Develop your Persona and Subscribe to Find Buyers that Match

Besides providing you with an immense B2B database at Apollo, we also equip you with intuitive and efficient tools to quickly find potential customers.

In this blog post, we’ll walk through two improved prospecting features, Persona and Search Subscription, that will help you find the right buyers instantly and effortlessly so that you can focus on selling.

What is a persona, and why do you need one (or several)?

A persona represents the individual buyers within your ideal customer profile (the target company you’re going after). To understand the personas you want to target, you should look at the specific demographics, job titles, challenges, and goals of the people who purchase your products or services.

There are four reasons why establishing clear personas is important when prospecting:

1. Personas help you better understand your ideal buyer. Narrowing in on your persona will help you understand the individual buyer profile with which your product and service have more success. For example, your product or service might resonate more with digital marketing managers versus the head of marketing, whose day-to-day work is very different.
2. Personas help you create personalized outreach based on your prospects' pain points. Based on the different personas defined, you’ll be able to create a more personalized outreach that directly speaks to each one of their pain points. For example, you can help digital marketing managers and heads of marketing with lead list building. To a digital marketer, you’d address their pain point of driving clicks or impressions to their digital campaigns. While to a head of marketing, you’d address their pain point of driving ROI to their overall marketing initiatives. While both seem to be similar pain points, how you message or speak to them affects your conversion.
3. Personas are the key stakeholders in Account-Based Sales. Account-Based Sales strategy is a common B2B strategy, where the entire company focuses its efforts on targeting high-value accounts. This strategy entails a multi-touch and multi-channel strategy coordinated across teams to deliver a hyper-personalized outreach and onboarding experience. A key pillar to Account-Based selling is reaching out to the right buyer personas at the target account. According to HubSpot, you need to talk to an average of 6.8 stakeholders to win the account!
4. Personas help you prospect faster and more efficiently. Prospect faster and quickly identify the good leads from the bad leads so that you don’t waste time on prospects who are unlikely to become buyers. With sophisticated analytics at hand on Apollo, you’d be able to track conversions from each outreach campaign for each of your personas.

Searching for your Persona in Apollo

Since you know that a persona is essential to define as part of your prospecting strategy, using Apollo’s Persona feature is a no-brainer.

The Persona feature allows you to filter through contacts in Apollo based on their job title, management level, industry, location, and the number of employees. As you’re applying your filters, you’ll see how the total amount of new leads narrows down to your ideal individual buyer.

Let’s continue with the example above of digital marketing managers. Here’s an example of the Apollo filters you could apply to find your ideal buyer:

• Job title: “digital marketing managers”
• Management level: “Manager”
• Industry: “computer software”
• Location: “United States”
• # of Employees: “11-2000”

Once you’ve applied the filters, you’ll narrow it down to 1,057 new leads that fit your target persona. Hit "Save Persona" and give it a name (in this case, "Digital Marketing Managers"). Then apply the Persona to your search.

With saved Personas, you’ll reduce the need to re-apply the same filters every time you search for people. Apollo can also track your outreach activities and provide analytics on which personas engage with you the most based on your email or call engagement metrics (available only if you use Apollo Sequences and Dialer).

Of course, before you reach out to these personas, you’ll want to make sure you understand their unique challenges and goals so you can talk to them about how your solution can help them.

Find more buyers that match your Persona with Search Subscription

Once you’re clear on your Persona, how do you quickly find more people that fit the profile? When prospecting on the Apollo platform, you can save a search and now subscribe to get email alerts when we find new people or companies that match your search criteria.

The Apollo database constantly grows with new people and company records. With Search Subscription, you can get alerts when new relevant records are added. This way, you can stay on top of your prospecting efforts with new leads at your fingertips.

Let’s do a quick walk-through of how it works:

1. Let’s apply the Persona filter “Digital Marketing Manager” and then the “Revenue filter” as I’d like to target at least 1 million in revenue (whom I believe will afford my product and services).
2. I hit the “Save & Subscribe” button at the top of the “Filters” bar.
3. I name my “Save Search,” and under the field “Search Subscription,” I’ll be able to choose the cadence of email alerts I’d like to receive when new records are added.

Easily set up a Search Subscription and get new relevant leads in your email inbox at your desired cadence; daily, weekly, or monthly. You’ll be one step closer to closing another customer.

For more information about using Personas and Search Subscription or other Apollo prospecting features, visit our comprehensive Knowledge Base.

If you haven’t tried Apollo yet, what are you waiting for? Sign up for free today!