You’ve got a great SAP business and you’re proud of what you deliver. Now you need to communicate your awesomeness to the world, and how you can help them achieve their goals and solve their problems – this is where marketing comes in!
If you are an SAP partner who is looking to learn more about marketing or review the fundamentals, then this post is for you!
Imagine you’ve just executed a great marketing strategy, which communicates the message: “Let us help you complete your sales reporting tasks fast, so you have more time to focus on your financial planning!”. Sounds like a good value proposition, right?
But what if your buyers are not concerned about reporting? What if they’re more interested in the security features of your offering, or your ability to deploy effectively? Your team might be more than capable of meeting these needs as well, but if you are not communicating these specific abilities, then you risk being overlooked!
When planning your marketing strategy, it’s crucial to know your buyers so that you can craft messages that speak directly to them and their needs.
Who are your buyers? Maybe you’ll describe their role, or the industry or line of business in which they work. So you might say, “my customer works in healthcare,” or “my customers are field-service agents.”
And at a high level, that’s fine. But now, try to think about them from the following standpoints:
And of course, you want to focus your efforts on the individuals that influence the decision to select your offering – these could very-well be the end-users, but they could also be higher-level employees with completely different priorities.
As you answer these questions, you will start to paint a “picture” of the customers who would select your offering. This picture or generalized representation of your customer that you create is called a persona
Creating personas helps you to relate to your customers as real humans, and it helps you help you understand the specific needs and goals of your customers and prospects.
Not only should you define personas, but you should document their traits into persona records. Persona records are useful because:
In general, to build a persona record, 1) answer questions about your buyer’s professional experiences, and then 2) map the findings for each buyer type into a persona template.
Answer the following questions about your buyers – and remember to focus on the individuals that influence the decision to select your offering:
| Goal | Details | Questions to ask |
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Identify your buyers |
At a high level, determine what industry or line of business your buyers work in, and then at a lower level, determine the roles they have. Answer these questions for customers you have, but also for customer segments you want to have in the future (for example, are you looking to add additional industries to serve or geographical regions?) |
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| Develop empathy for your buyers |
Understand what they need to accomplish in their role: their KPIs, goals to achieve, problems to solve |
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| Understand your buyers’ job to be done |
Understand the work your personas do on a daily basis, and how it contributes to or takes away from achieving their KPIs and goals? |
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| Synchronize your offering with buyer personas |
Think about how your offering can help your personas with attaining their KPIs and goals, or completing their daily tasks. Think about how it has helped your current customers. Finally think about your competition and lost deals – ask yourself why companies are selecting them instead of you |
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Remember that it’s possible to have multiple answers for each question – in such cases, you will want to consider creating multiple buyer types.
Once you have answered the questions above, map the characteristics of each buyer type into a persona template that organizes their traits into groups your sales and marketing team will find useful. Here’s a template you can use, but feel free to use any type of template you wish.
It’s recommended to give each of your personas a name (“Cheryl the CEO”, “Amy in Healthcare Data Analysis”, “Sam the Field Ops Manager”). This acts as a reminder that your personas reflect actual human beings who have real goals, needs and challenges that you can help them achieve and solve.
Based on the answers you provide from the questions above, it will become obvious whether a single persona describes all your buyers or if you have multiple personas with unique needs and goals – for example, if your target market is narrow and focused, one persona might be enough, but if your buyers work in different roles, industries, geographies, etc., it might make more sense to have individual persona records for each of these buyer types.
Whatever you decide is OK, and remember that you can always change your mind later!
Here’s an example of a fully fleshed out persona. This one in particular is based on actual interactions with several decision makers in the HR line of business.
When you create persona records, think of it as an iterative exercise that you do on a yearly or semi-annual basis. As you learn more about your buyers, or as the market winds change, it makes sense to go back to your persona records and make some updates. You might even merge multiple records into one or split a single record into several!
And of course, no one knows your customers better than your customer-facing colleagues, such as sales executives. Therefore include them in the process of creating your company’s persona records.
Understanding your buyers is fundamental to building an optimally-targeted marketing strategy. By truly knowing who your they are – their needs, goals, problems, expectations, blockers, triggers, barriers, etc., you’re well on your way to crafting messages that best speak to them – you’ll demonstrate empathy, leadership, and an awareness of their reality – you’ll capture their attention, and you’ll stand out from the rest!