
• Create compelling product packaging and pricing schemes
• Enhance customer success and retention with improved product and service delivery