Creating Buyer Personas for your MSP

Crafting your MSP buyer personas is one of your first steps in generating a growth strategy for your business.

How well do you know your customers? I mean, do you really know them?

Who are you selling your services to? Or more importantly, who do you wish you were selling to?

If you want to hit your business growthtargets then you need to have a grip on your customers’ decision making processes, and their motivations, and their demographics.

Having robust buyer personas is anessential first step to meeting your high growth business hopes.

What is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is the definition ofthe main characteristics held by a group of your customers. A persona is arepresentation of your favourite type of customer’s key decision maker. It is a representation of the traits of asufficiently big enough pool of customers and potential customers that you canuse to guide your marketing planning and growth strategy.

I consider a buyer persona to be plain oldfashioned good manners as well as robust growth marketing. It means you have agood grasp of who your customers are, what they need, and what they want. Youcan have conversations with them intelligently and empathise with their needsbecause you understand them.

There is no one size fits all answer tocreating buyer personas. It really does depend on the complexity of yourservice offering.

But you have to start somewhere, and hereis what I recommend.

As an MSP you are selling business to business (B2B) and so your persona will start with the basics of their working characteristics:

• Job Title
• Industry
• Education
• Age
• Company turnover

To this basic information you will want toadd a more personal layer of behavioural information:

• Where do they get theirinformation from?
• What keeps them awake at night?
• What challenges do they face?
• How do they make decisions?
• What are their business goals?
• What motivates him personally?

An example of an MSP buyer persona

It is very likely that your business isgoing to have several buyer personas. You key decision maker might be theowner/director of a company, or it might be the head of technology, or it mightbe a finance director.  You will have apersona for each distinct type of decision maker.

And you already know your selling messagesto a finance director is going to be quite different to head of technology.

Let’s start with the finance director:

Persona Name:  Michael the Money Man

Job Title: Finance Director
Industry: Legal Services
Education: MBA
Age: 45+
Company turnover: 2,000,000

Business Goals:

• To help the company hit itsrevenue and profit targets
• To reduce costs whereappropriate
• To manage his cashflow

What keeps him awake at night?

• He thinks his current provider isn’t doing a good enough job
• His fee earners are complainingthe network is down too often
• He’s had this problem beforewith another MSP
• He’s not an IT expert and he’snot sure what to do next

Personal motivation:

• Give the IT problem to somebodyhe can trust to worry about
• He wants to see proof that anew supplier really is the best
• Be able to brag that he has gotthe best possible MSP
• Wants to be recognized makinggood decisions.

Gathering information on your MSP personas

I am sure you have access to lots of data about your customers, and now is the time to put that data to work.

Better yet, put your team to work and besure to include not only your sales or marketing colleagues, but also your customer support crew and anybody else who has experience working with your customers. Have a brainstorming session where together your pool your knowledgeabout your favourite and most profitable customers.

You will want to take a look at yourAnalytics data, your ticketing system, your CRM data, your social media data.

What will you do with your personas?

Once you have developed your personas itwill be time to start creating a journey for your most desired company and key decision maker to engage with your company.

How will your target persona even know your company exists? You will need to raiseawareness of your company and its services. You need to be visible in thesearch engines or other information sources when your persona is gatheringinformation about potential MSPs to work with. And you need to create contentthat will answer their basic questions.

How can you help your customer decideyou’re a good fit for their needs? Your buyer willbe considering a number of suppliers, so you need to position yourself as beingthe best company to meet their needs.

How can you help them to make thedecision? When you’re buyer is ready to make thedecision, you need to convince them that you’re the best options. This is whereyou can make use of your testimonials and case studies.

How will you keep them loyal? This is perhaps the most important part. Once you have won theirbusiness you never want to lose them as a customer. What do they need to keeployal to your company?