Loyal Lewis: An MSP Buyer Persona

By Dean Ara

This is the last post in our series on the importance of MSP buyer personas. You’ve met two other sample buyer personas, Problem Peter and Go-Getter Gary. Now to wrap things up, we are going to introduce you to our final example MSP buyer, Loyal Lewis. Read on to discover how to attract Lewis and what marketing tactics will best convince him to buy from you.

MSP Buyer Loyal Lewis

Loyal Lewis is a male in his mid-40s and has been CTO for a profitable SMB for more than a decade. He’s happily married with three kids, lives in the suburbs, enjoys taking an annual family vacation, and likes to cook. Lewis has a strong network of IT specialists and technology aficionados that he meets with frequently to discuss trends and changes in the market. He enjoys attending IT events and conferences to spark new ideas and meet new people.

Loyal Lewis is happy with his current managed services provider that he’s been with for a number of years, but due to means beyond the provider’s control he needs to find a new MSP – even though he doesn’t want to. There are any number of reasons a scenario like this can happen. Perhaps a natural disaster blew out the provider’s servers or Lewis wants a solution with better backup. Or maybe his MSP is closing shop or can’t accommodate Lewis’ growing need for Cloud services.

Loyal Lewis Identifiers

Lewis is a loyal, steady… and slow buyer; he values relationships and wants to feel extremely comfortable with any decision he makes. He genuinely cares for the people around him, including his employees and his partnerships, and makes decisions for the greater good of every stakeholder involved. However, his decisions are often unstructured, strongly driven by emotion, and made very slowly. Lewis wants to know who he’s buying from and will choose to buy from like-minded companies that align with his values and beliefs. He doesn’t particularly care for facts, and instead looks for the best fit based on his gut feeling. 

Capturing Loyal Lewis

Relationships are key for Lewis and when selling to him you have to address his primary concern: “Who else used you as a solution provider?” It’s critical you demonstrate that you have long-lasting and satisfied customers.

The best way to attract and convert Lewis is to appeal to his emotions. You can do this by being creative. Engage in storytelling, use rich media, emphasize social belonging and helping others. Focus on showing Lewis social proof by providing testimonials with photos of your customers. Remember he also wants to learn who you are as a company, so get personal and share real names and photos of your staff, along with your company’s founding story.

Marketing to Loyal Lewis

Once you understand Lewis’s interests, needs, likes, and dislikes, you can use those insights in your marketing efforts.

When you craft your marketing messaging to capture Lewis, you want to appeal to his emotional and humanistic buying characteristics. Try using words and phrases such as:

Here are four marketing tactics you can use to earn Lewis’s business and long-term partnership:

Makes Sure Your Website Considers All Three Personas

Clearly, more than one type of buyer will visit your website. So, it’s best to take all three into account throughout your copy and graphics. Use the research you’ve done to focus your messaging on what you believe your dominant MSP buyer persona is. Most importantly, test variations of your messaging that focus on different buyer personas to continue to learn and discover what works best at converting your audience.

Like any of your value proposition, the best place to test messaging is on landing pages or homepages. Want in on an expert tip for testing buyer persona messaging? Place secondary buyer persona messaging within the text of an exit pop-up. Since exit pop-ups only activate when visitors leave your site, they’re an excellent place to try out persona messaging targeted at visitors who weren’t sold by your primary landing or web page copy.

Ready to learn more about how to make your marketing dollar go further in the ever-more-crowded MSP space? At Total Product Marketing, we specialize in inbound and channel marketing for MSPs and VARs. Contact us today and learn how we can help you better connect with your buyers to grow your market share.