So, now that you've nailed down your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), it’s time to zoom in on the actual people behind those companies. Who are the decision-makers you need to connect with? Who will you send LinkedIn requests to, call, and (hopefully) craft personalized, relevant messages for?

Stage 2: Buyer Persona (BP)

With a clear ICP, the next step is identifying the key decision-makers within those companies. These are the people you’ll target in your outreach campaigns.

To do this, start by researching your own client portfolio. This part is relatively easy—you already know your customers and understand the buying process. Was it the Founder of a startup, the CTO of a scale-up, or the Head of Technology at an SMB? Maybe it was a committee of decision-makers. Understanding the roles involved is crucial.

When analyzing your competition, there are a few shortcuts. Look at testimonials, Clutch reviews, or even project completion videos that competitors post. These often mention the key decision-makers, giving you more insight into their structure.

At this stage, you should ask yourself several key questions to fully flesh out your Buyer Persona. Ideally, you’ll know the profile so well it’s like knowing your best friend. But we’re not diving into details like their favorite Friday night drink at 9PM at a local bar 🙂

Instead, let’s focus on relevant aspects of their professional lives:

1. Professional Information

  • What’s their job title or role?
  • What are their key responsibilities?
  • How experienced are they in their field?

2. Challenges and Pain Points

  • What are the biggest challenges they face at work?
  • What common frustrations do they encounter?
  • How do these challenges relate to your product or service?

3. Goals and Motivations

  • What are their short-term and long-term professional goals?
  • What are they trying to achieve in their job or business?

4. Behavioral Information

  • Where do they go for information (social media, blogs, conferences)?
  • What content formats do they prefer (articles, videos, podcasts)?
  • Who influences their decisions (colleagues, industry experts)?

5. Technology and Tools

  • What software or platforms do they use daily?
  • Are they tech-savvy or hesitant to adopt new tools?

6. Objections and Barriers

  • What objections might they have to your product or service?
  • What risks do they perceive in adopting your solution?
  • What reasons could prevent them from buying?

7. Buying Behavior

  • How do they prefer to interact with vendors?
  • What’s their budget or spending authority?
  • What drives them to finalize a purchase (case studies, referrals)?

In order to see how we can get there, let’s take our example from the previous article: a fintech scale-up in the DACH region, with 50–200 employees, at Series A funding, generating $10M–$20M annually. Who’s the key decision-maker in such a company?

The rule of thumb is that the larger the company, the more people are involved in decision-making. In a 1-10 person startup, it’s likely the CEO or a Co-Founder. In a 50-200 person scale-up, you might have to target multiple people: a CEO, CTO, CFO, VP of Engineering, etc.

Now, if you’ve worked with similar companies before, you can identify key roles based on your past experience. For example, if the CTO was your primary contact, look for similar people in other fintech companies. Download them as PDFs, ex. on LinkedIn there’s an option to do that, upload them to ChatGPT or any other AI-based app and upload the list of questions.

While AI can be a starting point, remember that it’s not a magic pill as this can be too generic and state the obvious 🙂 You’ll need to adjust and refine the insights based on your industry and specific needs.

Stage 3: Crafting Hypotheses

Once you’ve identified your ICP and Buyer Personas, it’s time to develop hypotheses for your outreach. 

What is a hypothesis? To put it simply, it’s an assumption that we believe will most effectively engage our target audience and lead to higher conversion rates.

Since we know the exact target company, the profile of the person we reach out to, the hypothesis will illustrate what pain point we’re going to address, what solution we’re proposing to solve this issue and what key results does the person need to expect with our solution.

Here’s how to craft a solid hypothesis:

  • Past Experience: You’ve solved problem X for a similar company before, so you know it’s relevant.
  • Competition: You see a trend where competitors are solving problem Y, and you have the expertise to do the same.
  • Market Research: You’ve identified that problem XYZ is trending in the industry and needs attention.

Alternatively, as with buyer personas, you can use AI to formulate them.

Let’s use our fintech example:

Key Challenge: The CTO is struggling with slow transaction processing speeds, which impacts the user experience and increases churn.
Solution: Your company offers a low-latency, real-time transaction processing system, specifically optimized for fintech.
Expected Result: By integrating your system, transaction times could be reduced by 50%, improving customer satisfaction and retention rates.
Related Case Study: We’ve implemented this for Google and Facebook—here are the case studies.

After forming your hypothesis, you need to gather the data, create messaging and launch the campaign in any of your outreach apps that you use.

Make sure your contact list is large enough to get meaningful data - 100 contacts with only 2 replies won’t give you solid conclusions.

The beauty of this process is that you can create multiple hypotheses, test them, and refine them based on what works for your particular case. Time is the biggest challenge, but the faster you generate and test these assumptions, the quicker you’ll understand what resonates with your target audience.

Talk to you soon! 🔥

October 2, 2024