How to create a persona to level up sales with Mural

If you’re a sales rep, think about your ideal buyer: Who are they? What makes them tick?

Successful go-to-market (GTM) teams get to know their ideal customers really well. Surveys show that 73% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs.

To achieve this, one approach is to create buyer personas. Go-to-market persona development requires time, effort, and cross-functional team participation. You can create inspiring personas quickly with a real-time collaboration tool and templates. 

What is a persona in sales?

A buyer persona is a snapshot of your perfect customer using audience and market research. It includes key details about your target customer like their age, what they like to do, and their challenges so you can understand them better.

The process of developing buyer personas is part of the journey to learn about and intimately understand your ideal buyers. Take a simplistic understanding of a customer, and create a narrative to help this person feel real. Weave in data points to add depth. A thoughtfully crafted persona will make it much easier for you and your sales team to stay focused on your end audience and keep customer preferences in mind.

How do personas help GTM strategy?

Detailed personas make your marketing and sales efforts more precisely targeted, leading to better engagement and higher conversion rates. In fact, 96% of marketers believe personalization increases the chance that buyers will become repeat customers, and 94% say it increases sales. Personas are part of this personalization, and are worth the time and effort.

Successful go-to-market strategies ensure your organization offers a unique value proposition to prospective customers. Clearly define potential customer needs, motivations, and behaviors to inform this strategy.

Well-defined buyer personas can help your team:

• Identify your target market: Focus your marketing and sales efforts on the right people, and skip spending time and resources on leads that are unlikely to convert. 
• Develop better products: With a detailed understanding of your customer’s preferences, goals, and challenges, you can tailor products and services that are more likely to resonate.
• Strengthen your messaging: Amplify your marketing campaigns with unique selling points. Explain with dynamic, yet concrete, language how your product solves customer problems.
• Pick better channels: Where is the best place to communicate with customers? Where do they make purchases? You’ll get to your audiences faster when you spend time on go-to-market persona development.

What teams are responsible for the go-to-market strategy?

Great GTM strategy requires cross-functional team participation. Each team plays a key role in contributing to buyer persona development. Departments might include:

• Product makes sure the product hits a sweet spot in the market, and offers insights into product features and benefits.
• Marketing crafts messages that resonate with the target audience.
• Sales maintains relationships with prospects to close deals.
• Customer Success helps customers achieve their goals with the product.

Tap into the expertise and different perspectives from across your organization as you collaborate on buyer personas. You’ll form a more complete understanding of the customer, and your descriptions will be more valuable to others, and (ideally!) actionable.

How sales teams can benefit from well-defined buyer personas

Personas are a tool that can help sales teams sell better. They can help them create better pitches and increase conversion rates.

With buyer personas, sales reps can:

• Respond to objections more easily, if they can fully understand and even empathize with the buyer's pain and concerns.
• Qualify leads more effectively by pinpointing their ideal customer and prioritizing those leads.
• Tailor sales pitches, making them relevant to their prospects. Bring your buyers along the sales journey by involving them in a collaborative discussion from the start.
• Understand the buying process, and predict customer constraints, budget, and timelines proactively.

How to build sales personas with Mural: A 6-step guide

Be thoughtful about the persona-building process, even before you get into creating the actual personas. Here’s what we recommend: 

Step 1: Review your templates

Consider which templates you need to structure your buyer persona development process.

• Track the project
• Run a project kickoff meeting
• Brainstorm with stakeholders 
• Prioritize top personas
• Create personas

Collaborating in Mural will help your remote or hybrid team build personas real-time or asynchronously. Make it easy to track the project status, share information, and contribute to personas in a centralized visual space. This way, everyone works from the same information and can eventually agree on the final elements of your personas together.

Step 2: Run a kickoff meeting

Try kicking off your buyer persona process with a virtual workshop, or collaborate with stakeholders asynchronously. Gather teams from product, marketing, sales, marketing, and customer success to help them understand the value of building personas. Outline goals for developing buyer personas, and assign roles so everyone is clear about their responsibilities.

Step 3: Gather information

Put all the information needed to build your buyer personas in one location. Find data in places like CRM systems, dashboards, customer interview notes, market research reports, internal documentation, social media insights, and web analytics. Next, visualize themes and patterns your team notices to bring the data to life.

Step 4: Brainstorm and prioritize personas 

In a live workshop, or an asynchronous brainstorm, review the themes you’ve visualized, and start to piece together some ideas. As a group, determine top-priority personas.

Challenge the team, maybe in pairs or small groups, to choose the number of personas, type of personas, and high-level characteristics of each persona. 

Step 5: Develop personas

From there, either as part of a live workshop or asynchronous project, use the persona profile emplate to outline specific characteristics of each buyer persona. 

Don’t stress too much as you build your first draft buyer personas. Customize the templates with details important to your buyer audience like demographics, pain points, goals, and buying behaviors. (You can even save time and generate first-draft personas using mind-mapping with AI.)

Incorporate images, icons, and other visual elements to make your buyer personas more engaging and memorable. (At Mural we like to use gifs and memes to make murals more lively.)

Step 6: Review and maintain

Get feedback from the larger group, and share with other team members throughout your organization to get aligned. Leave quick feedback with the comments feature in Mural, and sprinkle sticky notes around the canvas as you react to what resonates, and what doesn’t. (Try Rose, thorn & bud method for comprehensive feedback.)

Build personas efficiently

Buyer personas take intentionality and expertise. Your team will want to dedicate time and energy to crafting and visualizing these important go-to-market tools. If you need help, Mural's Services team is happy to jump in. They can facilitate your meetings, transform your existing materials into dynamic murals, and help you develop personas that resonate throughout your organization. Get in touch with our services team to learn more. 

Ready to go big? Contact our sales team for bigger team plans to transform how your team works.