The Power Profile™ Part II: Recipe for Success



The Power Profile™ guides you in your marketing and prospecting activities to focus on organizations and buyer roles that have a propensity to buy from your company.

The Power Profile does more than the typical target buyer profile, though. It aligns marketing and sales, which means that the right leads are being generated at the right time and in the right manner, so sales can engage in meaningful, effective ways.

Let’s dive deeper into the components that go into the Power Profile.

The Ideal Buying Organization

In a B2B selling climate, you are not focusing on a type of person or several profiles of people — you are serving up a solution to people in an entire organization. First, you need to identify which organizations those are.

We break down the information into two key areas:

  1.    Characteristics and demographics
  2.    Attributes

Characteristics and demographics involve searchable information available from databases with keywords. Look at industries and size, and go through all possible characteristics and label them as “target,” “opportunity” or “non-targeted.”

The attributes of organizations are less searchable than characteristics and demographics. This information includes catalysts for engaging the ideal buying organization, such as mergers, acquisitions, new regulations, etc. You will not find these on a database but rather by reading press releases, news articles and publicly-available documents about the organization, paying attention to local business journals, and keeping up to date on the industry and their arena.

Once you discover your ideal buying organizations, you need to uncover the right people for whom to connect.

Buyer Roles and Personas

There are a number of people within an organization who would benefit from your solution and, more importantly, make the buying decision or influence the Decision Makers.

Direct Decision Makers suffer from a relevant pain your solution can fix. They have the authority to find a solution to the pain.

Stakeholders exist in the sphere of influence. They suffer the pain, too, and they are motivated to talk to Decision Makers to find a solution, but they hold no direct buying power. Stakeholders are often direct “users” of the potential solution and/or impacted downstream from the solution.

Champions, like Stakeholders, operate in the sphere of influence for the Decision Makers. They play a critical role for both the buyer and the seller as Champions sponsor the solution (and many scenarios in the business case for no longer accepting status quo). That sponsorship can serve as a bridge between buyers and sellers, especially when it comes to navigating schedules, competitive landscape and even pricing.

To uncover these people within an organization, use empathy. Understand the use cases where the pain originates and talk to the people it affects. Ask questions, be sympathetic to their current situation and learn what the true cause of the pain is as well the impact it is having on the organization and them personally.

Without this comprehensive view of your buyer and their organization, developing a differentiated strategy aligned to the prospect’s pain is impossible. With it, you can work to serve your target buyers, become trusted advisors and solve their pains.

Are your sales and marketing teams aligned on a target buyer profile? Does your profile have the power of the Power Profile?

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