How to sell to different types of buyers
Persona deep dives
Selling gets 10x easier once you understand the persona you’re targeting, as it reveals what they care about and how to sell to them effectively.
While there are may ways to define personas, I consistently find the following dimensions to be the most predictive for diagnosing a deal situation and developing the right sales strategy:
Selling to early adopters vs. late adopters
Selling to employees vs. owners
Selling to people with different levels of seniority
Selling to specific department leaders
Selling to early adopters vs. late adopters
Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm identifies 5 customer segments in the technology adoption lifecycle, each with their own set of needs and appetite for risk. While its a very useful framework in the real world of early-stage selling, I’ve found you can further simplify down to two segments: early adopters and not early adopters.
Early adopters
These are folks who are willing risk trying something new and unproven, motivated by a desire to be seen as an innovator in their field or sheer enthusiasm for new stuff. You can spot them fairly easily.
They usually already have an idea of what they want to do and how they want to do it and are looking for the right tool(s) to bring it to life, so the way to sell to them is to focus on understanding their vision and then show them exactly how your product helps them achieve it.
Not early adopters
These are people who have concerns about trying new things because they are worried about the downside of something going wrong.
The way to sell to them is to be prescriptive in your recommendations, clear in your answers and diligent about asking open-ended questions to proactively get their reactions and surface their concerns — “How does that sound?”, “How does that look?”, “Can you see yourself using it?”, “Who else will need to weigh in on this?”, “What else are they going to care about?”, “What obstacles will we run into getting this in place?”