2026 Buyer Insights

The depth of data available about market trends, customer behavior, and the effectiveness of various sales tactics can be helpful in tweaking your sales process approach. B2B sales activities are designed to identify B2b buyer personas and attract prospective customers and then engage and close deals with customers in need of your products or services. AI sales tools are great for organizing information, like keeping track of leads and where you are in a deal’s process. In B2B (business-to-business) sales, one business sells goods or services to another. When building a B2B buyer persona, communication preferences tend to refer to the methods in which your audience prefers to communicate with the brands they do business with.

This requires different content strategies, measurement frameworks, and timeline expectations. 62% of B2B marketers report improved sales enablement from SEO-driven content, leading to 2.9x more leads qualifying for sales. 78% of B2B marketers now track MQLs as a key SEO metric beyond traffic.

Once you’ve identified these, you can tailor your messaging accordingly, depending on who you’re targetting. This includes identifying pain points and trends, determining which significant influencers or key players are attracting attention in your field, and analyzing what they say and do. Don’t just provide a brief overview; dive deep into uncovering all the details of your industry niche. It’s essential to take the time to identify and understand who you’re targeting and why they would want your product or service. TopRank Marketing states that 43% of marketers report significantly greater results through their influencer programs. B2B marketers are also ramping up on delivering impactful influencer-driven content.

Your Pipeline Won't Fill Itself

You can use our free customer profile templates above and populate them with data from your current customer base to reap these benefits for your small business. Consumer profile refers to a fact-based description of a lead or customer who’s likely to purchase your products and services. The best way to gather data for profiling is by sending out surveys, reading through product or service reviews, conducting focus group discussions, and responding promptly to customer support queries. Building customer profiles accurately involves collecting and using information that describes your customers, their experiences, pain points, preferences, and behavior. The ideal customer profile includes a combination of qualitative and quantitative data. With this information, you create a profile that will assist sales management as you seek additional clients in that category.

What roles are common in B2B sales?

Retail B2B sales involves businesses that sell retail products like clothing or electronics to other businesses. Develop a thorough understanding of it so you can answer questions on the fly with confidence. Take advantage of your CRM and sales software that provides robust pipeline management features. This issue often points to our previous challenge, a disconnect between marketing and sales. If you find that prospects don't have enough information about your product, then work with marketing on how to raise the level of knowledge. Customers will have no shortage of questions about what your offering can do for them.

Primary buyer persona

If you’re running ABM campaigns you’ll need a detailed B2B buyer persona to best use your resources. If you’re running any Account-Based Marketing (ABM) campaigns, then a detailed B2B buyer persona is vital. Developing an ICP is crucial if your B2B marketing and sales team want to be contacting the right people.

This can help you communicate complex ideas more easily, making you more relatable and approachable. Although it may seem less professional, this video method has generated greater engagement in B2B marketing due to its more authentic, relatable approach. Relying solely on organic traffic won’t be enough in today’s highly competitive social media landscape; a robust paid strategy is essential to support your goals. You can use educational content, such as industry reports, how-to guides, and trend analyses, to elevate your brand and provide thought leadership content. One way to achieve this is to demonstrate how your product or service is the ultimate solution to your audience’s pain points or challenges. For example, you can share relevant loyal customer or employee experiences related to your product or services.

Careful customer persona analysis reveals behavioral patterns and engagement metrics that help predict which customers are most likely to become advocates, driving referrals and organic growth through word-of-mouth marketing. Customer persona examples help maximize lifetime value by understanding existing users who are primed for expansion, renewal, or upsell opportunities. Use sample buyer personas when you need to understand the people who research, evaluate, and ultimately purchase your solution. These examples of user personas should focus on customers’ actual usage patterns, feature adoption, and daily workflows– rather than just purchasing power. The output is ready to guide content strategy, messaging frameworks, and campaign targeting immediately. HubSpot's AI Persona Builder prompts you with questions like "What is their biggest challenge?" and "How does your product help them succeed?" — so you can describe your target customer naturally, without structured inputs or predefined fields.

This makes perfect sense, as businesses consist of different people in varying roles and seniority levels. A Content Marketing Institute study reported that 85% of B2B marketers cite LinkedIn as the ultimate gold mine for businesses, delivering the absolute best value for their organizations and brands. This guide provides a comprehensive framework for implementing B2B SEO that drives measurable pipeline impact — not just traffic.

Having a set of questions will help you identify the needs and goals of your target buyers. Asking the right questions will filter the users and help identify the ideal users, which is essential for creating accurate B2B buyer personas. To handle such needs, team members within an organization, possibly from different departments, will characterize the need/problem and the desired solutions from their respective perspectives. This could result from, for example, monotonous tasks that can use automation, or a fresh line of work that demands the help of new products or services. Attributes of these personas help to identify their needs/desires and provide ideas to interest them. This mandates a different approach to creating B2B buyer personas when compared to that of creating business-to-consumer (B2C) buyer personas.

By analyzing aggregated intent signals, such as searches for key terms, content downloads, and website interactions, marketers can identify what topics or products are resonating with accounts. Intent data offers valuable behavioral insights that signal a prospect’s interest in specific solutions. Demand intelligence combines intent data, firmographics, technographics, and historical buying patterns to understand who, why, and how prospects buy. Moreover, if you work with outsourced teams, personas can also be useful tools for educating team members and quickly bringing them up to speed.

Explore Forrester AI Access For Faster, Smarter Decisions

In other words, one-size-fits-all sales materials will pass out of fashion, replaced with content that speaks directly to potential clients. Government agencies of all kinds — from local to federal — need to buy products and services to support their own programs and services. By understanding the preferences and pain points of each persona, marketers can create highly targeted and relevant content that resonates better, leading to higher engagement and conversion rates. By understanding the specific interests, needs, and pain points of each persona, marketers can produce highly targeted content that speaks directly to each segment.

These fillable templates will help you understand which insights your marketing and sales teams will need before they can engage B2B buyers and win their business. Whether you’re responsible for product marketing, demand generation, sales enablement, or all three at the same time, developing a stronger understanding of your prospective customers is a surefire way to deliver better results. Thanks to our detailed understanding of Michelle, we are now well-equipped to position our solution in a manner that resonates with time-crunched ecommerce entrepreneurs. Specifically from a marketing perspective, Michelle’s goals include expanding her email list, growing her website traffic, and increasing the average price of her customers’ orders.

• In contrast, B2C brands usually build trust and authority with their clients much faster than B2B brands, as they target individual customers directly.
• For most businesses, the best customers are those happily paying for one of your higher-priced plans.
• A VP of Engineering approving a $150,000 software contract is thinking about technical fit — and about what happens to their credibility if the implementation fails.
• This launch gives enterprise research, marketing, and product teams a way to get segment-level insights in a fraction of the time primary research requires.
• However, most marketers agreed that hitting that gold mine requires a decisive and tailored B2B social media marketing strategy.

Closing is the hardest metric to move — but the teams doing it are consolidating tools and investing in real-time visibility (SPOTIO State of Field Sales 2026). That’s time spent before a single outreach attempt (SPOTIO State of Field Sales 2026). The data supports hybrid as the operating model, not a replacement for the field.

Test persona-based approaches against your current strategy. Tools like Marketing Hub make it easy to segment your audience and deliver personalized messaging at scale. Explain that you're researching and want to learn from them, not sell to them.