Do you really understand your ideal prospects?

I’m not talking about buyer personas. Details like title, industry, and “jobs to be done” are important. But that’s just scratching the surface.

Buried underneath all those descriptions are the messy, complex truths about people that typically remain hidden from view. The nuances of your ideal prospects’ most important goals, beliefs, and challenges.

Their unique stories.

To be clear, you’ll never truly understand every individual’s story. It’s hard enough for us to wrap our heads around our own.

But you can get a better understanding of the themes each of these people’s stories have in common.

You can talk to your best clients and customers. You can ask them to share their thoughts about the goals they care about most, the beliefs that guide them on that journey, and the challenges that seem to always be getting in the way.

Every person’s story will be somewhat unique. But if you really listen, you may start to notice a few common threads that tie them together in profound and insightful ways.

• The “goal” themes. Personal aspirations that drive people at a much more emotional level than “increase earnings” or “boost ROI.”
• The “belief” themes that people may typically be afraid to share. Personal fears, worries, and assumptions that tend to keep them stuck in place.
• The “challenges” themes that feel insurmountable. Obstacles that seem too big and overwhelming to even start chipping away at.

In order to create B2B marketing and messaging that quickly earns trust and moves buyers to take the next step, you have to put in the work to actually understand those buyers at a more human level.

You’ll never understand them perfectly, and you may get it wrong more often than you get it right.

But the more effort you put into paying attention to what really makes people tick, the easier it will be to figure out how to align your company’s unique mix of expertise, capabilities, experience, values, and perspective with your ideal prospects’ unique mix of goals, beliefs, and challenges.