If you’ve been involved in marketing or branding at some point in your career, you’ve most likely encountered the concept of buyer personas. If you haven’t, there’s no reason to fret. We’re here for you.

We’re also here to say that buyer personas aren’t just for marketing teams. They can grow your channel sales as well.

In a nutshell, buyer personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers, based on real data and market research. They take demographics, behavior patterns, goals, and motivations into consideration. And they outline ways to understand and delight your customers.

When used strategically, buyer personas can increase sales. “How so?” you ask. Let’s walk through how you can use buyer personas to grow your channel sales.

Examine Current Customers

The first step to grow your channel sales using buyer personas is through taking a step back. Take a look at the customers you already have and work to find commonalities. Buyer personas are created through research, surveys, and interviews with your customers and prospects—and the more you can examine current customers, the better.

Imagine a typical day in the life of your customers. What social networks do they use? Where do they get their industry information? How busy are they? Do they prefer communicating through email or phone?

Survey or research your current customer base to find out what makes your customers tick. Being able to segment your target audiences not only helps you pinpoint marketing messages, but it helps you determine the ideal customer.

Which leads us to our next point…

Determine Your Ideal Customer

As mentioned above, buyer personas are based on real data: customer demographics; psychographics; online and offline behavior; and educated guesses about your audience’s personal histories, interests, motivations, and concerns.

In other words, buyer personas help you identify your ideal customers.

Buyer personas provide your entire network with critical business intelligence. And being able to provide your channel partners with this invaluable information leads to their success, as your indirect sales reps can leverage buyer personas right out of the gate. Additionally, reps can rely on these buyer personas to reach new segments and enter new markets.

The better you know your current customers—and predict prospective customers—the better your partners will sell your products. It’s that simple.

Deliver Personalized Experiences

Buyer personas enable organizations to align marketing and sales efforts throughout the lead-nurturing, enrichment, and engagement processes.

Whereas marketing teams will often produce and provide the right content, it’s still important for channel sales reps to deliver the right messages at the right time. The most effective buyer personas help your sales team determine what it needs to say or how it needs to act to close a lead and convert him or her into a customer.

Buyer personas also empower indirect sales reps to sell for your organization. PRM tools accelerate sales and marketing time to value by empowering reps to deliver aligned content to specific buyer personas.

Recruit and Vet Partners

In channel networks, success doesn’t solely rely on your organization’s ability to engage your end customers. It’s equally important to attract the best channel partners. After all, they are the ones directly delivering value—your product or services—to the customer.

Buyer personas not only empower indirect sales reps to get the right type of content in front of the right type of people. They also enable your organization to recruit and vet the best channel partners in the first place.

Much like buyer personas, channel partner personas determine ideal prospects. Do your research, discover patterns and trends, and develop persona profile stories. Outline goals, challenges, pain points, demographics, and objectives. And finally, personalize messaging to attract the best prospects.

Authentic communication builds trust. And when you establish accurate, data-driven personas, you attract the best reps who deliver results to the right end users. It’s a win-win situation.