Grounding Strategy in Research: How Dun & Bradstreet Built Buyer Personas Sales Actually Use
To drive successful revenue marketing efforts, an organization’s marketing and sales strategy has to go beyond demographics and firmographics: it has to be grounded in the reality of how and why buyers buy.
Personas grounded in how buyers actually buy.
This reality is characterized not only by who your buyers are but also what they are thinking, feeling, and doing at each stage of the journey, as they conduct research, and as they interact with others. As Dun & Bradstreet discovered while working with Demand Spring, developing comprehensive, research-based buyer personas is a key component of successful sales and marketing strategies.
Dun & Bradstreet, a leading global provider of B2B data, insights and AI-driven platforms, helps organizations around the world grow and thrive. Dun & Bradstreet’s Data Cloud fuels solutions and delivers insights that empower customers to grow revenue, increase margins, manage risk, and help stay compliant.
The business challenge.
Over the years, the team at Dun & Bradstreet had initiated multiple efforts to introduce buyer personas, and to get sales comfortable using them in their prospect outreach. But it was difficult to get any traction with these efforts because many of the personas they introduced were simply based on Google research, and were not actually representative of their true customer base.
Research shows that companies that exceeded their lead and revenue goals were four times more likely to use personas for demand generation than those that missed their lead and revenue goals.
Dun & Bradstreet realized that in order to be highly effective in their sales and marketing efforts, they needed to implement a more research-based approach for their persona program. The team at Demand Spring was brought in to help them do just that.
Testimonial
“Building buyer personas is probably one of the most powerful ways that organizations can change and improve their strategic marketing efforts and sales enablement processes.”
Start with one persona, and get it right.
Dun & Bradstreet brought Demand Spring on board and kicked off their first persona project - focusing specifically on their finance customers. The Demand Spring team undertook comprehensive research through customer interviews and surveys to determine what Dun & Bradstreet’s typical finance customer looks like. The result of this research was a detailed persona report that the team named “Finance Finn”.
Following the success of “Finance Finn”, the team continued working with Demand Spring to develop personas for a number of additional focus areas.
Testimonial
“The result of this research and the process of pulling together this persona content is something that we’ve been able to use across our finance business. Having everything backed up by actual research and quotes from customers, and having the quality of the profile and the buyer journey that Demand Spring provided has been phenomenal.”
Personas the sales team asks for on day one.
Going into this project, the Dun & Bradstreet team had set out two primary objectives:
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To enable the sales team to be able to speak to prospects and customers in an informed and educated way.
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To ensure the marketing team had a solid foundation upon which to build their marketing initiatives.
The sales team has come to rely on the buyer personas, and regularly use the profiles and buyer journeys to inform how they speak to prospects and customers. One of the first things that new sales team members ask for are the persona materials in order to inform themselves before doing any outreach. The marketing team has been able to track how often the sales team is accessing and referencing content through their sales content management system, and the persona materials have become one of the most used assets in the organization.
Beyond sales enablement, the research that went into developing these personas has helped the marketing team to better understand their customers, and to develop marketing messages that speak directly to them. In Abby Lutte’s words: “We were definitely successful in achieving all of our objectives. The sales and marketing teams have come to rely on the customer personas that have been developed, and are using them on a regular basis.”
Testimonial
“We have had a great experience working with the Demand Spring team, and really appreciate the partnership and collaboration. I’ve worked with a lot of consultancies over the years, and the amount of time and effort that the Demand Spring team put into our project was second to none. We could see from the beginning that they wanted this project to be as successful as possible.”
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About Demand Spring
Demand Spring is an integrated Revenue Marketing consultancy. We help marketing organizations scale their ability to contribute to pipeline and revenue by transforming marketing practices, delivering exceptional customer experiences, and driving revenue.
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