Using Client Personas When Cold Calling

With high-quality data, cold calling can become the most powerful way to connect with prospects and boost your sales.

But that’s easier said than done.

It’s here where understanding your buyer persona comes into play.

For a long time, buyer personas were associated with marketers only. But salespeople also need them since they’re the first contact point with customers.

They need to be involved in the process of defining and identifying important buyer persona for your business.

In this guide, we’ll delve deeper into how you can use buyer personas to conduct cold calls that turn prospects into qualified leads.

Understanding Buyer Persona in Cold Calling and Marketing

Whether you’re in the marketing or sales department, the buyer persona has one goal. That’s to elicit curiosity in customers, drive them into sales funnels, and hopefully convert them into paying customers.

The only difference between the two is the approach.

With marketing, a persona reveals who your customers are and their needs. You'll then find the right approach to market your product by hitting their pain points.

On the other hand, a buyer persona in cold calling helps you know how to talk to the prospect.

These include the right time to contact them, the tone to employ, and the words to choose that attract them to your product.

However, still, there’s a correlation between the two.

Marketers use personas to inform their day-to-day activities. Salespeople use it as a general guideline to help them nail their messaging with each prospect.

Importance of Buyer Persona When Cold Calling

Whether you’re in the marketing or sales department, the buyer persona has one goal. That’s to elicit curiosity in customers, drive them into sales funnels, and hopefully convert them into paying customers.

The only difference between the two is the approach.

With marketing, a persona reveals who your customers are and their needs. You'll then find the right approach to market your product by hitting their pain points.

On the other hand, a buyer persona in cold calling helps you know how to talk to the prospect.

These include the right time to contact them, the tone to employ, and the words to choose that attract them to your product.

However, still, there’s a correlation between the two.

Marketers use personas to inform their day-to-day activities. Salespeople use it as a general guideline to help them nail their messaging with each prospect.

Importance of Buyer Persona When Cold Calling

You take away guesswork - With in-depth research and a well-portrayed buyer persona, you eliminate any guesswork when talking to a prospect. You will know what to say and how to answer every question.

Conversions are Increased - Of course, this is the end goal when making a cold call. Once you’ve identified your demographic, you will quickly develop several laser-focused strategies to convert your prospects.

But note that these strategies aren’t only employed when making calls. They can be from creating customized landing pages on your website to writing stellar blog posts that attract organic readers.

You build customer confidence - Developing different buyer personas for your target market allows you to identify buzzwords that resonate with your customers.

Speaking their language creates a bond with your message and company as a whole. When done correctly, this can be a compelling act that will overhaul your cold calling process.

Strengthens Relationship with your team members - Buyer personas are excellent for salespeople because they reveal who they’re targeting. Since salespeople are the first to deal with customers, they can quickly develop a persona. And as they keep communicating in the customers’ language, they perfect their cold calling skills.

How to Create Buyer Persona for Cold Calling

Creating a buyer persona for cold calling campaigns requires that you delve deeper into research. The old method of “say your name, your company and present your solution” no longer works.

Customer behavior in sales changes rapidly. Furthermore, 76% of consumers expect you to understand their needs before you call them. They need to feel a personal connection for them to buy into your product.

A few methods for collecting data include;

• Creating forms on your website to get vital personal information.
• Conduct surveys and interviews.
• Check your current customers feedback and see what they’re saying about your product.
• Leverage your contact outside your database who might share the same needs with your target customers.

Once you have extracted the meaty raw data you need, the next step is crafting your buyer persona.

1. Fill Business Demographic Information

How you will collect this information depends on one person to another. Some people prefer questions over the phone. Others prefer online surveys or one-on-one in-person talks.

Either way, the information you’d want to know is:

• Income range
• Place of residence
• Level of education
• Career background
• Business background

Fill this information on a customizable document on Google Drive. Or you can use free templates to fill the answers. Here’s a free template sample from Hubspot.

2. Determine Their Behaviours and Psychographics

This step tries to unravel your customer’s secrets. Well, not deep secrets.

A few of the psychographic questions include

• How do they want others to see them (whether an intelligent person or a trendsetter)?
• Are they price-sensitive?
• Do they favor quality over convenience?

In matters regarding behavior, ask if they are research-oriented or impulsive. Also, get to know if they use social media and how long they spend time on it.

3. Leveraging The Data to Prepare For Cold Calling

What you will be doing in this stage is putting down a few quotes or messages that represent your prospect’s concerns.

Since you delved into their thoughts on the second step, you can come up with a list of expected rejections. This makes it easy to address impromptu questions successfully.

4. Create a Messaging That Resonates With Your Persona

You will now bring everything together in this step. Remember, cold calling isn’t the same as cold emailing. You can’t control how a conversation goes.

The only thing you can do is assimilate the nitty-gritty vernacular. You’ll also need to create a standard elevator pitch to present your solution in a unique way for different target prospects.

Now, let’s assume you’ve put all this together to develop an actual buyer persona for your cold calls. This is how it would look like.

Example Buyer Persona for Cold Calling

Let’s say you’re an email outreach SaaS company and your target market are startups looking to grow their customer base with email marketing campaigns.

Prospect Name: James Lawson Title: Startup X marketing executive

Demographic: James Lawson is a 40-year-old married man and the Chief Marketing Officer at Startup X.

Psychographics: He’s concerned with the quality and accuracy of his company’s email outreach campaigns. He’s had negative experiences with a different email finder software. 50% of his cold emails bounced because of inaccurate addresses. He’s price-sensitive but is willing to use whatever amount to get the right tool.

Behavioural: James is not a social media fanatic, but he loves to spend time reading articles on Google. So he’s probably researched different email outreach software. He likes to talk to a seller that connects on a personal level before making a purchase.

Challenge and Objections: James is concerned about the accuracy of emails generated. If the software he chooses records a dismal performance, he won’t hesitate to look for another provider. Plus, he doesn’t want a tool that delays his projects. His goal is to send 1000 cold emails every week. So the tool must be robust enough to be at par with his business needs.

How to Use the Persona

Now that you have a fully functional persona, how would you use it in an actual cold call with a prospect?

Remember that the information you retrieved from James is a representation of your overall target customers.

With that in mind, you will use the information to figure out what to say in a cold call. For example:

• “Our email finder software has a track record of extracting accurate and bulk emails for your prospects in a short time” - This makes the prospect confident about your tool.
• Our product is easy to use and gathers email faster - The statement removes the fear of hiring another person to use the tool.
• “We price our product based on the number of verified emails extracted” - It takes away the fear of extra expense for a perceived value they might not get in return.

More Tips

While making the call, remember to keep your tone confident and knowledgeable. Of course, this is fueled by doing more research on the client.

Unfortunately, 42% of sales reps don’t have enough information when they get on a call with a prospect. Furthermore, customers don’t like receiving calls from sales reps who aren’t sure what they’re saying.

You’d also want to make the conversation fun to keep your prospect engaged.

Make it a routine to peep into your persona any time you’re about to jump on a call. It’s the same reason businesses create a tagline before they put out an ad. They want to speak to the right people.

Similarly, you have to let it sink in your mind who your customers are, their challenges and goals, and the tone they are likely to respond to.

Conclusion

I couldn’t stress enough the importance of creating your buyer persona for your cold calls. But doing so doesn't mean it’s over. It also doesn’t mean that you will close every prospect you call.

Have a plan to review your plan after a few months. You are at liberty to change a few things if it does not give the results you expected.

Moreover, your company might change, or you might introduce a new product. Make sure to shift with the changes. And don’t forget to change your marketing campaign as your persona changes. They always go hand-in-hand.