BuyerDNAHow to build your BuyerDNA

August 4, 2021

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Inside sales is just as much data driven as it is technology driven.

Without knowing who your customers are, the industry they work in, or the specific needs and pain points they have, you are essentially left swiping in the dark, just hoping for a sale. That’s where BuyerDNA can help, illuminating the path to sales success by offering powerful, actionable insights. Equipping yourself with this knowledge will help you better understand clients in a more advanced way. In turn, this will improve sales performance and drive revenue for your business.

Our latest blog will explore what a BuyerDNA is, what benefits it can offer, and how you can start building your own BuyerDNA.

What is a BuyerDNA?

Let’s talk more about where the term BuyerDNA originated from and why it was invented. BuyerDNA is a sales theory engineered by InsideOut with the intention of giving businesses a more reliable, data driven way to understand who their customers are and the challenges they face.

Generating a BuyerDNA is a new, dynamic method of analyzing customers and understanding your buyers in more depth. Building a BuyerDNA can amplify the effectiveness of your inside sales strategies, influencing your messaging and touch patterns to accelerate revenue growth. By having the most detailed profile of your prospects, you can communicate with them and understand their challenges and pain points more effectively.

BuyerDNA vs. ICPs and Buyer Personas

How do these methodologies compare?

Traditionally, sales and marketing professionals have used ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and buyer personas to tailor their sales plays and strategies. In sales and marketing, these are the two most commonly used methods of identifying who a company’s prospective customers are and the challenges they face.

ICPs generate profiles based on factors such as company’s budget, revenue, and size, as well as the industry they operate in, their geographic location, and any legal reasons that might limit their potential customer base. Already, these surface level aspects can be analyzed to begin developing a picture of potential customers.

Buyer Personas are different in that they attempt to characterize your customers. According to HubSpot, who first coined the term, Buyer Personas are “a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer or target customer.”

These are created based on knowledgeable assumptions regarding a customer or client’s demographics, behavior pattern, goals, and motivations. Working with these insights allows you to better picture exactly who you are reaching out to and how to personalize your messaging.

Although valuable, we argue that a “semi-fictional” representation of who your customers are limits your perspective. Instead of relying on gut feelings and opinion, you can create a more accurate profile by tapping into the wealth of data your business already has. This is exactly what the BuyerDNA looks to achieve, eliminating guesswork by supporting assumptions with data and analytics from sales and marketing.

In other words, InsideOut’s BuyerDNAs fuse together elements of Buyer Personas and ICPs, elevating these concepts with a comprehensive, data-driven approach. Not only that, it understands that sales success is a moving target.

Benefits of using BuyerDNA

We’ve already outlined a number of key benefits associated with using the BuyerDNA methodology.

The overriding advantage of these profiles is that they are both more in-depth and backed up by data, instead of working off opinion and bias alone. It’s not uncommon for businesses to build their sales strategy around the biased perceptions of leadership. However, this is naturally prone to being influenced by emotion and isolated or individual experiences. Of course, these are still an important influential factor in crafting your BuyerDNAs.

Although we are experts in inside sales and accelerating revenue, we don’t claim to know your business better than you do. Your expertise and experience will lend valuable insights that can’t be gleaned from raw numbers and statistics. As a result, BuyerDNAs have a 80/20 split between data the intuition of market leaders.

This approach has been devised by sales experts boasting many years of experience working with hundreds of clients who each have their own unique challenges and buyer profiles. We also understand that BuyerDNAs should be a living asset for your organization. They will continue to evolve over time as new data becomes available. This reflects the reality that your buyers are constantly evolving and changing in terms of their behaviors, as well as the messaging they’re most responsive to.

When building your BuyerDNAs, it is important to remember that this is a living process. In order to maintain your strategic advantage, you will need to update your BuyerDNAs to reflect changes in data.

How to build your BuyerDNA

This next section will give an overview of how to build a BuyerDNA, walking you through some of the steps we take.

So, where do we start in helping you generate your own BuyerDNA profiles? The first step is to initiate a discovery call to better understand you and what your company’s perception of an ideal customer is. This first stage plays out similarly to running an ICP session, which has plenty of value in and of itself. Not all companies will have generated ICPs and those who have may not have updated theirs in quite some time.

Buyer Personas are then used to help visualise the customers you are reaching out to. Are they ore decision maker or not? How do they prefer being communicated with? Are there demographic factors that should influence our sales messaging? This approach allows us to pinpoint exactly who we are connecting with and their role within the structure of an organization.

We don’t stop there, however. This is where data plays a key factor. We fuse together your expert knowledge and industry experience with insights extracted from the rich well of data available on your clients.

The type of data (as well as the amount required) will vary depending on what you see as being the most valuable. In most cases it’s easy to identify your best customers based on:

Who generates the highest profits for your business?
What is their account growth rate? Are they spending more year-on-year?
How long are their contracts and how likely are they to renew?
How low maintenance are they? How easy is it to keep them happy?
What is their projected lifetime value?
How likely are they to recommend you?

While some of these can be answered by sourcing easy-to-find figures, others will require you to dig deeper, gathering relevant data from account managers.

For instance, in order to determine how low maintenance a client is, you will need to accurately estimate the time and resources spent delivering what they expect and maintaining a good relationship. Meanwhile, the likelihood of being recommended by a client (referral business) can be measured using the NPS or Net Promoter Score which charts a customer’s experience by assigning numbers between one and ten across various categories.

The more transparency and openness you are able to offer, the more accurate the information. However, there will be a cutoff point. Where some aspects of building your BuyerDNA can benefit from analyzing granular pieces of data, this won’t be necessary to answer every question.

It’s important to remember that the aim of creating BuyerDNA profiles isn’t just to assign labels to the clients you already have. We’ll help you understand the parameters of what defines a theoretical ideal customer for your business that you want to attract. The BuyerDNA process will equip you with the actionable insights needed to reach and communicate with these prospective customers and help them tackle any challenges and pain points.

How long does it take to generate a BuyerDNA?

Again, this will vary depending on your business and industry, how long you have been operating, and the quality/quantity of data available. Determining your BuyerDNA will require an initial meeting of around 30 minutes to establish the data required, and who in the organization will be responsible for collecting this. The BuyerDNA session itself can then take up to 90 minutes, going through a comprehensive list of questions to make sure profiles are as accurate and reliable as possible.

Don’t wait: create your own BuyerDNA

BuyerDNAs provide accurate information backed up by data instead of being built around semi-fictional representations of buyers. There is less guesswork involved, and more actionable insights to work with.

Having reviewed the benefits and processes behind creating BuyerDNAs, it’s time to create your own. Connect with one of our sales experts and we’ll begin to help you generate data-driven profiles, creating actionable insights to improve your sales strategies.

As a reminder, it’s important to view your BuyerDNAs as a living asset. In order to maintain your strategic advantage (or identify new opportunities) you will need to update them to reflect changes in data.