With virtual selling interactions rising to prominence during the global pandemic and now becoming an accepted part of business, it can be easy to get distracted by the latest technologies and miss the bigger picture. Because one thing that hasn’t changed, is the need to properly research and understand your customers. By understanding their challenges and what their expectations are when engaging with a selling company, you can adapt accordingly and provide a positive buying experience, which will ultimately help you to close more deals. To build a thorough understanding of your customers, it is vital to have a really tight feedback loop between sales and marketing. If marketing has a new hypothesis, then sales can help to quickly prove or disprove the idea by simply asking a couple of additional questions when next talking to their customers. Not only does this allow a business to test ideas quickly, but it can also help to prevent unnecessary burning of budget on unproven ideas.

Buyer personas are, of course, a great way to document your understanding of different customers in a way that can be of benefit to all departments within your company. When done correctly and collaboratively across different departments such as sales, marketing and customer success, they can also help to identify where the gaps in understanding are. Tackling this ultimately makes you, your team and your company better at providing genuine value to current and future clients. Don’t be afraid to dive deep with your personas - what motivates them to do a good job? Are they hybrid working? What are their frustrations? This level of understanding can then be constantly developed and improved through your feedback loop, empowering your sales team to have more meaningful conversations than ever before.