Revenue Radar™: Finding the Right Type of Buyer Using Persona Scoring Models

Leadspace persona scoring for go to market

In our last few blogs, we discussed using Fit (propensity) models to determine the companies within your TAM who need your product, and how to determine which of those companies are actually ready to buy with Intent scores. Now you need to figure out who are the right people to pursue within those companies. Does their role at the company line up with the personas of your historical successes? Is their persona typically responsible for making decisions to buy your type of product or service? Who makes purchasing decisions at the company? Or who might see the value in your product and bring it up the chain of command quickly and effectively? This is where an AI-powered persona scoring model comes into play. With a persona score, you can narrow in on the department, level, right job title, role or expertise to go after by identifying the right person in that company who is most likely the right contact for your type of product.

After determining which companies fit your ICP and have expressed intent in your type of product, you need to establish where those buying centers are. Navigating the underlying hierarchies of large enterprises – trying to penetrate accounts with layers of subsidiary and parent-company relationships, with offices distributed across different geographies – is an incredibly complex and cumbersome process. In order for your ABM efforts to succeed here, you’ll need a data asset that can provide true visibility into identifying both where the key buying centers are located, how they’re connected, and where the true decision makers and buying committees actually exist – being able to navigate profiles throughout hierarchies at person, account, and buying center levels.

A persona scoring model uses AI-analytics and machine learning to determine the best personas for you to target. Persona models leverage standard or custom persona profiles to score the existing database and inbound leads based on their closest match. Persona models enable you to find net-new contacts within accounts and identify the right buyers for your product. Instead of just relying on a potentially fuzzy/generic signal like job title, persona models enable you to identify and target your key buyers using a much wider breadth of insights such as title, level, department, job functions, technology expertise. Additionally, applying exclusion logic and adding weights to individual signals enables you to both prioritize the right buyers, as well as ensure you’re reaching out to them with the right message that’s tailored to them.

With Leadspace’s persona scoring model, each buyer profile within your TAM is assigned a Persona score (0-100), where a higher score represents a closer match to the level, skills, department and buying center of that profile to your ideal persona. There are over 80 off-the-shelf personas in the Leadspace Persona Library. They range across all departments and job functions in the most popular B2B buying centers. Custom persona models can also be built for specific buyer use cases.

Leadspace Persona can be used to create net new campaign members for advertising or digital campaigns, and with our persona-matching scores, it’s easy to match content accordingly for the targeted nurture programs and content syndication. They can also be used to score entire databases to categorize prospects, leads and contacts into actionable content campaigns. When integrated into Salesforce or Dynamics, sales professionals can assess the best persona from ambiguous titles to understand the best lead or contact to pursue in an account.

Key Features & Use Cases

  • Enable inbound leads to route directly to sales or specific nurturing streams based on Persona.
  • Recommend content stream by persona, or product-best offering typical in cross/up-sell scenarios.
  • Leverage personal demographics and buying behaviors from social signals and interests to statistically assign personas instead of nondescript job titles.
  • Laser focus campaign segment members by leveraging our 80 off-the-shelf personas or create your own custom personas.
  • Identify the right and ready contacts for each territory or campaign.
  • Match your Marketo, Pardot or Hubspot scores against your Salesforce prospects and accounts, then use persona scoring with engagement scoring to identify the best engaged contacts/prospects to go after (use this to lower regional sales and marketing list buys).

With a CDP that leverages AI-powered persona scoring models, you can add the personal touch to your unified profiles, creating the best buyer profiles that automatically populate with personal demographics and buying behaviors from social signals and interests to statistically assign personas instead of nondescript job titles. This further enables you to optimize your marketing and sales engagement by leveraging AI predictive models to accurately prioritize the top 25% of leads that deliver 60-80% of your business. You would also be able to create and activate precision segments with engagement and other account or buyer personalization to optimize conversion rates.

And finally, scoring predictions and recommendations are delivered in real-time for active buyer profiles, as models are updated and refreshed on a quarterly or as-needed cadence. Not everyone wants your product, but by segmenting and prioritizing your TAM by Persona scores (especially in conjunction with Fit and Intent scores), you can direct your sales and marketing resources at the ones who do, targeting the right type of people at the right time – before your competitors do!

But what’s the next step? Now that you know which companies need your product (highest Fit score), which of those companies have been actively searching for your kind of product (highest Intent score), and who are the right type of people to pursue within those companies (highest persona score), the final step to achieving closeable business is to find the specific people within those companies to reach out to. Stay tuned for the next blog in our Revenue Radar series where we will explore how to find the right person to pursue using Engagement scores. In the meantime, get the full Revenue Radar Guide to see how Leadspace finds your best customers.