Personas describe the ideal target for Bit Project. They help us define our messaging and marketing delivery. They are theoretical people to target. By defining their concerns and where they go for information, we can best spend our marketing efforts by focusing on this ideal target.
Roles are distinct job titles. These are the real people you will encounter while selling. You will find a contact at an organization with a specific role. Understanding the challenges faced by each student, along with what they care most about, is helpful to deliver the right value proposition to the right person.
Personas are tools that we use to represent target audiences in order to define not only our messaging and marketing delivery, but also our product. Keeping personas in mind allows us to use the correct language and make the best decisions to address their specific problems and pain points. Personas are developed through a process of: creation, research, and review.
Guide to personas: https://uxplanet.org/how-to-create-personas-step-by-step-guide-303d7b0d81b4__
First, you need to determine the target audience for the product. In our case, open source education can be valuable to an unlimited set of audiences. The personas will represent various demographics of people such as students, professors, advisors, professionals in the technical industry, and more.
Identifying the persona depends on the purpose of the marketing campaign.
- Who is most likely going to use/be interested in Bit Project's open source technical education (cheatsheet) platform?
- How are they going to use the platform? As learners/developers/educators/partners/...?
- How are they going to benefit from the platform?
- What could be a potential concern for them using the platform?
The next step involves doing research to deepen your persona, find pain points that we can help mitigate, and determine how we can be most valuable to them.
The best resource for conducting research are the people who best meet the criteria of the persona. Reaching out to a Data Science Professor or a Psychology Graduate Student could help understand your audience's pain points.
How to do an interview: https://uxplanet.org/secrets-of-perfect-user-interview-by-talebook-ee61a7e155c7__
From: https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/uncover-business-pain__
Pain point question for: All prospects
This is a classic soundbite that cuts straight to the heart of the matter. Every company is in the business of growth, so the biggest obstacle to growth is generally a serious pain.
Many prospects haven't thought about this at all, so this question builds your personal credibility as well. Helping prospects talk through their current business situation can increase your understanding of the company while demonstrating your expertise in a non-showy way.
Usually, the business pains fall around revenue, customers, employees, product, or investment capital. Get to the meat of the conversation quickly with these follow-up questions:
- "What's your plan to tackle X pain?"
- "When is your deadline to solve this problem?"
- "Do you think it'll be easy or hard to solve it?"
- "Who in your company is working to fix this right now?"
These questions will blow your conversation wide open. By drilling down on any of these questions, you'll learn a lot about your prospect's pain and spot opportunities to help.
You will also learn how they are approaching their pain. You should hear a certain amount of stress in their voice. This is healthy. It means they are likely to spend money to help address a business issue.
Pain point question for: All prospects
This is a more whimsical version of question one. I like using it because it has personality, is funny, and creates a vision of chaos.
Most importantly, it'll stir up your prospect's emotion and gets to their core needs. Whether they're facing a major cross-departmental operational issue, an internal team problem, or a clear obstacle to growth, getting your prospect talking about what they're most frustrated by is a great way to get them excited about a potential solution.
It is also more personal. You're asking your prospect how the pain affects them. Based on their answer, you'll be able to determine if they have a potential personal win that can give you some extra support to get the deal through.
Pain point question for: Individual contributors
You won't always be talking to the head honcho -- sometimes, you'll be speaking to someone two or three levels below them.
It's in your best interest to get them involved in the conversation as early as possible. There are three reasons for this.
- They usually control the budget for B2B buying decisions. Their pain won't necessarily be the same as an individual contributor's pain, but they're the one that needs to pull the trigger on a purchase, so start with her pain.
- A manager's pain usually filters down to her direct reports. While an individual contributor and manager won't view the problem the same way, a win for the manager will usually improve her direct reports' lives as well. A lot of your prospects will have crappy bosses, and getting them off your prospects' backs is a big motivator in the sales process.
- It signals inexperience. If your contact doesn't know (or think about) their boss's business pain, then it might be a sign that they're too junior or inexperienced to help move a deal forward.
Pain point question for: Individual contributors and managers
This is another angle to approach business pain that focuses on your point of contact. Salespeople hear over and over again that buyers care more about value than features, and this question reveals the concrete value your product could have to your prospects on a personal level.
Ask your prospect about how solving a business pain would impact their team. Would it save them two hours of work a day? Cut their time spent in meetings in half? If you can find something concrete your prospect's itching for, dig deeper and see exactly how you can help.
Pain point question for: Senior managers and leadership
As mentioned above, business pain isn't two employees complaining there isn't enough toilet paper in the bathrooms. It's not something that can be fixed quickly or easily.
Pain is what keeps the CEO up at night. It has to be addressed for the company to continue operating at full speed. What do senior managers put on their quarterly planning agendas? What do they talk about incessantly? What do they send all-company emails about? This is the business pain you're looking for.
Pain point question for: All prospects
This might seem petty, but the responses you'll earn with this question can be extremely telling.
What begins as a complaint about not enough toilet paper might lead you to bigger pain points such as, "We don't have enough toilet paper because our company-wide budgets have been slashed this quarter. We're really focusing all available resources on advertising in the coming weeks and months."
A lack of toilet paper is a seemingly laughable and lighthearted gripe -- but when the experienced salesperson asks follow-up questions and digs in here, it can illuminate a larger issue you have the resources to solve for.
Not all questions need to be addressed to your prospects. It's important to take the pulse of the rest of your sales team's pipelines and challenges and understand what your prospect questions are not uncovering. Here are two questions to ask your fellow salespeople to uncover prospect and customer business pain points.
Pain point question for: Your internal sales team
If you offer more features at a higher cost than Competitor X but are still losing deals to them, you've uncovered a business pain point: budget. It's important to discern whether you need to get better at selling your product, qualifying your leads, or trimming unnecessary features/services from certain plans.
Pain point question for: Your internal sales team
Just because you close a deal, doesn't mean your customer's pain points go away. Dissect why customers are dropping your business and address those pain points just as you would in the sales process.
If you're losing business because your customer service wait time is too long -- that's a business pain point for both parties. For your customer, it's an impediment to them using your product/service to solve for their business. And your company can't continue to grow in this manner either.