Attention Conservation Notice: The following post highlights research on B2B Technical Buyers and provides a quick overview of how to develop a persona for this role.

Building an effective B2B target database takes a lot more than just identifying the right market segment, company size, and target title. Before you get started building your database, it’s important to get to know the different roles, responsibilities and characteristics of each person involved in the buying process.

Today, we take a look at the B2B Technical Buyer – the person within a company or organization who is responsible for ensuring a solution meets the technical requirements of the company. For technology purchases this could be an IT professional. For CRM software it might be a Sales or Marketing professional. Depending upon the size of the organization, these individuals may or may not have final financial approval but they do hold significant influence over the purchase.

Here’s what a recent MarketingSherpa Benchmark Study says about this role:

a. white papers, product literature and industry articles as their top sources for product information.
b. their top search engine is Google. Depending upon the source of data, you’ll hear that anywhere from 80 to 98% of them start their purchase process on Google.
c. 64% of them shortlisted a product based on a timely sales call.

What does your technical buyer look like? For my network management software company, we built a persona profile that described his or her job, life and daily concerns. We did this by describing our best customers. We even gave him a name—Ajay—and a face by adding a photo. Now, whenever I write literature or design a campaign, I always think of Ajay and I’m better able to target the campaign using the right messages and media. Here are a few items to think of when you are building your own:

Name:
Photo:
Geographic:
Gender:
Age:
Annual Income:
Marital Status:
Number of Children:
Education:
Work/Life Experience
Psychographics:
Current Work Environment:
Mobile Devices:
Presence in the Buying Cycle:

For more on this topic, download the free B2B Marketing ebook called Funnelnomics from ReachForce.