This is part three of a four-part Blog series discussing the six “types” or buyer personas of B2B buyers that occupy the digital space. We also offer some practical tips on how to adapt your sales and marketing strategies to make it easier for your buyer.
The second part of this blog series discussed the buyer personas of the Window Shopper and The Device Queen. This blog dives into the Mystery Man and the Eager Beaver.
Different Types of Buyer Persona
The Mystery Man
Our next buyer is the mystery man. To me, he’s like the popular guy in high school. You never know what we wants, what he’s doing, or if he’s ever going to call you again. He seems like he’s interested, but you never know how many of your competitors he’s talking to at the same time. The mystery man may call you three times in a week or spend a night reading every blog you’ve ever written, only to disappear into digital oblivion for the next six months, or forever.
To be honest, if you don’t have a marketing automation platform, you don’t really have any hope of selling to the mystery man buyer persona. Because his aloof, “I-do-what-I-want-when-I-want” attitude is baffling to a sales team who expects a linear progression from discovery to close, marketing has to step in to explain what’s happening behind the scenes.
Your mystery man could actually be a team of mystery men from the same company, each member having stake in the buying decision and educating themselves separately over the course of a few months. Or, your mystery man may be doing early stage research for a purchase he plans to make a year from now. Or, he could be workaholic from your own industry trying to get an edge on the competition.
In any of these situations, a marketing automation platform will help you identify who you are interacting with and track digital engagement over time—giving you and your sales team more visibility into who to sell to and when to sell. Once a prospect shows up in your marketing automation platform, they will stay there as long as you want. That way, you will know the second a cold lead from six months ago has revisited your content, and you can pick up where you left off.
The Eager Beaver
The next type of buyer grew up with graphing calculators and spellcheck—meaning his need for instant gratification in regards to information was hardwired from childhood. This need for instant gratification has only increased in recent years with faster internet speeds and more powerful search engines, and if you aren’t able to deliver on this demand, you’ll be left in the dust.
The motto of the eager beaver is, “Just let me do it myself. Now!” He is independent and impatient and does not want to have to wait for you to respond to his email. In other words, he wants to learn everything there is to know about your company without personally interacting with you. And if you want to sell to him, you need to give him what he wants.
To sell to the eager beaver, every aspect of your sales script needs to be replicated into a digital format and posted where it can be easily found. This means you need general “About Us” and “Services” pages to help people get to know you in addition to more specific product or service info that will help those further along in the buying cycle. You basically need to create a do-it-yourself, digital version of the process your top salesman goes through with each prospect. For example, if your salesman takes your prospects through a product or software demo before closing, then record the demo and publish on a landing page, so it can be accessible anytime.
You can still have requirements to download or access your high-value content in order to track buyer intent, just remember that “too many download requirements” is the number one annoyance of B2B buyers today.
For the last part of this blog series profiling the final two buyer personas, click here.
One of the top advantages of Marketing Automation is the ability to help your sales rep understand how to best sell to this buyer. If you would like more educational content on how integrating insights about your buyers with marketing automation can affect your sales, click here.
To learn more about the sales and marketing outsourcing services we offer (including marketing automation implementation, content development and lead nurturing), you can check out our services page. If you are interested in a free review of your sales cycle, you can request one here.
