Study: B2B Buyer Personas Help Companies Exceed Lead Gen and Revenue Goals

According to Cintell’s “2016 Benchmark Study on Understanding B2B Buyers,” organizations that surpass revenue and lead goals are more effective at creating, using and maintaining personas than companies that fall short.

In fact, the study found that companies who exceed lead and revenue goals are twice as likely to create and formally document personas when compared to those that do not hit their targets.

However, successfully building personas doesn’t come easy, according to the report. Four challenges that B2B marketers face in building and using personas are getting the organization as a whole to value personas, validating persona insights with quantitative measures, training teams on how to leverage these personas in day-to-day work, and finding third party data to support persona creation.

The research indicates that companies with high-performing personas integrate buyer drivers and motivators, fears and challenges, role in buying process, organizational goals and demographic information into the development process.

High-performing companies are more than twice as likely to research the drivers and motivations of their buyers, twice as likely to include the buying preferences of their personas, and almost twice as likely to understand the fears and challenges of their buyers than their underperforming counterparts.

Based on the study’s results, companies who are most successful at leveraging buyer personas have updated the personas within the last 6 months and use a variety of sources, including qualitative interviews.

Understanding the B2B Buyer

A survey from Akoonu recently found that 91 percent of companies who built buyer personas and buyer’s journey maps feel they have a deep understanding of their audience’s goals, fears, challenges and buying roles. On the other hand, only 50 percent of companies who have not built buyer personas feel they have a deep understanding of the buyer.

Ninety percent of B2B marketers agree that understanding their buyer audience is necessary for creating engaging content.