Lead generation engines will have higher visits and engagement when there is a better understanding of buyer pain points.

In a highly competitive market, understanding the behavior and decision-making process of an organization’s target audience is crucial for successful marketing and sales efforts. However, many marketers in the software industry face the challenge of not knowing their buyer personas well enough, leading to ineffective marketing strategies and missed opportunities. To address this issue and help software marketers create more effective strategies, SoftwareReviews, a leading business-to-business (B2B) software resource, has released a new research-backed blueprint called Create a Buyer Persona and Journey.

This blueprint provides step-by-step guidance to help software marketers better understand their buyers, including how or why they purchase. This deeper buyer understanding will help in marketing, selling, and achieving product-market fit in an increasingly challenging market.

SoftwareReviews’ research details the challenges that B2B marketers can experience without documented buyer personas and journeys. These challenges include not converting contacts into leads because of messaging that does not resonate with buyers, as well as products failing to reach their target audience due to a shallow understanding of buyer needs. Other common challenges are unopened sales emails and failed discovery attempts caused by a lack of knowledge of a buyer’s challenges, pain points, and needs.

“Buyer personas and journeys are critical success factors of a successful go-to-market strategy for software,” says Jeff Golterman, managing director at SoftwareReviews. “Without them, B2B software marketers will fail to optimize product-market fit, lead generation, and sales effectiveness.”

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Despite personas being a critical element, many organizations don’t have them documented or struggle to build the framework due to a lack of alignment and collaboration among marketing, product, and sales. Limited access to tools and techniques for building personas and buyer journeys is another obstacle software marketers face. An agile environment, combined with the pressure to generate revenue quickly, means that high-tech marketers may often skip the steps necessary to build buyer persona understanding.

The firm’s research further indicates that organizations can align marketing, sales, and product with a common framework and a targeted output, empowering teams to collaborate and share current knowledge on buyer personas and journeys. Targeting 12-15 customers and prospects to interview will enable marketers to gain valuable buyer persona insights. Findings in the blueprint support this approach; B2B software marketers who activate findings from buyer personas and journeys will see a 50% improvement in results.

Buyer personas and journeys are essential for go-to-market success as they unlock several advantages for marketers. By adopting SoftwareReviews’ recommended approach, marketers can expect the following results:

• Greater stakeholder alignment – When marketing, product, and sales agree on personas, less time is wasted on targeting alternate personas.
• Improved product-market fit – Buyers see pain-relieving features and value-based pricing “because you asked vs. guessed,” and win rates will increase.
• Greater open and click-through rates – Visits and engagement across the lead generation engine will go up.
• More qualified leads – Improved lead scoring algorithm and qualified leads can be expected.
• Increased sales cycle velocity – Teams should prepare for improved sales call productivity and optimized sales processes.

Although buyer personas and journeys are beneficial, if marketers develop them without understanding or fully activating the findings, they risk wasting precious time and resources throughout the customer targeting and acquisition process.

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