In this blog post, we’ll teach you how to implement your B2B SaaS Buyer Persona that actually gets the job done. 

Let me guide you through the common situation. A company spends lots of time and money to develop its B2B SaaS Buyer Persona. They make content for their advertising, social media, and website. A content that’s trying to engage their buyer persona. Yet, despite everything, there are no sales.

How many times have you seen this happen? 

What’s the reason companies get into this situation?

What we discovered after working with various SaaS businesses is that when you have several buyer personas, they misguide you into trying to appeal to all stakeholders in your target audience simultaneously.

If you’re doing this, your content and message will dilute since now they aren’t compelling to any buyer persona. Rather than having truly resonating content with any of them, your content falls on deaf ears.

This leads to fewer sales.

The model we introduce you here is based on Clay Collin’s concept “The 5 One’s”.

Table of Content:

• What is “The 5 One’s” model for creating a B2B SaaS buyer personas?
• The Four Crucial Steps of Implementing Your Buyer Personas
  • The Daily Users, Check Signers, and Managers
  • Deciding Which Buyer Persona Should be Targeted First
  • Deciding Which Problem to Target First
  • What to Do if You Have Several Issues to Select From?
• Setting Up and Launching Your Campaigns for Targeting Your First Persona
• Scaling to the Next Buyer Persona (Typically After Around One Quarter)

Feel free to schedule a free consultation with us to explore more about how your company can increase its MMR by improving your targeting.

What is “The 5 One’s” model for creating a B2B SaaS buyer personas?

Clay Collins’ concept is based on the simplest method to expand your SaaS company. In it, you focus on “The 5 One’s”:

1. A single target market
2. A single product
3. A single conversion tool
4. A single traffic source
5. All for a single year

We modified Collin’s concept by exploring which buyer persona marketing should focus on first, and increasing traction with them before trying the next target persona.

The Four Crucial Steps of Implementing Your Buyer Personas

If you want to target several buyer personas, you need a holistic approach to marketing strategy. Every part of your marketing — from SEO, organic social, to Google Ads and paid social, has to be customized to the buyer persona you’re trying to target. 

There are four key steps of implementing your buyer personas, they are as follow:

The Daily Users, Check Signers, and Managers

Based on the business size of your target customers, these avatars can represent three different individuals, or a single or two individuals wearing several hats. 

Yes, the Check Signers look like the obvious first choice for targeting. However, the Daily User and Manager are often those searching for your SaaS product.

For example, imagine a company that targets supply chain owners (The Check Signer). The business experiences poor results with its paid advertising. However, if they were to concentrate on warehouse managers (The Daily Users), they would see an increase in conversion. 

Before we explore the process of selecting who to target first more, let’s review these users a bit further.

We have defined 3 different categories: 

The Daily User

Our Daily Users usually want easy-to-use products that save their time and help them become more effective.

The Manager

Our Managers want to maintain the standards in their area of responsibility. Stuff like reports, alerts, and updates for measuring progress.

The Check Signer

Our Check Signers want to gain insights for better decision-making and explore the ROI when compared to the cost of your product.

All of this boils down to the number one step of our process.

Deciding Which Buyer Persona Should be Targeted First

Everything starts with exploring:

• Who are your current clients?
• Who is the first person you were marketing to?
• What does the engagement process when they convert to look like?

Speak with your sales team. Explore your CRM data. Cross-check everything and ensure your perspective is based on the data you have. From here, you’ll need to identify which positions are coming up the most. This will help you discover which personas you should begin with.

If you’re selling to bigger enterprises, your first target buyer will likely be The Daily User or Manager. Your initial engagement can go in various ways. Just think about these situations:

Scenario #1:

The Daily User has a problem, discovers your solution, and calls you directly.

Scenario #2:

The Daily User has a problem, discovers your solution, and brings it to their manager who calls you directly.

Scenario #3:

The manager has a problem, discovers your solution, and calls you directly.

If the first and the third situation is what you see the most in your CRM, you’ll have a more straightforward way regarding targeting. 

However, if situation number two is your most common scenario that leads to a sales call, it may look like you need to target the individual who called you (The Managers).

But, you in fact want to begin with The Daily Users since they will be the ones to discover your company first. And they’re the ones whose issues your product is trying to resolve.

This is how you can explore the truth in Situation number two: During the sales call, ask various questions like — How did you discover us?

This will help you explore if the person you’re speaking to is the same who discovered you. Or if they came from a different channel. 

However, if you’re selling to smaller companies, this is where you’ll find yourself in several hats situations. Here, it’s often the same individual (usually the business owners) who have the role of two, or all three buyer personas. If this is the case, you should try to explore:

• The percentages of their time they spend in each of the buyer persona roles (The Daily Users, The Check Signers, The Managers)?
• Regarding the pain points your product helps with, which buyer personas they most relate to?

Deciding Which Problem to Target First

Remember that your one promise is the inverse of that problem.

To start with this step, view your demo qualification process. Which questions you ask to decide if the prospect has a pain point your product resolves. This often helps with identifying which pain points you should focus on. 

If you don’t have a well-developed qualification process, you can utilize these two resources to pinpoint the issue:

1. Competition: Which features and benefits they’re talking about?
2. Review: What do reviews look like on review sites like G2 or Capterra?

If you aren’t able to figure out what individuals are really speaking about liking your product or those from the competition, you can’t explore the inverse of those things.

For example, if you’re selling CRM, and the most common feature your clients say they enjoy about your product is the easy-to-use and intuitive User Interface, you might discover that the largest pain point, (and the one you should target first) is a poor User interface that leaves individuals without being able to truly use CRMs.

What to Do if You Have Several Issues to Select From?

Often a Saas product solves several problems for customers. 

This is why businesses often can’t decide on which singular issue to concentrate on. Even if this is the case, if you want compelling content and effective messaging, you’ll need to select a single issue to focus on. 

For example, you’ve discovered three large issues:

• Write them down.
• Imagine that you must delete one of them. Which one goes?
• Then, with the last two, repeating the deleting process once again.

As you narrow your focus on a single issue, the inverse of this issue will be the promise you’ll make. To continue with our CRM example from above, if the issue is “poor UI”, your promise may look like — Finally use a CRM with intuitive, simple UI.

One persona. One issue. One promise. 

Now it’s time to set up and launch your campaign for targeting this first persona.

Setting Up and Launching Your Campaigns for Targeting Your First Persona

All of this we have explored so far is to help you define your ad, lead magnets, and demo landing page messaging. 

The benefit of making these assets with a single persona, issue, and promise in mind is so you get concentrated, appealing messages around a value proposition that resonates with your first target buyers. 

Once you gain traction with your first persona, you can start launching campaigns that focus on the next.

Scaling to the Next Buyer Persona (Typically After Around One Quarter)

The most important KPI that will help you decide to add campaigns targeting the second persona is lead velocity. 

Once your pipeline starts filling up with qualified prospects and your trial or demos are downloaded more, it’s typically a great time to start targeting a second buyer persona.

Another indicator that will show you the same is the situation when several personas are starting to show up more in your sales calls. 

For instance, you’ve started with targeting The Daily Users, but The Managers are continuously coming along too, it’s likely time to start making content and ads that help them comprehend your offering.

This means that when they’re more engaged in sales calls they’re more likely to be familiar with your offering. 

Moreover, you’ll avoid the issue where managers are the ones explaining the story behind your product rather than you. They’ll often describe stuff you don’t want.

Remember, when you start targeting several personas, each of them will have its own ad copy, landing page, and content tailored specifically to them and their pain points.

That’s why you don’t target them all at once. 

This is the mistake we’re trying to avoid with this all along.

You need help with advertising, social media, website, or content that resonates with your buyer persona? 

We can help! Shoot us a message and let’s talk.