SaaS buyer personas Guide

• SaaS buyer personas are essential for companies selling SaaS products and services.
• Since most brands want to be recognized and supported by their buyers, it is vital to know what their customers believe in, what their goals, motivations and interests in life are.
• This will not only ensure that their products are liked by their buyers, but also that they will recommend them to their friends, family and acquaintances.
• You need your customers to survive, and if possible, to succeed.
• This is even more true for SaaS companies that cater to different audiences and rely on recurring purchases and subscriptions.
• SaaS companies need buyer personas to identify potential customers and keep up with changes in customer behavior. Once they create them, they can easily identify problems and learn how their product is being used by customers.
• That said, SaaS buyer personas are the best way to understand your potential customers before you interact with them.

What is the buyer’s personality?

• The buyer persona is your ideal customer. It provides detailed information about a specific buyer segment, such as demographics, goals, motivations, buying behaviour and interests.
• Depending on the size and type of your business, you may have multiple buyer personas.
• These are easy to create if you have the right persona tools at your disposal. To create some manually, make sure you have the following data sources:

Quantitative data.

User data collected through site analytics tools such as Google Analytics and CRM software such as Salesforce.

• Qualitative data.

  Customer data collected through surveys, feedback, interviews and customer focus groups.

• Combining different sources of customer data helps you create accurate, data-driven personalization that allows you to better understand your prospects and existing customers.
• However, when it comes to SaaS customers, you shouldn’t confuse users with customers.
• User persona focuses on how users use your product to solve their problems, while buyer persona focuses primarily on your customers’ buying behavior.

The importance of buyer personas for SaaS companies

Did you know that Skytap, a provider of cloud automation solutions, has seen a 97% increase in leads generated by buyer personas?

It’s one of many SaaS companies that have realized the importance of buyer personas since 2013.

But how do you know if you need buyer personas?

It’s simple. If your company. SaaS is facing any of the three issues listed below, you need to proceed with creating buyer personas.

1. Many companies have the same business models

• A business model is the way a company makes money. Most SaaS companies have Saas business models that are similar in nature, if not identical.
• Take Hubspot and Salesforce, for example. Or Google and Microsoft.
• All  brands  rely on recurring payments (subscriptions) base system to generate revenue. This means they struggle to retain existing customers to reduce churn.
• In order to retain their customers long-term, SaaS companies need to fully understand their buyers. This includes their customer journeys, current preferences and needs.

2. Intense competition in the SaaS industry

The SaaS industry is one of the most competitive in the world, with around 30,000 Software as a Service (SaaS) companies worldwide.

If you make a mistake, competitors offering the same product can come in and steal your customers. Or your buyers may actively replace you with a better alternative.

To survive in the SaaS market, you therefore need to be extremely competitive.

One effective way to do that is to outperform your competitors in every possible way. Create the best products, improve the user experience, hone the SaaS buyer’s journey and personalize every interaction your customers have with your brand.

3. Changing customer behaviour

• The technology field is constantly evolving. New products, updates, breakthroughs and enhancements appear every couple of months.
• Or every two days there are new products, updates, breakthroughs and improvements.
• So do customers. They are also constantly changing. The features they liked when they bought your product might not be the same after they’ve been using it for a while.
• So for SaaS companies to keep buyers using their products, they need to keep up with changes in customer behaviour, needs and technology.
• Understand what they want, what solutions they’re looking for, what tasks they want to accomplish, and what alternatives they’re considering.
• Buyer personas built with the right customer data can address all of these issues and accelerate the SaaS buying process.

B2B purchasing process: Stages and decision-makers

• The business-to-business (B2B) purchasing process refers to the decision-making stages a company goes through when purchasing products or services from another company.
• The B2B purchasing process involves several stages, from an individual’s perception of a problem to selecting a supplier and obtaining the company’s approval.
• The SaaS buying process is even more difficult because it involves several decision-makers, requiring the development of buyer personas for each stakeholder.

Five types of decision-makers for SaaS products

In the sales process for SaaS-based products, the decision maker is the person who doesn’t need to get approval from other people before making a purchase. This is usually a person in a leadership position, such as a C-suite executive.

According to Gartner, the number of decision-makers in a B2B purchasing group can vary from six to ten people.

However, the following are the five main decision-makers who influence the SaaS purchasing process:

Initiator.
The person in the organization who recognizes what the problem is and looks for other solutions.

Influencer.

Someone inside (or outside) the company who can influence and persuade decision makers to buy the product.

Decision maker.

Decision makers are the most important part of the sales process because they make the final buying decision.

Buyer.

The person responsible for selecting suppliers and contacting them to make a purchase.

End user.

The person who uses the product on a daily basis and in some cases is the creator of the product.

All of these people help in the decision-making process in one way or another, so it is vital to include them in the sales plan.

Example of B2B CRM software purchasing process

Here’s an example of how decision makers in the B2B sector are involved in the sales process for SaaS CRM software such as Hubspot.

• The buying process starts with the vendor noticing a problem with their customer data management system. Let’s say inaccurate data that leads to problems in communicating with customers.
• The retailer realizes it needs a CRM solution and starts looking for alternatives.
• As the problem affects the marketing and customer service teams, the marketing manager and customer service manager will act as influencers. They will explain the benefits of the software to the chief operating officer (COO).

If the COO is impressed by their suggestions, he will give the green light to purchase the CRM.

The buyers will then evaluate the vendors based on features, cost and support. They may also ask for feedback from users (sales, marketing and customer service teams).

After thorough research and discussion, the CRM product is purchased.

What is a SaaS buyer persona?

SaaS buyer personas or SaaS personas are the ideal customers for your SaaS products and services.

They are not the same as buyer personas because they do not focus exclusively on the buyer.

As we’ve already explained, the buying process has multiple decision makers, such as initiators, influencers, end users, etc. There are many personas to go through in the sales cycle, and SaaS marketers need to consider them all.

SaaS buyer personas are the best way to understand all audience segments.

They are created based on rich data collected from demographic, behavioral and corporate sources. Market research, third-party data, customer surveys and internal data can also be used to create SaaS personas.

Why should you create a SaaS buyer persona?

To increase conversions, sales and revenue you should create buyer persona.

Statistics show that 82% of companies that use personas have managed to create a better value proposition.

In addition, buyer personas provide details that help identify the needs, challenges and preferences of the target audience.

SaaS companies can use this knowledge to their advantage and adapt marketing strategies, refine product features and improve the customer experience. This will result in better customer engagement.

How to create SaaS buyer personas?

If you know what you are doing, it is not too difficult to create SaaS buyer personas. Depending on the type of company you run, you can have as few as two buyer personas or as many as ten.

It doesn’t matter how many you create as long as they convey useful customer insights and appropriate use cases in relation to your SaaS product.

However, here are some simple steps to follow when creating SaaS buyer personas.

Conduct thorough market research

Conducting market research should be your priority. This will give you a good idea of how your products and services are found and used by professionals.

You should have a clear picture of the target audience you want to convert into customers.

Conduct focus groups, interviews, online surveys, etc. to learn more about your existing customers. Use internal data logs to collect information, for example, about conversations with your sales team, website interactions, purchase history and decision makers.

Online tools such as Google Analytics and social media dashboards are a treasure trove of information that will bring you closer to creating SaaS customer personas.

Below are some questions you can ask to get a clearer picture of what your prospects and customers want:

What’s the biggest problem that’s holding your business back?

What do you like about our product/service?

How do you think our product/service can help you solve your problem?

Is there a competitor’s product that you prefer? If so, why?

What should we do to change your buying decision in our favour?

What tools do you use in your daily work? 

Step 2. Write down your customers’ pains and problems

If you don’t know exactly what problems you are solving, it will be difficult to offer the best solution.

Every SaaS buyer’s journey begins the moment potential customers realize they have a problem or challenge they need to solve, which will make them look for a solution. You need to understand their challenges and goals, as well as the pain points that prevent them from achieving them.

Find out what motivates them, what their goals and motivations are. Make a note of the areas in which they are struggling. What challenges do they face on a regular basis? How can you solve their problems?

As you track down your customers’ pain points, your buyer persona will emerge. SaaS will have a clearer story of how your product works as a solution par excellence.

Step 3: Organize your customer data

Different departments handling customer data in isolation is a big problem that most companies don’t know or care about.

Siloed data is useless. They don’t provide insight into the customer journey, they don’t provide any contextual information about how customers use different platforms, their behaviors and actions.

It would be helpful to have a consistent view of how and where this data is hosted.

When buyer data is organized and accessible across departments, hidden patterns and trends in user behavior can be uncovered.

Step 4: Enriching the segmentation data

Once all the data is combined, you can enrich it with details such as contact details to ensure that the right data is tagged with the right customers.

Choose tools that use multiple sources and contact points to automatically update customer history.

This ensures that the data you are working with is up-to-date and captures every customer interaction.

Omitting important details about b2b customers, such as job description, work experience, roles (which are constantly changing), organisation, number of employees, industry, location or revenue, can be damaging and lead to the creation of inaccurate customer personas.

Once the data is enriched, it is easy to create different segments that can become SaaS buyer personas.

Step 5. Identification of the gears of the decision wheel

Within its segments, there are various sub-segments. For example, customers who buy the product and users who actually use the product.

In reality, only some people in the organization will be responsible for decision making, while others in the same organization will only be able to influence the process to a certain extent. You can find these people by their job roles.

Someone who can influence may be more concerned with the buying experience, while a decision maker may be more focused on contract terms or finance.

It is essential to identify decision makers and create different content and communication strategy for each sub-sector.

Step 6: Create Buyer Personas

Creating buyer personas should be the last step in all your research efforts.

Once you’ve collected the necessary audience data and identified the different buyer segments, you should start creating personas.

Give the SaaS buyer personas a name, a background, and a persona. They should be able to tell the buyer’s story – who they are, why they are looking for a solution like yours, how they found your product, what problem it solved and whether they would recommend your product to others.

How to use buyer personalization for SaaS products?

By learning buyer personas, you’ll be able to identify their goals, motivations, problems, and buying decisions that influence your SaaS product.

You’ll be able to develop a strategy that is tailored to their needs.