How can you sell if you don't know who the buyer is?
When I talk to companies about who their product is for, it’s common to get a list of engineering job titles, often all across the engineering organization and sometimes veering into other departments, like legal and compliance.
Many products have multiple user profiles, and that is ok. Many products have different buyers and users, and that is ok (as I’ve pointed out before, the classic example of different buyers and users is anything for kids under about 10 — no matter how much the kids loves the product, it’s the parent who has to be convinced it’s worth the money). But if you have 5 different buyer personas for a single product, you probably haven’t figured out what value your product provides to customers.
The head of development, head of infrastructure and head of compliance have different criteria when purchasing a decision. The value that matters to the head of compliance probably isn’t meaningful to the head of infrastructure, and vice versa. If you try to create a sales deck or a marketing campaign that addresses all of them, you’ll end up confusing everyone.
If you know the core, differentiated value you provide, your buyer should be obvious. Do you make it easier to recover from incidents? Improve retention among developers? Make it easier to put together a compliance report during an audit? But wait… what if you all of the above?
It’s entirely possible you can move a needle for a variety of metrics and that you can provide value for people in different roles. But you’ll end up being most successful if you focus on the buyer who will get the most value out of the product instead of trying to sell to everyone who could possibly benefit. Doing so will help you:
Use language and data that your buyer will understand and care about
Make sure the value you provide isn’t missed among a bunch of other value statements that the buyer doesn’t care about
Avoid having sales cycles that require approval from 5 different departments.
If you position your product as something that is for 5 different buyers, every sale is probably going to involve a huge number of stakeholders. That’s going to stretch out sales cycles and ultimately kill deals. If you have one buyer who clearly understands how the product will make his or her life better (and lead to getting a promotion or something) — and it doesn’t look like something that’s going to need extensive sign-offs — you’ll close more deals, quicker.
If you don’t know who your buyer is, you probably have a positioning problem. If you’d like help refining your positioning, schedule a time to chat.